The Staying Power of Mrs. Jonathan

ENGAGEMENTS BY Chidi Amuta

Very few Nigerians remember any quotable utterances by former President Goodluck Jonathan. A self confessed introvert, the man was more preoccupied with finding enough confidence to fill a job whose scope clearly overwhelmed him. A man who hardly found shoes to wear till rather suddenly found himself struggling to fit into the oversized shoes of Africa’s most powerful presidency. Some think he was merely in office but not in power. A minority thinks he was in both but was perennially lost as to where exactly he found himself. The consensus is that he had neither an agenda of power nor a mission in office.

Mr. Jonathan’s and his handlers were content with him saying ordinary things in too many pedestrian words. His speeches read more like apprentice campus seminar papers than lofty presidential pronouncements. Power without rhetoric or memorable elocution is the tragedy of accidental leadership and unplanned ascendancy.

On the contrary, Mrs. Jonathan has endured in the minds of Nigerians in unforgettable words. Somehow, the ‘patience’ in her first name complemented the ‘good luck’ in her husband’s name and rather fortuitous emergence. She has emerged, seven years after leaving Aso Rock, as a very memorable voice that appeals to the people on the streets and boardrooms out of the seat of power. Her words still resonate. Her unvarnished and unwashed witticism spices up light conversation among the high and mighty as well as the lowly and common.

In a strange way, I have heard many ordinary non-political Nigerians express a hunger for the ‘return’ of Patience Jonathan in some format but not necessarily as First Lady of any enclave known to geography. Not even the delectable glamour of a Mrs. Aisha Buhari has lessened this nostalgia and lingering appeal of Patience Jonathan, a First Lady who has retained the uncanny and uncommon ability to make us all laugh at ourselves as a society. A return to Goodluck Jonathan beyond the ritual of professional peace missionary or envoy of the incumbent president does not look like an object of much interest. It is a dream path littered with fields of mines and shrapnel.

In her Aso Rock days, Mrs. Jonathan was stubbornly natural in her tenacious clutching to very simple convictions. She left her audience of more polished men and women to worry about the niceties of grammar and syntax. She blasted her grammar as natural cannons and cobbled her syntax with the natural ease of an Aba mobile tailor: little measurement, ready made to fit all sizes and shapes and for all occasions. The result was a tapestry of expression with an uneasy seduction that was hard to ignore but could fit either beast or beauty. The remarkable point in her natural spontaneity was that she was confident in her natural convictions. This is an innocent Ijaw woman “on whose nature, nurture cannot stick”.

Because she came across in her authentic natural hew, she has managed to remain more memorable than most of her predecessors. No one remembers Flora Azikiwe for anything she said except for her beauty, ladylike carriage and fashion flourish. Few recall Lady Aguiyi Ironsi as her tenure was too short lived. Similarly, hardly any one can recall anything that Maryam Abacha, Stella Obasanjo or Turai Yar’Adua said while their spouses held sway. The only other memorable First Lady we have had was perhaps Maryam Babangida, not for anything memorable she said but for the topicality of her pet Better Life for Rural Women Programme because it touched the lives and realities of a forgotten segment of our society. Her natural beauty earned her the silent admiration of the menfolk as well her fellow middle class women.

Otherwise, within the over decorated pageant of Nigeria’s First Ladies, Mrs. Jonathan occupies a pride of place and has become the most memorable occupant of that office on account of her linguistic freshness and unintended comic ingenuity. She was not exactly a ‘lady’ in the sense of the refinement and elegance that sophisticated high education and classy social exposure would confer. Let us not forget that she too was a graduate of one of our universities. Some media have even conferred a “Ph.D” on this naturally gifted and unusual Nigerian woman.

In the last seven years or more, comic skits and sundry comedy strips in Nigeria’s prolific social media scene have been profusely garnished with Mrs. Jonathan’s memorable interjections. Her authoritative matronly voice, her scant attention to the niceties of grammar, syntax or lexicon have produced a language and an idiom that belong neither to the street nor the high station of stately elegance. Sometimes, it is a fluid amalgam of pidgin and tolerable English. At other times, it is a series of direct transliterations from some Nigerian native tongue into a tolerably strenuous dialect of English.

