Eight years of “Madam President”: Issue for 2015 (2)

By Dele Sobowale

“When women have gone a step too far, they will stop at none”. Henry Fielding, 1707-1754. (VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS p 280).

Henry Fielding, the author of world classic, TOM JONES, was an excellent writer and the classical “woman wrapper”. So, he knew what he was talking about. For Fielding as for all men, there is an abiding warning - be careful when your woman (wife, running mate, mistress, girl-friend etc) intrudes too much in your business. Irrespective of whether the business is politics or a church or illegal oil bunkering the odds of a happy ending are very long. Conventional wisdom has it that “behind any successful man, there is a woman”. But, conventional wisdom is not history and the verdict of history has not been too kind to conventional wisdom.

Last week, in the first part, I mentioned three women, wives of Heads of States who interfered publicly in governance. One ended well, two ended in tragedy for husband and wife. In fact, the chances of a wife damaging her husbands’ political career, instead of helping it, are higher than two to one. They are more like 1000 to one. To be candid, I have searched in vain for an example of a political career that was saved by a wife jumping publicly into the fray.

From this survey, it is my conclusion that a wife can only help if the public perception of her is very positive and if the citizenry, in general, consider her as a positive influence on her husband. Otherwise, a synergy develops – the President’s or Prime Minister’s real or imagined faults are multiplied by the personal defects or wrong doings of the wife.

Today, in Nigeria, rightly or wrongly, Mrs. Patience Jonathan, the President’s wife, had become branded with two characteristics – none of which can possibly do her or the President any good. First, every governor in Nigeria, even if some will not admit it, must dread the arrival of Mrs. Jonathan in their state capital. After the experiences in Lagos, Port Harcourt and Abuja, where her presence left people literally cursing “whoever is the cause of this” (as I heard co-victims saying on Ikorodu Road when she held Lagos hostage), it is doubtful if anybody in that holdup, people who lost their daily income, missed business or doctors’ appointments etc, will ever want four more years of that nonsense. The Lagos hold-up almost resulted in the premature death of one of my friends – until he called his doctor who gave him an emergency prescription on the phone!! He will never forget Mrs Jonathan; so will millions of others.

Second, she might have forgotten, but few Nigerians will forget the bundle of lies Nigerians were fed during her prolonged illness abroad – which must have emptied the national treasury of undisclosed sum. When she finally chose to tell the “truth”, it was followed by an extravagant “Thanksgiving” (more like fund raising) Service into which more millions were thrown.

Prince Philip, the Queen of England’s husband was discharged from the hospital recently and his return home called for no more than handshakes from the hospital staff and his official assistants. His wife, the Queen, is more powerful than any Nigerian President. But, he knows that Britain is struggling with economic recession and the masses are suffering. The difference is clear.

Whether Jonathan likes it or not, Mrs Jonathan has become a 2015 campaign issue. And from my point of view, it is an issue which might cost the President millions of votes. The choice is his. Or is it hers?

ASUU AGAIN? ARE NIGERIAN STUDENTS TAUGHT BY DULLARDS? 2

Last week, you were treated to part of a column written in June 2013 predicting another ASUU strike. The current one is the second since 2011. Read what was written in 2011 and send me a bottle of Gulder for accuracy of prediction.

POWER LIES

Protest: Residents of Sakpoba/Dumez Road protesting “No light for six months” at PHCN Office, Benin City. Picture in Vanguard, August 21, 2013, p 7.

One funny fellow, who claims to be living near Brig-Gen. Ogbemudia, had been telling me lies about power supply in Benin – which according to him averages 18 hours a day. I had visited Benin at least twelve times this year, and there is a Vanguard Office there. I know this Jonathan supporter will be exposed eventually. He still has not told me how less than 4,000MW generated can provide all of Nigeria with 18 hours supply everyday. Jonathan’s supporter indeed. By their reasoning we know them. Certainly, he will try to wriggle out of the lie again. With “supporters” like these…

“ROPE A DOPE – ASUU – 4

“We do not know whether there is a special way of passing this Bill that had been begging for attention for years. We also doubt if the lawmakers were equally sensitive to what the non-implementation of the said agreement [emphasis mine] had caused the academic community, students and parents and what it would cause them in the future”.

