Yesterday, another tech bro fell to the dust. The Nigerian twittersphere is always filled with drama and drama usually seems to happen when I’m asleep. A married tech bro was caught propositioning private mentoring on “private servers” to unsuspecting young women who’d applied to study in his company(I think). I didn’t read in detail about this. All I know is he got funding for this scholarship project from a famous Nigerian artiste--Don Jazzy.
Art by me
It’s not surprising that he was caught. Every year, we have men in this category who feature and I’m not going to allow myself to imagine that this will be the last. The follow up is the same, the man apologizes for failing everyone and deactivates his account. It’s very cliche. Hardly do you find someone brave enough to stay back to fix his mistakes. Regardless of how similar these men are, there are still some unique things about each particular case.
For this one, the interesting bit was this man was recently married and had his wife as his twitter header. In the dms he sent to these girls, he clearly states he is married, he lures them with his achievements, doesn’t fail to mention how important his role is in the tech community and how much funding he’s getting. He also states this casually, with emojis and mentions some weed. He compliments them and makes reference to their boyfriends. He also injects some paranoid sentences about privacy and asks if the dms space is a safe space. Is it? You’d think he’d know.
After reading screenshots of his dms to some girls which were shared online, I wondered about his wife. They said she was quite active on twitter so I decided to look for her handle to see how she was taking it. I can’t imagine the embarrassment, the actual confusion because judging by her recent tweets, she thought this man was God sent. The kind of man a Ciara prayer would bring. She regularly shared intimate discussions on their whatsapp with the public and I don’t see how there is any coming back from that into the twitter space.
I was talking about this with my best friend and during our discussion, I just felt the weight of this blow on her carefree nature. Would she ever be able to send such raunchy dms to her man with the innocence of a trusting wife? Would she ever attach meaning to her partner sharing her pictures in public or will she be forever paranoid that everything is a cover for illicit affairs? I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I had to look at someone who was this skillful and sloppy at the same time as my husband. Sloppy because who sends quotes like “My lawyer said and I quote “If you want to do sh>t, remember you have brands to represent and be wise about the sh>t?”. And still goes ahead to do the sh>t? Skillful in the way his twitter image portrayed something else and his ease with inserting his marital status in a dubious way.
I have her in my thoughts and I tried to picture myself in her shoes. What would I do if I was newly married and had to deal with this? What would you do?