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“Patience, young man, patience. You need patience. Your agitation is rash, presumptuous and unnecessary.”
“You are blowing grammar, my friend. If you have not forgotten your history then you will know how right from the time of Adam and Eve, to that of Samson and Delilah, to that of Caesar and Calpurnia, to innumerable others the woman has been the cause of downfall of the man and the nation!”
“Again, I say, patience, learn patience.”
“You exasperate me with your nonsense ‘patience’. I don’t think we need ‘patience’ any less than we need poison. It is time to let her know where to get off. This land belongs to us all and we cannot allow the
unchecked ambition of a woman to ruin it for us.”
“What, in all fairness, has she done that anyone in her shoes would not have done?”
“What shoes? Her husband never had shoes in the beginning, and neither did she.”
“You are not in a position to know that.”
“Yes, I am. I knew her as one little native girl of Okrika, running about without shoes and not much else.”
“But that’s the story of all of us. We were once kids.”
“True, but we grow up, have shoes and wear good clothes, and they don’t make us forget where or how we started; we don’t go running our mouth as if we own the world.”
“I still don’t know what your grouse is. She is beautiful and she loves her husband. And like all beautiful and loving wives, she stands tall to defend her husband at all times.”
“What husband? Our husband! She can do all that without polluting the air for the rest of us. After all, she is not the first one to be wife of a president. Make we hear word.”
“Would you have her stand by while an ordinary governor disrespect her on her own land like her husband has not been a governor before? That, I hear, was the beginning.”
“Rubbish. On that occasion four years ago and in public, she grabbed the microphone and told the governor to shut up for saying the demolition being carried out in Anyagubiri in Okrika is for public good. Told him to shut up in public just because she is from there and she’s ‘President’s wife’.Who, as a governor, would forget that? Is that a way to endear people to yourself or your husband?”
“That’s not all; not the whole matter.”
“What else? She claims the governor further went ahead to sack the Okrika Local Government chairman who was her man, as if the governor needs to get her permission to take decisions in governing the state.”
“But the governor knows she’s from Okrika and it’s only decent to take her into account on actions that may affect her or her people – if you are not deliberately spiting her or courting trouble.”
“Not after she has publicly disgraced him. In any case why must these personal matters be overblown to create so much havoc and unrest for everyone in the state and even the rest of the country? Turning it intoroforofo fight, getting the police and security forces involved is bound to bring the house down on all. And now the husband is going to pay for not being able to put his wife in check.”
“How is that?”
“She’s making more enemies for him than he needs and that’s putting the prospect of a second term for him in further jeopardy. In fact he may at this point kiss it goodbye.”
“Is that why the governor is said to be gunning for her husband’s seat come 2015? That’s not fair in my view. He should’ve tried to let the husband know his displeasure with what the wife was doing in first place.”
“What husband, whose wife? She’s the boss o!”
“You don’t know that.”
“That’s public enough. She showed it coming out of the aeroplane the other day on an international visit, and she’s showed it in the way she throws herself every time.”
“Still, the governor gunning for her husband’s office isn’t a friendly act.”
“This is silly. The guy hasn’t said he was running, and even if he was, so?”
“That’s the point. What’s his hurry, can’t he wait for another time instead of running against a fellow Niger Delta man? Patience, he needs patience.”
“Ha, ha. ‘Patience’! Jonathan can keep ‘that’.
Not yet time to forget those kids
Last week I rained curses (most uncharacteristically!) on the terrorist group going by the name Boko Haram, or whatever, for the latest of their dastardly deeds – the murder of about 30 children in cold blood. I had (also uncharacteristically) endorsed President Jonathan’s curse on the killers that they end up in hell.
The boarding house of Government Secondary School, Mamudo, Potiskum, Yobe State, was set on fire at dawn by the bandits. Then, as the smoked-out kids ran for dear lives they were gunned down like rodents one after another by those evil creatures.
Incidentally, my good aburo and one of Nigeria’s most gifted columnists of his generation, Azubuike Ishiekwene (simply, Azu) formerly of PUNCH now of Leadership Newspaper, also wrote on the horrifying incident. But Azu distanced himself from President Jonathan’s damnation of the killers. In typically Azu caustic sarcasm: “If in two years over 150 students have been murdered in four states (Kano, Adamawa, Borno and Yobe) by Boko Haram and not a single one of the murderers has been brought to book, then, the president can be sure that Boko Haram will not go to hell unaccompanied.”
And I can understand and share Azu’s anger. There have just been too many murders in the President’s time and on his hands, and ones involving children and innocent people, murders with impunity – all evoking nothing more than the same gratuitous assurance of government action, the same platitude of leaving it in God’s hand, by the President to mean anything.
Worse, Azu shudders and so do I at a country in which these deaths mean nothing; evoke no public outcry; get no memorial to remind us.
Azu reminds us: “Twenty children were killed in Sandy Hook and the US came to a standstill, mourning beyond comfort…When 16 persons, mostly students, were killed at a German secondary school in March 2009, the German flag was flown at half-mast…”For the rest of my life, as a feeling parent and human being, the image of those children trying to escape from the inferno only to be gunned down in the dawn of day and of their lives will remain on my mind.
Please, for whatever it is worth, let there be something erected out there at the site in Mamudo, in memoriam of those children killed by the Boko Haram terrorists – that is, as Azu said, if anyone of the victims is known by name, even as I write. What a country!
BY TUNDE FAGBENLE
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