It's the season of OPEN letters again and this well written piece was done by my friend Peter Oshun, the letter is addressed to the first lady(wife to the president of Nigeria) need I mention her name? No need you all know her.
I shouldn't be saying much just dive into the piece and share your thoughts on the truth that is well written to the 1st lady...........Well hope she get's to read it........more like get someone or her husband to read it to her! she fit no understand sha! .
Dear Madam:
It grieves me to pound out a letter to your good self in circumstances such as these, on the subject on which I feel compelled to address myself to you in the paragraphs below, because they are matters which as the oyinbo would say, really should go without saying. My grief aside, I also am conscious of the impertinence on my part, certainly a slight sense of incongruity, as with the young Obi Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease when he won public disgrace and reduced his primary school headmaster to tears by writing a letter to Adolf Hitler, no less, at the height of World War 2. You are no Adolf Hitler, madam, but neither am I a precocious prepubescent colonial pupil unmindful of the treasonous implications of giving aid and comfort to the enemy in wartime. I am a Nigerian citizen concerned about the welfare of my own sovereign state, and you madam, far from being in a legal state of war with Nigeria, are the wife of its elected president. By some bizarre twist of circumstances you could well be the most important person in Nigeria today, certainly the most important person in government, by virtue or in spite of your constitutionally indeterminate position as First lady, with all the arrogated powers appurtenant.
I watched bemused, along with my fellow countrymen with access to the internet andelectric power in one form or the other, that interesting vignette in which you lashed out at the parties you invited to ‘discuss’ the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram and sought to blame your husband’s political opponents for the shameful debacle. There are those who have been getting a huge laugh out of your crass demeanour and rotten syntax . I hardly blame them, in the light of the dangerous tension building up at the nonchalant attitude of the government to the plight of our girls for three weeks, but laughter at clownish behaviour is not a helpful strategy in the face of this disaster. There are those who rightfully question the sincerity of the emotions you displayed, questioning what species of delayed reaction to the horror of Chibok was taking place almost three weeks after the kidnap victims entered the filthy hands of terrorists. Rest assured madam, that I will not join any calls for lab testing of the handkerchief you dabbed your eyes with while tearfully wailing for the cameras. Theatre has its place in governance and leadership. The question is whether the leadership provided is the type that adds value and provides effective solutions to the problems faced by the collective.
You are the wife of the president. I’m enough of a male chauvinist to assume that in Nigerian culture when a woman, one who owes her social status solely to her husband’s own position, unleashes the sort of diatribe you let loose on Monday, then she is reflecting the innermost convictions and priorities of her husband and he can be as firmly held responsible for the views expressed as if he signed his name to them. So that, when in your rant against your husband’s enemies and all the liars in Borno state you asked the rhetorical question with respect to the almost 300 missing girls the whole world is looking for: “So my sisters, you can all see that within them they know what they are doing. With what is happening now, will you believe that any children got missing?” and your sycophantic amen corner bellowed ‘NO’ in expected, sickening response, you were merely reflecting the belief held by the presidency that the whole story of abduction is a hoax concocted to embarrass him personally. And when you blundered on, encouraged by the spineless, heartless chorus of unthinking assent to your crass assault on logic and basic intelligence: “So, we the Nigerian women are saying that no child is missing in Borno State. If any child is missing, let the governor go and look for them. There is nothing we can do again”, you were merely articulating what has in fact been the government’s default policy for the last three weeks – to do absolutely nothing about rescuing the girls, even while it rebuffed an offer of military assistance by the US from Day One and was fibbing to the world that it was on top of the situation.
Madam, it is either that this is the case –you speak for your husband and his regime on this matter - or the alternative; that you are a dangerous loose cannon who cannot be called to order by the C-in-C, his chief of staff, his security chiefs, his press chief or indeed anyone at all within the administration. I do not know which alternative is worse. Dirty male chauvinist that I am, I declare that to give the impression that your husband in his capacity as husband (which is the only relevant relationship in your case; you do not answer to him as absentee Perm. Sec. in Bayelsa State) cannot control your utterances on such a sensitive matter, is to call into question all over again his basic credentials for heading even a local government council or a department in your local church. You bear his name, and as Chinua Achebe reminds us in Arrow of God, in our cultures once a man marries a wife, he has no hiding place: “...he will no longer be called a child. When strangers see him they will no longer askWhose son is he? but Who is he? Of his wife they will no longer ask, Whose daughter? but Whose wife?” If he cannot control his family, what business does he have leading Nigeria?
In my darkest moments I tend to think that both alternatives are, in fact, correct. Your husband considers that the existential problems facing the nation are not hisheadache and that the best approach is to pretend they don’t exist, and in addition, he has no control over when and where you manifest your latest attack of verbal diarrhoea. Certainly he was not dumb enough in his last media chat to even insinuate that the credibility of the grieving parents in Chibok was being questioned, but one finds the complete failure of his government to lift a finger in their aid for three weeks to be baffling. When you now factor in the increasingly bold and heartless arguments of government bootlickers on social media endeavouring to prove by the most idiotic pretences at logical argument imaginable that it was impossible for almost three hundred girls to be gathered together in a school in illiterate northern Nigeria, you get the feeling that this is the kite the government has been flying from the beginning; confuse, obfuscate, delay and postpone, and hopefully Nigerians will give up their noisemaking and leave the government free to attend to more important matters.