Prof. Ukachukwu Awuzie, President ASUU, lamenting the delay in passing the Bill arising from the agreement reached with the Federal government in 2009.

“It is unthinkable that wisdom should ever be popular”.

Goethe, 1749-1832.

Fuel queues are back; your wife is probably still searching for kerosene; power supply had reversed back to one hour a day. A guy seats in Aso Rock enjoying the “breath of fresh air” which his “rope a dope” strategy has yielded. I dey laugh O!!!

Commonsense is not common. If there is anything funnier than the “rope a dope” strategy, it’s the new twist. You would think Professors and Senior Lecturers in our universities are intelligent; that they could not be fooled. Well, you are half right. They are mostly intelligent; but also mostly not wise. A good lot of the world’s catastrophes had been caused by “egg-heads”.

David Halberstam, in his book THE BRIGHTEST AND THE BEST, the best chronicle of the American misadventure in Viet Nam, had called the policymakers and top military brass, who produced the debacle, “intelligent but not wise”. Back in 1974, when I was reading the book, it had not registered in my mind that someone can be intelligent and not wise. Now I know. Of all the definitions of wisdom, John Milton’s, 1608-1674, is the most apt for this column. According to him:

“To know/That which before us lies in daily life/Is the prime wisdom/ What is more is fume”. (VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS, p 275). Wisdom, is never taught in schools; it is learnt from experience, open mindedness and providential intuition; from being truthful to oneself all the time and not compromising with the truth – however unpleasant. When ASUU reached the 2009 “agreement” with the Yar’Adua-Jonathan administration, the two sides compromised heavily on the truth.

ASUU is now left holding the empty bag. As this piece is being written on June 3, 2011, the Sixth National Assembly had gone into history without passing the Bill. Yet, if the discussion between some of my friends in academia is a reflection of what others did on election days, they also “voted for Jonathan not PDP”. In the end, Jonathan and PDP had colluded to break the agreement entered into in 2009 to get ASUU back to the classroom. That self-deception on the part of highly intelligent people is bad enough.

A look at the composition of the present National Assembly reveals that except for the mini-tsunami in the Southwest, the PDP had again been overwhelmingly re-elected nationwide by people who deceived themselves that they “voted Jonathan not PDP”. Was Jonathan running for Senate, House of Representatives and Governor everywhere?

ASUU members, who might find themselves back in the trenches, can now ask themselves if they were honest with themselves and other stakeholders by keeping quiet until it is too late. To be quite blunt, did they actually expect Jonathan and the PDP to keep their promises? If not, why the self-deceit especially when it is now clear that the calamity Professor Awuzie predicts would come to pass for Nigeria’s education sector? ASUU is now threatening to go on strike again. A lot of sense that makes!! That’s like bolting the gate after all the chicken have fled.

Mummy Patience Jonathan, one wife too many (2)

By Rotimi Fasan
PATIENCE can carry a placard and decide to go on the street of Port Harcourt alone or with her side kicks, if she so pleases and nobody would be bothered. But she can’t and must not employ the apparatus of her husband’s office to do that.

Each time Mrs. Jonathan opens her mouth to talk she confirms what many suspected: that she has got her husband wrapped around her little finger and can and indeed does twist him in whatever direction she pleases.

[caption id="attachment_297988" align="alignright" width="250"] Patience Jonathan[/caption]

This confirms Prof. Tam David-West’s statement in an interview with The News that this woman is actually the one controlling her husband and by extension the country. Given the close link between spouses, it may be to idealistic not to expect that they would somehow exert influence on one another. This is to be expected.

But there should be a limit to it and the spouse doing the influencing should be careful not to rub it in the face of everybody, especially where those who would be directly affected by the decisions are not accountable to the influential spouse.

Which is the case of Patience and the rest of us. She has no constitutional role as the wife of the president and she ought to show more discretion in the manner she conducts herself. But no, Madam Patience just has to be noticed.

