A Dame and Her Ways By Steve Nwosu

I think we are gradually losing our humanity in this country. And nothing better confirmed this to me than the three text messages I got yesterday morning. They were from a readers who had learnt of the auto accident that claimed the life of Mrs. Charity Iwarioba (aka Sisi), mother of First Lady Dame Patience Jonathan.

Rather than mourn with the First family, as Britons (who, by the way, have a lot of issues with the Royal family) are celebrating over the birth of a future king, Nigerians who have human blood flowing in their veins called and texted to jeer at Mrs. Jonathan. Many were actually happy that these bad roads that have been claiming the lives of many Nigerians had also touched Jonathan’s family. They did not even bother to find out if it was indeed caused by ‘bad road’.

Somebody even asked me to list all the people old and young who have died in road accident in the last six months to prove how all the deaths were caused by Jonathan’s non-performance.

Of course, virtually everyone of us has lost one friend or family member in road accidents, but we also know that the experience is not what we would wish for a fellow human, rich or poor, in or out of government.

Have things gone so bad that we have lost every sense of human feelings and sympathy? How then are we any different from Boko Haram and their suicide bombers? Why do we suddenly wish everyone in government dead? Why do those who have not wish all those who have dead?

The Monday accident is sure an eye-opener, to have we have slowly lost the capacity to empathize. And it is not a feeling of confined to the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Even in the media, we found a way to still squeeze partisan politics into our report s of the accident. Several reports quietly celebrated the fact that the body of the first lady’s mum was taken to the morgue by Evans Bipi, the lawmaker who was elected Speaker by the group of five lawmakers who tried to impeach the Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly penultimate week.

So, even in her bereavement, the first lady still manages to attract a lot of bashing – which I think is unfair who I consider the most transparent and uncomplicated player out there on our crowded political field. For with her, what you see is what you get.

In fact, watching her from a distance, one thing that regularly comes to my mind all the time is that Dame Patience Jonathan would probably be one of the toughest principals to ever work with – either as an adviser or spokesperson. It is always like that with people who bring a lot of native intelligence to the public sphere (or office).and that is no insult.  It was a problem the media managers of the Obasanjos of this world, the Orji Kalus of this world and the MKO Abiolas of this world always have to put up with. Just when you’d think you’ve reined them in, got them to shut their mouths for a change, and pushed out what you feel is a more politically correct media statement, they suddenly break loose, snatch the microphone and blow the lid on that which you had been trying to keep under cover. And they would say it in the ‘crudest’ of language – without any embellishments or pretensions. Of course, what they say is usually the truth, the naked facts.  And they never really mind whose ox is gored. But what they forget is that it is not all the time that the truth can be said.

Yes, Dame Patience is like that. That was why I was afraid for Prof. Wole Soyinka, when some mischievous fellows were suggesting a television debate between the Nobel Laureate and the First Lady to put an end to the little media war that was going on between the two of them. They reasoned that if such a debate ever took place, Soyinka would take Dame to the cleaners. That our sartorial professor would have started and concluded the debate before the First Lady succeeds in stringing together her first correct sentence. But that was where they got it wrong.  They forget that Soyinka only speaks better Queen’s English than the First Lady, but his Pidgin is not nearly as impeccable as hers. And, whoever said that debates are only conducted in Queen’s English?

And, don’t forget, apart from speech and fluent speaking, recent developments in the Rivers State House of Assembly have even shown that there are several other ways of ‘debating’ without actually speaking. In fact, when your mouth gets tired of talking – or fails to achieve the result a quickly as you want it, you can always bring your fists into the ‘debate’. If the fists don’t do it, you deploy the chairs. And if those are still not enough, you could also articulate your argument better by bringing the mace and camera tripods into the mix – after all, they say war is also a form of negotiation. But that’s just by the way.

As for the first lady, it is only a pity that the poor woman is now bereaved, but of the thousands of politicians bestriding the political landscape and constituting one form of obstacle to true democracy or the other, I still believe Dame Patience is the only one that would see white and tell you that it is actually white.

I wouldn’t know if it has to do with her upbringing, expose or touted limited vocabulary (English vocabulary, that is), but the fact remains that the current first lady is not one to play around with words. So, she just hits the nail on the heady, brushes aside all our insinuations about etiquette and finesse, and just moves on. And by the time we are through filling up newspaper pages, analyzing this latest booboo, she would have said or done another one. With her, it’s non-stop drama.

