His name is male, even in a culture where names can have gender ambiguity. He is Yoruba and his first name is Idris, inevitably male. His surname is Okuneye. While he is self-styled the “mummy of Lagos,” he prefers to enmesh his profile in a mystery by calling himself Bobrisky, with all its evocations of recklessness.

He says he has transformed from male to female but he does not yet bear an official female name. He has not even addressed the issue. He appeared in court recently under his male name, which confirms the view of many that he is only putting up an act. So brazen has been his performance and so dubiously authentic that he was christened the best dressed female at a public event, and it was a movie premiere. The movie took a subordinate step to the crossdresser impresario at the event.

But that was not the only irony. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) nabbed him for another act of overindulgence. He was abusing the naira in public. He was thereafter arraigned before a Lagos High Court judge, not for abusing a body, or a gender, but the nation’s asset that is also going through its own trial of identity: the naira.

Some observers have wondered why, of all offences, Okuneye, alias Bobrisky, was not charged with abusing his body, his heritage, his country, or his tribe, or for that matter, his gender. Why would the EFCC think that it was doing a great service to the country against corruption by nabbing a fellow whose main problem with a conservative, Christian and Muslim, and even traditional society like Nigeria was not related to naira and how it survived or died in the temple of use and abuse.

To be clear, to abuse the naira is regarded as an offence, and Okuneye himself was contrite in court and said he was not going to repeat it, and he is probably hoping for as much mercy as the trial judge would proffer. Many, though, out of sheer ignorance and even cultural revulsion, are asking why the EFCC thinks it can stop the menace of crossdressing with all its reverberations of homosexual sins by charging him with an impotent charge of abusing the naira.

The police have said that is the offence he has committed. That has led observers to believe that he was served that charge because the anti-graft agency, as it is often called, did not see any charge other than that. To them, it is a frustration of the anti-corruption fight against a man who might have committed not an economic sin, but a cultural iniquity.

But they have no charge in the law against crossdressing. The man is clean as a whistle in that department. Yet, the society, especially its conservative stripe, is aboil with righteous indignation against a man who calls himself a woman and who has generated not just mystery but also mystique.

We do not have a culture police endorsed by the constitution. So, it is believed that the rage against Bobrisky is not really the naira, but against a holy cast of mind. It is not an economic crime, but a fly in the face of our culture that abhors ambiguous gender identity and against lesbianism or sodomy. Which raises a question. If the offence is naira abuse, why not go after many, especially in high society, like a traditional ruler who made a necklace of the currency? It is therefore seen like trying to catch a thief who committed theft but whose real sin, adultery, is not in the law. That in itself is lying without seeming to lie. It is corruption in trying to fight corruption. It is therefore seen as hypocrisy.

We hope that Bobrisky does not end up a cultural icon default, no matter how perverse, after he might have served his term, therefore thriving over a system that failed to slaughter him.

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