She thrusts herself into matters beyond her knowledge or domestic sphere, pushing her husband into avoidable troubles. In ‘A crude game of power’, the May 30th edition of this column in which I first commented on the bust-up between President Jonathan and Governor Amaechi, I traced the origin of the disagreement between both men to Patience. My exact words deserved to be quoted directly:

“In spite of denials by the presidency, the latest being the one by Reuben Abati in the immediate aftermath of the Governors’ Forum election, many Nigerians know better than to believe that President Jonathan is uninterested in the outcome of the Forum’s election....[ ]...this informal association has widened the breach in the relationship between two south-south politicians that probably started for reasons traceable not to any personal animosity between them but the bad blood generated by the outburst of Mrs. Patience Jonathan who embarrassingly chided Governor Amaechi for actions she considered targeted against the good of her people.

It is not impossible that in the many months since this open attack on Governor Amaechi, Mrs. Jonathan has succeeded in turning her personal antagonism for the governor into her husband’s. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched then to believe that the unfolding drama between Jonathan and Amaechi is traceable to Patience (My emphasis).

Patience Jonathan herself confirmed this statement in her remarks to bishops visiting her in Abuja two weeks ago. She traced the fight between her husband and Amaechi to the demolition exercise conducted by the latter in the waterside area of Okrika four years ago. Patience’s embarrassing conduct on this occasion when she openly chided the governor like an erring school pupil was widely reported by the media and criticised as unbecoming of the wife of a president.

To his credit, Governor Amaechi reportedly kept quiet through it all. But it was clear Patience with an elephant’s memory that rivals President Obasanjo’s in malevolence and in recalling past slight, imagined or real- Patience had neither forgotten much less forgiven Amaechi even though she was the one in the wrong. But she recalls that incident to her visitors in the garbled manner of a sophist, telling them that the governor made no consultation before embarking on the demolition exercise.

Yet, it is apparent who Patience thought the governor should have consulted- she the wife of the president. She called and begged Amaechi, she recalls to the bishops, to reconsider his decision but the governor would not listen.

The governor went ahead to remove the Chairman (actually Patience called the chairman a ‘boy’ and Amaechi her ‘son’-her exact words!) of Okrika local council for hosting her, she alleges further. What further proof do we need that Patience is behind the fight between Jonathan and Amaechi? Uncle Joe has been shadowboxing all the while. His is a proxy war on behalf of and at the instigation of his wife.

The very rhetoric Patience Jonathan employs in her public utterances about elected public officials shows she considers them well beneath her as wife of the president. They must appear to as her husband’s employee or worse yet her own domestic staff.

But more than showing what Patience thinks of these elected officials and her oversized ego and overweening ways, her statement says a lot about what she considers her husband, the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. For a woman who calls an elected local Council Chairman a boy and refers to Governor Amaechi, a political contemporary of Goodluck Jonathan her husband, one who was already Speaker of Rivers House of Assembly when Jonathan was in Bayelsa as governor or deputy governor- if Patience saw this man as no more than her son, then what does she consider the president, her husband? At best the president cannot climb any higher than Amaechi in his wife’s estimation.

Which is why she thinks nothing of it when she corrals state apparatus of power and puts them to personal use. Only somebody’s mother who knows the value of power would deem to use it as she does. Even as a mere metaphor, which she didn’t pretend she meant it to be, in what sense can Amaechi be considered Patience’s son?

We can understand the servile, even slavish mentality that would make the ‘motherless’ power monger, Evans Bipi, the Rivers State Speaker-manque who called Patience his mother and Jesus Christ on earth (the man sure knows where his bread is buttered)- we can understand this case of forlorn orphanage. But what do we make of a state governor being called a son by an unknown quantum constitutionally-speaking? It’s people like Patience who as head of organisations or establishments insist on their staff calling them Mummy.

Amaechi is in trouble with Jonathan obviously for failing to pay Patience what she considers her due as Mummy or mother of Nigerian politicians. Since her husband is the ‘father’ of the country, she must be the mother of the nation. Truly, truly yeye dey smell!

