Freeloaders, all. And ingrates to boot.
Some six weeks ago, they dominated the front pages and the headlines in the national media, from the moment they landed at Abuja Airport until they departed some four days later and even thereafter.
They were the talk – and indeed the envy – of the town as they were whisked from one event to another in the finest automobiles that ever rolled off the assembly lines of the Bavarian Motor Works in Germany, from lavish breakfast, with judicious helpings of cassava bread, I gather, to sumptuous lunch, and thereafter to opulent dinner, with the choicest victuals in between.
By one account, one of them could not find her way to Abuja in a manner befitting of members of the conclave. Pronto, an executive jet from the Presidential Fleet had to be dispatched to Lilongwe to fetch her, and apparently to fly her back at the conclusion of the proceedings.
Practically all of them were heard to remark in their less guarded moments that never had they never enjoyed such a good time, inured from the querulous intrusion of the media back home and the malicious gossip of the domestic staff.
They came, they ate, and they left, laden with precious souvenirs.
But not a word of solicitude or solidarity has been heard from members of this conclave, severally or jointly, about their ailing Abuja host who left nothing to chance to ensure that they would forever remember their visit as the happiest time of their lives.
As far as I could ascertain, they have not sent flowers to her bedside in the German hospital where she is reportedly convalescing, let alone a deputation to comfort her. Nor have they summoned the presence of mind to send a goodwill delegation to her husband through whose office all that munificence they enjoyed had flowed.
Anyone who has hosted a regional conference, to say nothing of a national conference, knows how exacting the task is. Hosting an international conference is prohibitively more exacting. When it comes to staging a continental conference involving first ladies, the task grows by geometric progression.
Indeed, so enormous was the stress and strain occasioned by the convening and hosting of such a conference that the convener had to repair to the quiescent clime of Dubai just to decompress. But the damage had been done, and opportunistic complications set in.
And yet, as I was saying, the African First Ladies Peace Initiative, to come right out with it and call the conclave its proper name, has expressed no concern or solidarity with its chairperson and convener, Dame Patience Jonathan, with her husband, and with the people of Nigeria.
Whatever happened to ubuntu, that hallowed imperative that enjoins us, Africans, to look out for one another, and in this particular instance summons the first ladies to be their sister’s keeper?
Where is the solidarity?
Dame Jonathan even took a shellacking for allegedly muscling her way through the bureaucracy to secure for the organisation’s headquarters building choice land in Abuja — land to which her predecessor claimed to have genuine title. She was called all kinds of names in the media, but she endured it all graciously, unshaken in her commitment to the goals and objectives of the African First Ladies Initiative.
Is it too much, then, to expect her fellow first ladies to show humane concern for the health and well-being of one who has sacrificed so much and endured so much to advance the organization’s interests?
When it comes to Nigeria the host country of its most recent summit, the African First Ladies Peace Initiative has been even more remiss. Since that summit, hardly has a week passed without some shadowy organisation carrying out a slaughter of innocents, much of it sectarian, in the northern part of Nigeria.
The Independence Day massacre of 42 students of the Federal Polytechnic, in Mubi, Adamawa State, is only the latest episode of what Festus Eriye, editor and columnist for the Sunday edition of this newspaper, has with his accustomed perspicacity called a “descent into depravity.”
If any country not at war qualifies for an urgent visitation from the African First Ladies Peace Initiative, that country, surely, has to be Nigeria, which hosted its most recent summit.
Yet, there has not been the merest hint of a move in that direction; no appeal to the rampaging bomb-throwers and gunmen to end the slaughter and allow for the kind of mediation that women are uniquely suited to promote, as mothers and wives. They have sent no message of commiseration to the beleaguered, and offered no succour to the most vulnerable casualties, children and older women especially.
They had better prepare an answer for their serial derelictions, for their chairperson is sure to demand an explanation when she returns to circulation any moment from now. And it had better be a robust one.
Dr Jonathan will have some explaining to do, too.
Something tells that if Dame Patience finds on returning to circulation that “First Lady” is no longer reflexively prefixed to her name; that she is now largely seen more as her husband’s wife than as Nigeria’s preeminent woman, and that she can no longer command the kind of attention she used to command, she is sure to demand an explanation.
She will surely find out that her husband treated her indisposition as a family matter that did not rise to the level of national concern, and that he did not give a damn about the public’s right to know, even if only in outline, what was happening to the woman they had come to regard as Her Excellency the First Lady.
In the process, he reduced her to an object of tawdry gossip and tabloid titillation.
She will discover that, by his silence and his secrecy, Dr Jonathan blocked the outpouring of sympathy and goodwill that Nigerians typically manifest toward the indisposed, and that by the same measure, he may have taken her out of public consciousness.
The video clip aired on national television the other day showing Mrs Jonathan “hale and hearty” with her husband and children at an undisclosed location in Germany did little to clear the air.
While the reservoir of sympathy and goodwill has not dried up, she will find it no easy task to re-enter the public consciousness in a positive light.
But one writes off Mrs Jonathan only at one’s peril. I will not be surprised if, the day after her return, she carried on where she had left off unfazed, and unstoppable as ever.
Still, I don’t envy Dr Jonathan.
