By Desmond Tamuno
There is a pattern so consistent in VDM’s digital insurgency that it is impossible to dismiss as coincidence. His most vicious attacks, his most personal and deliberately degrading insults, are overwhelmingly targeted at women. Particularly successful, visible, independent women who built their platforms to national acclaim.
From Iyabo Ojo to King Mitchy, the former pornstar who apparently left that trade due to a lack of success seems driven by a compulsive need to humble and shame women who have achieved what he could not, to drag them into silence and disgrace until their reputations are as diminished as his own self-worth.
These attacks routinely cross into the personal and the sexual in a way that his attacks on men rarely do. Take Iyabo Ojo. Their feud began during the Justice for Mohbad movement when he accused her of various misdeeds. When she pushed back, he posted a video claiming she was having an indecent sexual relationship with her own daughter.
He accused Tonto Dikeh of diverting funds donated by the public and running a gossip blog, before reducing her professional achievements to male patronage. He called Blessing CEO a prostitute on camera, casually, hours after leaving police custody. He led the dangerous body-shaming of Nkechi Blessing after a gym photo of her was posted online without consent, and even offered money for more embarrassing material. Phyna, who had sought his help for her sister, eventually became a victim.
Most recently it is King Mitchy, whose only offence was building genuine goodwill through charity work and having access to people VDM had eyed for years without success. Without evidence, he has reduced her work to sex.
The accusations follow a depressingly familiar template and reveal VDM’s disturbing worldview that women cannot build anything real on their own. Every female success has a man behind it, a powerful sponsor and an improper relationship. Sex with accomplished men is the simple explanation for every prominent woman.
His own pathology aside, what is truly dangerous about VDM’s anti-women digital crusade is the audience absorbing this daily. He is teaching thousands of young Nigerian men that female success is a myth, that women are objects of male pleasure first and human beings second. He is fertilising the soil in which incel culture grows, and this has real life consequences for women in a country where they already fight twice as hard for half the recognition.
Sanitising Nigeria’s digital space must include confronting this. VDM should not be allowed to run amok under the cover of activism while poisoning an entire generation’s understanding of women and success. The women who have faced him have said the same thing in different words. That there is something personal, pathological and depraved in the way he comes for them.
When that many women, independently, arrive at the same conclusion about the same man, it is probably worth believing them.
| Tamuno, a public affairs analyst writes from Lagos