The First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan, has finally returned to Nigeria after a 54-day therapeutic trip to Germany. Her flight to Germany in late August, if that was where she went, was a closely guarded secret, with some of her aides eventually coaxed into suggesting that she went on vacation, and would return when she was fully rested. Like her abrupt departure, her stay abroad triggered speculations about the reason for the trip and the destination. Did she have food poisoning, appendicitis, or cosmetic surgery? No one was sure, no one is sure still, but all local newspapers offered diverse perspectives, and her husband and presidential aides lent no helping hand in shedding light on what newspapers came to dub the Dame Patience affair. It must be a reflection of the interesting standards of the Nigerian media that no medium had a realistic clue why she travelled, nor apparently where she went. Indeed, the way she spoke at the airport on her return mid last week, it would not be surprising if media establishments thought she never travelled at all.
Whether it is acknowledged or not, the Jonathan presidency has managed the Dame Patience story much more efficiently than the immediate past First Family managed theirs. Nigerians knew the hospitals in Saudi Arabia and Germany where the late President Umaru Yar’Adua received medical attention, and what ailed him. Moreover, they also knew the story became a tragicomedy. But in the case of Dame Patience, no one knows where she went or how to categorise her trip. According to her, she was not at any hospital we knew, let alone the hospital where Yar’Adua was attended to, the Horst Schmidt Klinic in Wiesbaden, Germany. So where did she go? Mum was the word. Secondly, she said she did not have any surgery, not to talk of tummy tuck, and had no terminal illness as her detractors speculated or hoped. So what ailed her? Again, mum was the word, except to add that her husband adored her shape. Magnificent. After all, it is pointless asking her husband what he thinks of her shape, or imagining what men think of the shapes and sizes of their women.
It was clear, as Dame Patience put it, that she experienced trying times, but due to God’s mercies could now have a second chance in life. So, she did not dispute the fact that she had certain unnamed difficulties, and except she spoke bad English, we got the impression those difficulties nearly took her life and attempted to destroy her first chance in life. Though she did not take Nigerians into confidence, and had spoken cynically and derisively about a few who wished her what God did not plan for her life, she gloated that Nigerians actually prayed for her in her time of trouble, and God answered the prayers. This column joins the prayer warriors to wish her well.
Of all the questions Nigerians were dying – oh, that morbid word again – to receive answers to, Dame Patience answered none. It seems even more likely that now and in the foreseeable future, with a considerably mute presidency and cheerfully scornful aides, there will be no answer provided to any question about the First Lady’s trip and her supposed illness. The best the presidency wanted to give anyone during her absence was the few minutes video clip broadcast by the government television station NTA showing a vibrant Dame Patience exulting about taking photographs with her visiting husband and announcing her eagerness to return home. And the best we will ever receive now that she has returned is her airport rebuke and sermon. There will be nothing else, not even if there should be a reoccurrence of the unknown trial she obliquely referred to, God forbid.
The airport sermon itself was nothing transcendental, and nothing like the exegeses we are used to when we read Martin Luther or John Calvin. But it was at least simple and touching, if a little exaggerated and affected, and perhaps even engaging and disarming. Hear her in her inimitably alluring grammar: “Thank God Almighty for bringing me back safely to Nigeria. Wherever there are good people, there are also bad ones. There are few Nigerians that were saying whatever they liked; not what God planned because God has a plan for all of us. And God has said it all that where two or three are gathered in His name that He will be with them. Nigerians gathered and prayed for me and God listened and heard their prayers, so I thank God for that. At the same time, I will use this opportunity to tell those few ones that are saying that anybody that goes to the Villa or Aso Rock will die. They mentioned Abacha; they mentioned Stella Obasanjo; they mentioned Yar’Adua and other people. But why did those people not mention those who went there with their families and succeeded and they still came out alive? We should remember that Aso Rock is the seat of power and that is where God has ordained for us Nigerians that our leaders should rule from and to rule us right. God is wonderful and His infinite mercy endures.” Clearly she has read her Bible, and she studiously quoted the right passages. But until she alluded to those who wished her dead, few Nigerians knew such talk was abuzz on the Internet, nor that during her therapy she was unnerved by the morbid online chitchats.
If the media would welcome Palladium’s counsel, instead of asking questions to which answers may never come, they should rather come down hard on the governors, ministers, wives of governors and other highly placed government and party officials who indulged their sycophantic bent by going to the airport to receive the First Lady. That was not a show of love. It was typical, insufferable Nigerian flattery. If the governors and ministers were so grovelingly idle, perhaps we should appeal to the officious and obtruding National Assembly to invite them to the legislative chambers – invitations that apparently irritate the likes of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi of the Central Bank – to ruffle their flimsy feathers.
According to some newspaper reports, at the airport to receive the returning and obviously refreshed First Lady were Governor Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa State, the increasingly technocratic and dashing Petroleum minister Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke, the soft-spoken Environment minister Hadiza Mailafia, Education minister Ruqayyatu Rufai, Labour minister Emeka Nwogu, many ministers of state and wives of some governors – all fawning, wife of the Senate president, and many other government officials. Their excuse must never again be that invitations from the National Assembly weary them; for if they could shelve their work to receive the First Lady at the airport, they must be willing to go to the ends of the earth to honour National Assembly invitations, no matter how distracting or cumbersome. Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. It must, however, be deeply ironical and quintessentially Nigerian that Governor Dickson was also at the airport to receive one of his permanent secretaries. Is order of precedence no longer valid in Nigeria, that the senior finds it imperturbable to fawn at the feet of his subordinate in government?
As the second round of guessing game begins, this column welcomes Dame Patience back home to enjoy the second chance she says life is offering her. And by the way, she kisses far better and far more natural than her husband who, in the photographs published on the front pages of Thursday newspapers, made what should be an adorable spousal exercise look like, well, an ordeal. In her broad smiles there was not a hint of distress; but in her sermon there was a touch of the Chief Olusegun Obasanjo Christian conversion – the use and application of elementary theology to underscore the cumulative rejection of one’s detractors. As Dame Patience prepares to forgive her rumour mongering enemies, let her also be prepared to read more online speculations about her health and the recent German trip. She has put the testy trip behind her; but she will not be able to ignore the avalanche of speculations likely to lather her every cough, every wince and every sneeze.