Mrs. Jonathan’s interjections in comedy skits serve as irresistible adornments. Now and again, bits and pieces from her many well meaning but simplistic interjections are inserted as moral rectifiers. She is available to hector the numerous foibles and serial foolishness of a half literate society of street urchins, roadside pundits. All manner of bus stop and street market pundits of diverse theologies fall back on her moralistic entreaties in that unmistakable matronly voice. Comedy skit makers quickly invoke and incorporate the kindred interjections of comedians like the late Sam Loco Efe, Chinwetelu Agu, ‘Akin and Paw Paw’ to beef up the comic spice with the authoritarian finality of a Patience Jonathan in amazement: “Chai… Na so una be?”

In societies with a fairer sense of intellectual propriety and property rights, Mrs. Jonathan should by now be laughing to the bank with bulging royalty accounts. More accomplished comedy script writers should have officially invited her to act major roles. But instead, all manner of comic scavengers and intellectual vultures have been busy cannibalizing her originality. Her iconic statements, utterances and unforgettable interjections are being voraciously plagiarized, misshapen or mischievously trivialized for commercial purposes. But those who have made fortunes from her originality and altruistic sense of plain unintended humour are yet to render their accounts to this authentic market place genius. I think the time has come for Mr. Lai Mohammed to descend on these comic skit plagiarists to pay up or justifiably proceed to jail on the orders of Mr. Abubakar Malami. The grounds are simple: intellectual property infringements and sundry violations. Intellectual property thieves will definitely look better in prison uniform than in their current robes of affluence funded with the proceeds of victims like Mrs. Jonathan. I think Mr. Lai Mohammed and Attorney General Malami will fare much better hounding intellectual property scavengers and comedy skit thieves than innocent journalists and social media influencers and youth right advocates whom Mr. Buhari’s media Hisbah are so fond of terrorizing. Jokes apart, the Nigerian social media industry, especially the skit comedians, owe Mrs. Jonathan troves of cash in arrears for their prolific abuses and massive thievery of her originality.

We need to understand the profitability of comedy in our society today. In fact, a casual stroll in places like Lekki or even Banana Island in Lagos will compel a new enlightenment on the matter. I hear some of the most breathtaking and eye popping architectural marvels in these places belong to comedians. The profitability of comedy in today’s Nigeria remains a controversial matter. Some say that our society today is like English Restoration society (from 1660-1700), a patently unserious era. It is an era in which clowns became heroes and gossip was the major preoccupation of the entire society. Trivia replaced substance in the conduct of state. The media was awash with gossip. The tabloid became the most popular staple of an indolent and cavalier society. People were better entertained by caricaturing the foibles of the high and mighty. It was the clandestine prostitution, the endless concupiscence, the casual swapping of wives and mistresses and the petty gossips that went with them which fed common conversation in pubs and clubs. Society’s hunger for entertainment was fed on this constant diet of scandals and small talk. The comedians had a field day. Restoration comedy emerged as a distinct genre of English literature.

In Nigeria, a case is being made for comedy from another angle. Some insist that the battles of daily living are too gruesome that something needs to lighten our mood. A constant dose of comic relief is what is keeping many Nigerians alive. The horror and terror in our daily lives have created a market and a social necessity for comedy. People prefer to watch comedy or play comic skits on their phones than listen to yet another presidential drawl or gubernatorial gibberish.

It is only fair that those who have made it their business to make us laugh in these bad times should be richly rewarded. It is demand, supply and profit, the standard fare of a free racket (market?) economy. A good comic skit can make you forget that you are broke until the landlord comes calling for arrears of rent or the school calls you to say that junior’s tuition payments are still in arrears!

So, let us give unto our comedians their due. And in that fold, Mrs. Jonathan has by default become a voice of endless social relief. She is variously quoted, often mangled and distorted but hard to ignore. Her spontaneous outbursts of simplistic innocence touch the depths of humour of ordinary folk in the bus stations and vegetable markets. Her expressions of concern for the excesses of politicians as well as concern for the welfare of her fellow womenfolk. Yet no one can ignore the timeless hilarity of her statements.