Concluded

PS: My condolences on the passing of Mrs. Jonathan’s mother.

 

Mummy Patience Jonathan, one wife too many (1)

By Rotimi Fasan
YOU only get to see one even if there are many more living out of public glare in semi-retirement. We are talking here of executive wives, women married to men of means and ways- inflated balloons turned power houses by virtue of straying into the corridors of power either by the imposition of powerful brigands misnamed godfathers or rigged elections.

From the presidency down through the state to the local councils, these crops of women of no consequence whose only claim to glory is on account of their connections to political men manage to flaunt their emptiness in the face of those they consider less fortunate members of society.

[caption id="attachment_313261" align="alignnone" width="412"] *Patience Jonathan[/caption]

By their public posturing, monogamy seems the preferred way of Nigerian leaders, be they soldiers or civilians. But for one or two odd cases who, perhaps for reasons of quiet acceptance of their polygamous status, respectfully kept their many women back in their out-houses, far from the presidential palaces, choosing to run a ‘bachelor’ presidency, all other Nigerian leaders have pretended to be monogamous.

They introduce to the nation and indeed go around with only one woman, even if this is the latest and youngest addition to the ever-expanding harem. Most times this one woman has a larger-than-than-life persona, living the joint splendor and attention of all the other unacknowledged women combined, and this not for reason of any worthy achievement.

Often it is for the very absence of any worthy achievement beyond the tolotolo puffing that comes with the awareness of being close to power that these women stand out. This is the disgusting paradox of an unknown quantity, a puff of wind that proclaims its presence by its very worthlessness.

It is the nature of our executive wives. Just one of such in the house of a political husband is more than enough to enact for the sheer madness of it the bitter rancour of a polygamous household. One such wife is often too many for a man- indeed one like President Goodluck Jonathan whose wife seems to have convinced herself she has better uses for power than her husband.

Patience or Pepe as her friends in the waterside areas of Okrika would most probably call her is obviously thick-skinned. Pity then that she is the wife of the President. The country needs a sensitive, perceptive woman able to take a hint and recognise the limit of spousal misconduct.

Just when you think this woman has been sufficiently chastened by the welter of public criticisms that followed her recent misbehaviour and abuse of state power in Lagos through to Rivers, just when you imagine that the series of editorials, columns and verbal condemnations have served their purpose, there you see the wife of the President out with another faux pas, evidence of her naivety in matters political.

Indeed her case reminds one of the necessity of compulsory orientation for political spouses, men and women whose spouses occupy public office.

It is obvious this doesn’t happen for immediately these public office holders get into office they become all-knowing and are treated as such even if only the day before nobody reckoned with them.

Even in our local communities, new occupants of an office, say a traditional ruler, have period of seclusion before formal ascension, time during which they are oriented to their new office, informed of the expectations of their position, the dos and don’ts.

And this extends to their immediate and extended family. An aside: In the early 1990s an episode played out before me in which the wife of the newly-crowned ruler of my town was chastised openly by a man when her son held her across the shoulders in the affectionate fashion common between today’s youngsters and their parents. Not even the Olori’s (King’s wife) explanation that the young boy (a fact the man obviously knew) was her son would satisfy the man.

For him the traditional taboo that no man openly displays such affection to the wife of the king holds even with family members.  Perhaps the young man could do that in the confines of the palace but not in the full view of the world! We are talking here of modesty. The kind which makes Wole Soyinka asks that President Jonathan’s wife seek first to be a lady before being a ‘First Lady’.

Talking of which, I can’t recall seeing a photograph of the Queen of England openly kiss the Duke of Edinburgh or any member of the royal family for that matter. Have you? If not, then the same principle that held in Ondo probably holds in London!

What business has the President’s wife issuing a press statement through a spokesperson, a hired scribbler suddenly filled with a sense of self-importance, purporting to respond ‘in kind’ to her critics? If one could understand Reuben Abati or even Doyin Okupe responding to the President’s critics or simply explaining a point involving the President, what do we make of the President’s wife issuing similar statements through her so-called office? In what capacity is she speaking? She went on to give what a respondent to this column last week has called ‘her side’ of the story, pertaining to her disagreement with Rotimi Amaechi over demolitions in parts of Rivers State.

