Regina Daniels’ Scandal Says More About Ned Nwoko Than It Does About Her

Before we start talking about who saved who, it would do everyone involved some good to remember that by the time Ned Nwoko married Regina Daniels, she was already a millionaire in her own right. At just 17, she was one of the highest-paid actresses in Nollywood for her age. And she had worked so damn hard to achieve that.

She had multiple endorsements, a luxury car and a brand name powerful enough to headline major productions. Even all the way in Kenya and East Africa, we knew who Regina Daniels was. So the claim by some people that Ned picked her from poverty simply diminishes what she was able to achieve at such a young age. And quite frankly, those claims are pushed hard from predictable quarters so they could rewrite a young woman’s success story to fit a patriarchal fantasy.

Now, if we can address the elephant in the room.

That Regina Daniels, wife to one Chinedu Nwoko, a senator in Nigeria, is a drug addict. But….If Regina Daniels is truly using drugs as her estranged husband Ned Nwoko now claims, then shouldn’t we be asking ourselves what really went wrong in that marriage? Because when a man in his sixties marries a 17 year old. A teenager – if we are to call a spade a spade – and parades her as a prize(!) then years later she’s allegedly broken and medicated, whom do we then consider the failure? Is it the child he married? Or is it himself, he who should have been wiser courtesy of living decades on earth. Where is the wisdom and guidance that is expected from such a matured man?The answer is, in a realistic and fair world, the blame lies squarely with the adult who should have known better.

But the world is twisted and not in the least realistic. Neither has it ever been fair.

A teenage girl doesn’t wake up one morning and decide to stay using. She does so when life becomes too heavy or the people who promised to protect her instead isolate, manipulate and diminish her. Simply, that if Regina truly found herself seeking refuge in substances, then that could be the loudest indictment of the domestic violence and control she claims to have endured in that marriage. Ned Nwoko’s counter claiming that Regina is “mentally unstable” and that she’s on drugs read less like concern and more like the familiar playbook of powerful men attempting to discredit women who finally speak out. We have seen this script, over and over again. Calling her mentally unstable doesn’t erase the questions about why she might be in distress.

This is what we call the dead cat strategy, throwing around outrageous claims in order to divert attention from something happening that could cause serious damage to a prominent person. According to wikipedia, The “dead cat strategy” is a political tactic of creating a shocking or controversial announcement to distract the public and media from a more significant problem or failure. The goal is to divert conversation to the dead cat incident so that the original issue is no longer the focus, even if the new topic is outrageous.

And the dead cat in this case is Regina’s alleged drug use, distracting us from the fact that Ned married Regina as a child, groomed her into silence and now expects the world to believe she simply lost control of herself.

I applaud Regina for publicly revealing the existence of an alleged sex tape before it surfaces. Others think she is talking too much (and indeed since this whole saga started she might have shot herself in the foot severally) but she may also have done the smartest thing possible. She took control of the narrative. Instead of letting the threat of exposure destroy her, she named it and neutralized it. She made the public aware of who holds that weapon. It’s called self-preservation in a world where women are too often shamed for other people’s crimes.

But from where I am seated, the real takeaway is that marrying girls barely out of childhood has never been the victory men on social media romanticize it to be. The same young women they believe they can mold forever eventually grow up. And once they do, that’s often when the real party starts. Because these girls now start to see the imbalance for what it was. How many wise, older men have we seen ending up being embarrassed once the naive girl finds her voice? The internet learns yet again that power doesn’t guarantee peace.

All these men on the internet claiming you should marry an 18 year old while hiding behind the facade of youth and fertility and (ohh the most famous of all, femininity) are delusional because what they are scared to voice out loud is that it’s about control and manupilation. What does an 18 year old understand about femininity? Plus if even a billionaire can’t manage the chaos that comes from marrying a child, then perhaps it’s time for men everywhere, both rich and broke stop promoting the fantasy of youthful submission. It always backfires. Like clockwise.

The Regina Daniels scandal teaches us all we need to know about power and control.

She was not saved by Ned Nwoko. She was silenced by him. And if her voice trembles now, it’s only because it’s learning to rise after years of being controlled. Let’s not mistake her pain for weakness.