The strength of Mrs. Jonathan’s verbal legacy lies in the fact that she intended her hilarious outbursts as serious commentaries on contemporary matters. But to ordinary folk, they came across as the unschooled verbal assaults of a common woman in an uncommonly high place of power. In a sense, ordinary women came to see Patience Jonathan as their ambassador in Aso Rock. She spoke to them and for them in a language that was authentically theirs. But to the elite, she was a demeaning departure from the common run of schooled elegance and cultural sophistication. Somehow, her utterances acquired a gravity of humour that lightened the weight of social and political disquiet unleashed by her husband’s rather rudderless prefecture.

With the benefit of hindsight and as a matter of important public observation, Mrs. Jonathan’s abiding legacy is in drawing our attention to the deficit of communication in our official language. Our leaders speak to us like textbooks. They present the facts that concern us in a format that communicates only to an esoteric cult of the highly educated. They speak above our heads about the things that concern us. They do not speak to us directly; a sad distinction between our politicians and those of the older democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom. In Mrs. Jonathan, therefore, we find a rough hewn mediator of this divide between government and people, an attempt to remedy the broken bridge of political communication and social language.

She has therefore given to the Nigerian public a rhetoric that reconnects the high and the low, the official and the informal, the street and the boardroom. It is of course our pompous pretension to high education and cultural sophistication that has made us laugh off the likes of Mrs. Jonathan as cranks and comic prodigals. In reality, she is a realist with a pragmatic sense of social and political language.

Somehow, Mrs. Jonathan has acquired a certain permanent contemporary relevance. She can become our collective voice in the grueling and often gruesome realities of our present days. When we sense that too many people are being killed by bandits in Zamfara and Kaduna, we have reason to take helpless solace in Mrs. Jonathan’s spontaneous outburst of our helplessness: “Chai! Chai!! Chai!!!” If Mr. Lai Mohammed becomes too loquacious in his often groundless defenses of Mr. Buhari’s bad job approval rating, we can summon Mrs. Jonathan to intervene and caution the Minister: “Will you keep quiet?!”

When our present reality of insecurity becomes too sordid and bloody for the ordinary person to understand how Nigeria became so lawless and bloody, we have a right to invoke Mrs. Jonathan to openly exclaim our helplessness in unison: “Dia Ris God o!!”

When the girls of Chibok high school were abducted, Boko Haram was in its infancy. The blood letting by the terrorists and insurgents was still minimal. Yet Mrs. Jonathan was able to see a future of more blood letting to exclaim in protest to the terrorists and their influencers: “The blood you are ‘sharing’ (shedding!) in Borno …will come to touch all of us o!”. At that time, it was strange to Mrs. Jonathan that the local government officials and other government officials from Borno state should be so indifferent as to turn out in such low numbers during their visit to the Villa to report the Chibok incident to her. In outrage and desperate unbelief, Mrs. Jonathan asked the Borno officials in attendance: “Na only you Waka come?”

The comic side to her outbursts was often the product of her audience’s imagination. She took herself quite seriously. For one thing, she saw her audiences with women’s groups as her contribution to her husband’s political work. Thus, when it was time for Mr. Jonathan to seek re-election in 2015, Mrs. Jonathan had the candor and equanimity to tacitly admit that the president had not done too well in his first term. She came up with the ingenious analogy that when a child does not do too well in an examination, he should at least get a chance to repeat the class and re-sit the examination! The occasion was, I believe, an address to an assembly of widows somewhere in Akwa Ibom State. By a morbid irony, she opened her address with the rather ironic and fortuitous greeting: “My fellow widows!” But the unfortunate slip was a figurative forecast of the political ‘death’ of the Jonathan presidency! Jonathan re-sat the political contest and lost to Mr. Buhari. Patience Jonathan became a ‘widow’ of political power.

By a curious irony, Mrs. Jonathan is still reigning in our hearts, on our television screens but mostly in a series of comic skits in the social media platforms on every phone in every hand. To those who owe her royalties for massively stealing her intellectual property, we can only enter a plea to heaven on her behalf in her own words and voice: “Dia Ris God ooo!…”