That is why I tell whoever cares to listen, that if Mrs. Jonathan were to seek elective office, I would be among the first to vote for her. At least, with her, you know that what you see is what you get. If the economy is not working, she will, like the rest of us, see it like any other market woman – no psychedelic theory about single-digit inflation, 7.5% growth in GDP, and all that.  She would just check the price of gari or rice and tell you; ‘gari never come down, so economy never improve’. She’s not going to confuse us with cleverly woven grammatical constructs which say essentially nothing.

And because she does not lie, she would not also allow you to tell a lie on her behalf. Or better still, she could allow you enjoy yourself by telling the public whatever you think the public should know about the situation, but you can be sure that whenever she gets the chance to talk, even if it is at the same event where you just spoke, she would just carry on like you never said anything, and would go ahead to tell the whole truth – including the part you left out for both ‘decency’ purposes and for purposes of political correctness. Of course, after she has finished, you might have need to do some damage control and image-laundering, but she would have said her own.

Take for instance when she had that medical scare that saw her spending several weeks in Germany and all manner of stories were flying from all quarters about what was actually happening. Some said she went on vacation, others said she went to visit her ailing mother. But when we probed further, they said; no, it was not the mother, but the step mum. Some even took to the social media to announce that she was actually on a jewelry-shopping spree. That she had started off in Dubai and then headed to Europe from there. It was only one report that alluded to the remote fact that she may have had food poisoning. In all these, my colleague, Funke Egbemode, and I told whoever cared to listen, to exercise patience, that Dame Patience does not lie; that whenever she returned, she would, in her own words, tell us what actually happened. All we needed to do was to pray for her safe return. The rest, as they say, is now history. The woman returned and dragged the same President Jonathan (whose presidency handlers had actually joined in the media spin to cover up the First Lady’s ailment) to church for thanksgiving. And during ‘testimony time’, Dame Patience came out with the whole truth: how she died for seven days, how the surgeons brought out all her intestines, how even her closest friends thought she had died and were even sharing her property. She thanked those who needed thanking and cursed those who needed cursing. Vintage Dame!

It was against the backdrop, therefore, that I patiently waited,  over this ongoing Rivers crisis, knowing that the First Lady would open up on the matter sooner than later. So, while the president’s men kept telling us that Jonathan was not involved in the crisis in the Nigerian Governors Forum and that there was no link between the NGF crisis and the madness going on in Rivers State, I did not disbelieve them. I just resolved to believe it only if Dame Patience tells us the story. For with her, there is no script, or any coaching before speaking. She always speaks from her heart and ‘naively’ lays the fact as bare as she knows them. Like Lamidi Adedibu of blessed memory, she is not one to go crosscheck what the constitution says about her position before she expresses it. Yes, remember, Adedibu, for instance, just could not understand why the Rashidi Ladoja that he made governor was refusing to give him a share of the governor’s security vote every month. For Dame Patience, like Adedibu, if we can afford to do something secretly, there can be nothing wrong if we also talk about it openly.

She made no secret of the fact that she and her husband are not happy with Amaechi, that Amaechi hurt her ego with his handling of the Okirika demolitions and urban renewal project, as well as his treatment of the then local government chairman – the ‘boy’ that, according to the First Lady, was removed soon after he hosted her.

Of course Dame Patience would not also feel that she owes us any explanation that a crony of hers led four others to impeach a speaker who had the backing of 26 others in an assembly of 32 members. After all, it’s only the case of one ex-aide that she’s pushing. Others impose their wives, sons, daughters, in-laws and all on the same government, and pass them on as having emerged through a transparent and democratic process – simply because the imposition was done with finesse.

So, while her more urbane counterparts do worse things underground, Dame Patience, probably for lack of capacity to cleverly play the intrigues of power politics, puts everything on the table. She does not understand why she should go the mind-tasking process of mobilizing people to come and ask her husband to run for 2015, when she already knows he wants to run and she wants him to run. So, even while the President is waiting for the politically correct time to declare his interest, she can begin to tell people; ‘if una like me and my husband, make una vote for us again o’.