What side does she have in this? We are talking of the constitutionality of her position! She can speak and express her disagreement with a state official as a Nigerian citizen, even as an indigene of Rivers State. But she must do that as a private citizen; not corral the apparatus of state power to prosecute a private agenda or simply showing off- blocking roads and impeding traffic, openly holding meetings with persons known to be opposed to the state governor,  where she is not making frivolous statements about the person of the governor.

This issue is not about the rightness or otherwise of Amaechi’s politics, not about his alleged fraternizing with opposition elements or his Governors’ Forum issue with Jonathan or the PDP or rumoured presidential ambition; it is about the mode of engaging him on these matters and who is doing that.

Prior to her husband’s presidency, how many times did Patience Jonathan take on her new-found activist role? Only months ago she was lamenting the fact that her husband had been reduced to reading newspapers in office, as she sarcastically put his sidelining by Turai Yar’Adua and Co in the wake of Yar’Adua’s ill-health. But now she’s grown to challenge a governor in a state he has constitutional right to govern- all because she is the wife of the President. Yeye dey smell!

Rivers crisis started four years ago, says First Lady

Abuja -The First Lady, Mrs Patience Jonathan, said in Abuja on Wednesday that she had committed the ongoing crisis in Rivers to prayer and that crisis  started as far back as four years ago.

Rivers has been embroiled in a political crisis which culminated in a free for all at the House of Assembly last week, with some members injured.

[caption id="attachment_314132" align="alignnone" width="412"] *Patience Jonathan[/caption]

Jonathan said this during a courtesy visit to the Presidential Villa by 16 bishops from the South-South geo-political zone.

``Rivers state issue is one thing I’ve committed to prayer because I believe there is nothing God cannot do. God restored me and I’ll do His work without the fear of man.

``The truth will always remain the truth and what God ordains must come to pass and so Rivers issue is something we’ve handed over to God.’’

The president’s wife said contrary to some reports, she had always mediated between Gov. Chibuike Amaechi and other parties in a crisis that began four years ago.

``This matter started as far back as four years ago at Anyugubiri in Okrika when I begged him not to demolish a part of Okrika but (that he should) dialogue first with the people.

``After that incident, he called the chairman of Okrika (local government) and sacked him for holding a reception in our honour; that boy was the first victim.

``He also put my people on curfew for nine months. I called him and pleaded with him but he refused. Then I began to hear all sort of propaganda in the media against me; this is not the way.

``I’ve never spoken about this issue but as men of God, I believe you’ll say the truth always because there are a lot of conflicting interests; some will hear one thing and say the exact opposite.

``I also want you to know the genesis of this problem and pray that God touches Amaechi’s heart as per his hot temper because when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.’’

Jonathan urged the parties involved in the crisis to help to resolve issues plaguing the state and not ``whip up sentiments that will aggravate the problem.

``I appeal to Amaechi to sheathe his sword so that we can defend our state and this country with love, unity, patriotism and truth at all time.

``Hebrews 12:14 urges us to embrace peace with all men without which, we cannot see God.

``Amaechi is my son, I cannot fight him and I cannot kill him. He shouldn’t be used by outsiders against his own blood because this seat is vanity.

``One day, no matter how long it takes, we will leave this seat. Power is not forever. This seat is vanity, others sat here and left so one day I’ll also leave and we will meet at home; so why should I fight him?

``Let’s take it easy, face issues, leave non-existent matters, stop magnifying lies and respect our leaders and people in authority. Let’s give peace a chance,’’ she said.

Earlier, Bishop God-Do-Well Awomapara, Chairman, Niger Delta Bishops Forum, who led the delegation, said the visit was significant ``in view of emerging situations in our region.

``We are on a quest to unravel the mysteries surrounding the Rivers issue and mediate where necessary.’’ (NAN)