Patience’s fears

Are the guilty afraid?
Except for the fact that her jokes are sometimes dry and insensitive, Dame Patience Jonathan’s interventions in her husband’s campaign have been as intriguing as they could be. But, when I say intriguing, I mean intriguing in reverse, because, virtually everything she said recently on the podium could be used, as they say in the police station, against her. Take for example her speech at the rally of the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) women wing in Ado-Ekiti, the Ekiti State capital on Monday. She said “What did they forget in Aso Rock? If you vote the PDP and Jonathan, it would be better for you. If you vote the APC, you will go to prison. How can you jail somebody for 300 years? I’m not ready to carry food to my husband inside prison oh!”
Now, if Mrs Jonathan is wondering what someone forgot in Aso Rock, does she not feel we should also ask what is it that is making them this desperate not to want to leave the place? I know she had said everybody who goes there does two terms; so, they too should be allowed to do theirs. No one is saying they cannot do two terms but the thing is not automatic. What Mrs Jonathan wants is for us to return her husband unopposed. Unfortunately, there is no such provision in the constitution. They have to work for the presidency. It is difficult for one to blame the First Family though; this is the first real election they would be having in their lives. So, one can understand their desperation and frustration with the turn of events. Perhaps if Nigerians had been as perceptive as they are today in 2011, the Jonathan administration would not have taken them for granted as it has done.
The point I am making is that Mrs Jonathan does not have the moral right to ask what anybody forgot in Aso Rock. They know how many churches they had attended to pray to retain their hold on power in recent months. That is for the ones we can see or know about. Some Senegalese Islamic clerics were in Aso Rock in May last year to pray for peace and an end to the insecurity challenges in the country. A few days ago, it was also reported that the Witches Association of Nigeria has thrown its weight behind the president’s reelection bid. As I said, there is no way we can verify some of these other connections, like that between the seat of power and the witches. We do not know too whether the wizards would go with their female counterparts. So, for someone whose husband has traversed the places the president has traversed, the question of asking what anybody forgot in Aso rock does not arise.
Then in Lagos on Thursday, the president’s wife said at another rally where she addressed PDP Lagos women at the National Stadium, Surulere, Lagos, among others, that “I want you to know that a lion cannot give birth to a goat, a lion can only give birth to a lion, and Dr Goodluck Jonathan has delivered Jimi Agbaje to deliver Lagos. What Goodluck Jonathan is doing at the federal level is what he has asked Agbaje to reenact in Lagos State, if he wins the election. Nigerian women your messiah has come, so vote freedom for yourself in Lagos.” Some comic relief?

But I could hear Lagosians’ thunderous “we reject this in Jesus’ name”. How can any serious person say Lagos should witness the kind of paralysis that is at the centre? Could it be that those who do not know that the Jonathan presidency is a monumental failure are doing so genuinely? Or many of them are being mischievous and are only supporting the government because of ‘stomach infrastructure’. And I hear a lot of that has been going round in dollars as the campaign enters injury time.
But there is good news for Mrs Jonathan that is afraid of a Muhammadu Buhari presidency because she might have to be taking food to her husband in prison if the retired general wins the forthcoming presidential election; that fear should have evaporated with the assurance by General Buhari’s wife, Aishat, that they are unfounded. Mrs Buhari said the job to be done would not leave time for the kind of witch-hunting that Mrs Jonathan is afraid of. “For those that are campaigning, saying that he (Buhari) is coming to jail Nigerians, I don’t know what their fear is. But they shouldn’t be afraid because we are all yearning for change”, Mrs Buhari told some women in Benin, Edo State, on Thursday.

But tobe frank with ourselves, Mrs Jonathan said some home truth. The few corrupt elements who are milking the country dry are afraid of Buhari presidency because their hands are too dirty not to imagine where their next destination would be, particularly if the ‘crutches’ that have been supporting them, that is the Jonathan presidency, are suddenly sacked from power. Indeed, former President Obasanjo said that much sometime ago, that the main reason President Jonathan himself is afraid of Buhari is because of fears the retired general might send him to prison on account of corruption. But there is reasonable ground to be afraid. This is one of the few backward countries where someone would enter either State House or Aso Rock shoeless and in the next few weeks, he is into some sudden, inexplicable opulence. Buhari had been so many things in this country, yet, when he told us what he is worth, many people who had not been anything near what he had been are wondering how come someone could be that stupid not to have made so much money for himself and for his generations unborn.
For sure, with Nigerians’ experience with President Jonathan, any contender for elective posts in the country who thinks he can gain cheap sympathy by saying he was shoeless as a boy can never smell the office, because experience is the best teacher.
Again, we should understand the fear of people who are afraid of going to prison in Nigeria; the point is, they have left the prisons to degenerate and they are afraid of having a taste of what they have been serving many Nigerians who have the misfortune of being in the jailhouses. But, I want to believe that Nigerians, in their usual magnanimity would not mind conceding to our very important citizens who may be jail-bound for the atrocities they committed against the country that they should apply to serve their terms in the International Criminal Court (ICC) prison. That is a much better place, where they would have almost all their comfort except probably their freedom of movement. Their ilk there would gladly receive them. And, per chance the president ends up there, his lovely wife does not have to entertain any fear as she would not be saddled with the responsibility of taking food to him in the ICC facility.
In this wise, the ICC should begin to expand its prison because, for the first time in our country’s political history, the court may have some very important guests from Nigeria after these elections. The desperation for power has become so unusually intense as even the Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Adetona, observed during President Jonathan’s visit to his palace on March 12.
Perhaps some lessons would have been learnt if General Ibrahim Babangida and his colleagues who annulled the June 12 1993 presidential election which Bashorun Moshood Kashimawo Abiola was set to win, had been punished. We have to insist that some people cannot impose leaders on us. The idea that some of those in power today would hand over to anybody but Buhari is arrant nonsense. If that is the choice at the polls, anyone who attempts to stop him from being sworn in as they did June 12 must be severely punished.
Happy voting.