Mummy Patience Jonathan, one wife too many 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. Patience Jonathan 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 roleas 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 ofthe 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’smemory 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!
Posted on: Wed, 31 Jul 2013 08:59:22 +0000
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