Dame Patience’s fixation with Buhari

FOR about two weeks or so before yesterday’s poll, Dame Patience Jonathan crisscrossed nearly the entire southern part of Nigeria wooing voters to her husband’s side. During the period, her animated spirit, unfettered by grammar and logic, presented a stark contrast to her husband’s dour and unremarkable performance on the stump. Her élan, especially when she began to wax joyous and lyrical in the vernacular and pidgin, was infectious, sometimes provocative, but undoubtedly unforgettable. In a quaint and uncomfortable way, she was the charismatic, entertaining opposite of her husband’s sullen, quivering unease.

Other than the 35 percent women representation in President Goodluck Jonathan’s cabinet, which she touted as a great achievement, she did not speak to any government programme of any kind; not the economy, for that was obviously beyond her ken, nor anything related to the reengineering of the society, which is doubtless an arcanum to her. Instead she specialised in speaking about her husband’s opponent in the election, Muhammadu Buhari. Indeed she was fixated with the general, who was for about 20 months a former starry-eyed military head of state between 1983 and 1985.

Dame Patience spoke ill of her husband’s opponents, whom she considered enemies, and she was versatile in the art of insults, which she passionately believed her victims richly deserved. She also had foul words for the North’s population dynamics, and fouler descriptions for their idiosyncratic culture. In addition, she had contempt for the All Progressives Congress (APC), which she mocked as an expired drug designed to kill. In fact, no person, idea or institution was too sacrosanct to elicit abuse. But her exclusive preserve, her forte, was her tendentious ascription of base, prejudiced and malevolent motives to Gen Buhari. The general, she said, was planning to jail everybody, because in his first time as head of state, he jailed everybody.

More crucially, as a result of her fixation, and having told herself a lie and believed it, Dame Patience announced during a campaign stop in Oyo State that Gen Buhari planned to jail her after he might have won the poll. She should be careful what she wished for. First, she warned voters not to help Gen Buhari to the throne, for he would jail them hundreds of years. Then, later, she began to personalise the warning, telling her campaign audience that the general planned to send her to prison, an exercise she concluded gleefully in her false religiosity the Holy Ghost would make impossible.

 

Hear her: “I want to warn you not to listen to the All Progressives Congress. The APC does not have materials to match what the PDP has on ground. Their candidate was there in governance initially. What did he do? They only sent your fathers to prison. They are planning to even send me to prison. Holy Ghost fire! Holy Ghost fire! Holy Ghost fire! They have nothing to offer.”

The highly expressive Dame Patience has managed in one dramatic statement to exhibit religious superficiality, political immaturity and a distinctly rosy worldview often associated with childhood. Her fears, her suspicions, not to say her longings, were unlikely to cut any ice with the rented crowds she entertained in two giddy weeks of campaigning. But what did she care! Her husband, the less excitable, more timorous but infinitely more impetuous President Jonathan also told many tall stories during his campaign, and felt he made huge impressions on his audience. Dame Patience is tarred with the same brush, believing her excitability touched many souls, and her logic sound enough to convert the disbelieving and the wary.

After all, when Chibok made its grand entry into national consciousness with the tragic tales of abductions and sexual slavery of over 200 schoolchildren, Dame Patience waltz into our lives and minds with what perhaps qualifies as the most famous dramatisation of First Lady meddlesomeness and, pardon this, mediocrity ever. After imperiously sending the Holy Ghost on errand against her unnumbered foes, particularly Gen Buhari, let us tread cautiously and, with broken hearts, pray to heaven lest we be punished with another of Dame Patience’s tragicomic reign.