Dame Patience Jonathan
A
tear for Mama Peace. No, not a jeer. She owes us that much. Let our
faces break up and tears course down in winding, tortured rivulets of
sorrow. Or that’s what I feel. The former first lady does not see it
that way, though. That is the power of the irony. She thinks herself in a
sort of messianic light, not for society, but for Mama Peace. She feels
wronged, she feels purloined, she feels betrayed. However, nothing will
sway her or dilute her resolve.
How come her $31 million was taken away
from her, and no one understands her right to fight back. Others will
call her naïve, and say let others take the fall on her behalf. But she
says, no, it’s her money and the Magu-led EFCC must return it to her
nest.
Patience Jonathan is a naïve woman, and
she flops about with a sort of dangerous innocence. She thinks it was
right for her to open a dollar account, or dollar accounts and ply them
with humongous sums of money. Never mind she was only a permanent
secretary and a first lady in those years, and no one could make a
fraction of $31 million without raising a highbrow. She was high brow,
she must have thought as first lady. So she was entitled to money that
could raise highbrows. That is innocence, Mama Peace style.
When she pleaded on the hustings in 2015
that she did not want to visit her husband in jail, she was as sincere
as when she mocked Wole Soyinka’s regal beard. No one could be more
sincere when she said, “there is God O! or when she insisted that she
was husbandless in “my fellow widows.” Or when she asked a photographer
“are you taking us alive?”
Mama Peace had never bothered about her
illiteracy. She has not tried to restrain herself, or attempted a lesson
in civility or public etiquette. She had no need for it. She was
perfect in her native ‘beauty.’ Some may have seen her as a hippo or
anthropoid, or the unrelieved maritime shrew. But she saw herself as
okay. We might say Patience was brash, bolshie, bashing, but she was
never bashful or dashing.
That is why we must feel sorry for her.
She might have gone away with her money, if she was subtle, cunning and
carted away the money in guises as others did, so that the EFCC would
not discover or let them discover it at her boon companion’s peril. She
would not.
Her innocence is rare to see in history
or literature, a fellow who is naïve enough to give herself away, unless
we look at characters like Okonkwo or Oedipus, who saw disaster and
pranced towards it. Critic Killam called it “insistent fatality.” But
those are majestic figures, otherwise not naïve. But merely fated by
their higher gifts to ignore their special follies, or what dramatists
call “fatal flaws.”
Was it not the same thing that propelled
former Kano State Governor Barkin Zuwo to roar that he kept government
money in government house? Was it not the same temperament that made
Marie Antionette to wonder why the protestors on French streets would
not take cake if they did not have bread? Or the shoe fetish of Imelda
Marcos who made a potential museum and industry out her foot comfort.
She was the opposite of what
anthropologists and philosophers call the holy or saintly fools. They
dedicate themselves to causes higher than themselves and play dumb in
execution, and austere in their sartorial devotions, in their spare
words, in the economy of their smiles and disdain for material
splendour, in their sacrifices for the joy of others, in their recoil
from personal happiness. Simeon in the Bible has been cited as one, as
some Roman Catholic Popes, this present one looking like a modern-day
version, or Mother Theresa. We also have them in the Buddhist tradition
like Buddha himself as fictionalized by Nobel laureate Herman Hesse in
his novel Siddhartha. Russian and French writers from Dostoyevsky to
Victor Hugo have fed on it. In one of them, Hugo’s The Hunchback of
Notre Dame, Quasimodo – the hunchback – organises a festival of fools
and he is called the Pope of fools. He exposes an age of sanctimony and
moral desuetude.
But Mama Peace’s story only exposes
herself. Her revelations tell us two things, among others. One, she
unveiled how people in high places take away money in stealth, except
that she is not prepared to hide because she believes it is her money.
Two, that her husband was not able to
tame the wife. She is the shrew that got away. An English newspaper
once wrote that President Jonathan lacked the ability to control his
wife. Jonathan could not play the tamer in Shakespeare’s the Taming of
the Shrew where Catherina is made from a wild woman into a model of
obedience, a play that modern stage directors and feminist rage have
turned into a rebuke of the author’s misogyny.
Humans like Patience Jonathan never have
the skills of high office. She never acted, and never knew it was
important to play roles when in such exalted positions. She was herself,
and she was a happy woman. She spoke her mind, hurt people, humoured a
nation, created traffic bedlam in Lagos and never saw a reason to
apologise. She said she took the money to heal herself. May no one wish
to spend such money in a hospital.
The other lesson is the “Baboon dey
chop, monkey dey work” syndrome. Just like we saw in the confessions of
Dasukigate, people had easy access to public funds without labour. That
is the primitive splendour of capitalism. They wanted to turn lazy hours
into wealth. We have many of them. They are finding it hard these days
because Buhari’s era does not reward the grandiose indolence of the
Jonathan era. They are like the characters in Ben Jonson’s classic The
Alchemist, where the landlord leaves the home to his servant to avoid a
plague. But before he returns the servant has made a huge fortune from
trickery, including by lying he could turn metal into gold, and had a
pretty wench to boot. The master returns and inherits everything without
a sweat. The play, ironically, was written before capitalism. So were
the words of Christ, “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and
he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away
even that which he hath.”
Mama Peace lived that world, and has not yet relieved herself.
0 comments:
Post a Comment