Because, let us not forget for one moment, the magic year 2015 is almost upon us. Every minute spent strategising on security measures to protect the lives of Nigerians is a sinful diversion from the top priority of assuring re-election of party and president next year. Every kobo spent on properly kitting and motivating our military to do their job effectively in combating terrorism is a kobo subtracted from the party’s potential war-chest in the looming electoral battles ahead. Or else how would the president go dancing where he went dancing immediately after what happened to us had happened? But the president knows that these things are never admitted to directly, even to a populace as beaten-down and sectionally divided as Nigeria’s. It is you who, afflicted with a crippling lack of self-awareness, blithely voices out and confirms what the rest of us could only deduce by observing the governments body language: “If any child is missing, let the governor go and look for them. There is nothing we can do again”
You are the wife of the president, I repeat. That does not imply some coronation to rule by divine right, the granting of powers to summon government officials to be tongue-lashed on matters you know nothing about, or the right to order the arrest of a Nigerian citizen whose only real offence is embarrassing your husband, as is indeed her right and duty as a Nigerian citizen faced with monumental presidential incompetence in the face of a national crisis. I think you fundamentally misunderstand the historical importance of the ‘office of the first lady’ as originally conceived within the presidential system. It is an office whose ultimate value is a function of what you bring to it, not what you seek to extract from it. The intrinsic prestige of the office derives from what others in that position, seeking for ways of bettering humanity, have used it for as a platform to galvanise support for worthy causes and principles. Thus we recall Eva Peron with affection for what she did to help the poor in Argentina, we respect the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt for the passion and intelligence she brought to her civil rights advocacy by the side of FDR. Even Maryam Babangida, vainglorious and unscrupulous, still got plaudits for the attention she brought to the plight of rural women. Justice Titi Abubakar, the best educated of all our presidential wives, having no apparent use for the office of first lady while Gen. Abdusalam was head of State, simply went about her day job without any fuss, and won our highest regard for not turning into an uninvited nuisance. Moral suasion deriving from sterling personal example is the currency of your office. To not recognise that, and to assume that Nigerians owe you the time of day by mere virtue of being ’Mrs President’ only highlights the glaring deficiencies in
your education
.
Madam, I did not set out to be rude; it’s just that facts like this get me emotional in the same manner that your own self-conjured fantasies do you. And from the point of view of your own enlightened self-interest, you really need to hear this. You are not helping your husband at all, whatever you may think. You make him look weak. Your documented lawlessness brings the presidency into disrepute. I have never slagged anyone off for not speaking the language of our colonial masters competently, but there is a reason why interpreters are an integral part of the diplomatic service. If you spoke through an interpreter you would save yourself and us a lot of unnecessary embarrassment. But that is still the least of your problems. I wish you would sometimes consider whether what you were about to say was worth saying before saying it. I wish you even had that capacity for reflection. Because I doubt you do.
If you do, and I am wrong, the appeal I am about to make should find a listening ear. I did allude earlier on to my evaluation of you as the most important person in Nigeria. I make that assessment keeping in mind the absolute necessity of a proactive approach to leadership at any level. Your husband is temperamentally not the sort to grab a sword and slice through the Gordian knot. For good or for evil, you are. The trouble is, in you I see a lot of energy trapped within a psyche that has never been exposed to beneficial social or ethical training. I do not object to your theatrics, your tears or your tantrums. I just feel that they are misdirected. Instead of nursing an unwarranted grievance against the wife of Borno state governor, direct your diatribes at your husband’s head. Instead of making the Aso Rock press centre the platform for your insensitive bullying tactics, drag your husband by the ear into the presidential master bedroom and hit him around the head with some unpleasant home truths. Nigeria is burning madam. You are in a position to be our Esther. Let me play at being your Mordecai:
- Please tell your husband we elected Goodluck Jonathan to be president of Nigeria. We did not elect God, any of His GO’s, bishops or senior apostles. The buck stops at his table. We are sick of him pretending not to know that we look to him for guidance and leadership in this, our biggest crisis since the Civil War. We expect him to come out and rally all Nigerians across partisan, ethnic and sectarian lines against the enemies of mankind pretending to do the will of Allah. That includes all right-thinking Muslims. Perhaps his political wizards have convinced him that he only needs Christian votes to win the elections next year. It may well be, I don’t know. But I do know that unless a politician is an utterly useless human being, there must be some things on his priority list more important than the next election. The war against terrorism cannot be won by Christian southerners alone. The president should stop using church pulpits as campaign platforms and demonstrate that he understands the applicable distinctions between Boko haram, muslims, northerners and APC. The utterances of the CAN president of late have been very unhelpful, to put it mildly, and the president suffers from his perceived closeness to the CAN leadership. He can start by politely asking Pastor Oritsejafor to shut it, or publicly distance himself from the man and his words completely. We don’t need any more religious incitement than we already have in this country.
- Please tell your husband that he is the Commander in Chief of the armed forces and that a state of emergency has been declared in three north-eastern states. The unfortunate consequence as far is he is concerned is that he is the one saddled with the direct (let me repeat, direct) responsibility for ensuring the security of life and property within the zone of the emergency. Let me inform you madam, so far he has done a piss-poor job. Boko Haram has killed 1,500 this year alone and rendered half a million homeless. Last night alone, when you would think our security forces would be on red alert, Boko Haram has slaughtered at least 300 people in Gamburo Ngala. It is no use blaming the Borno state governor – he controls no troops. Your husband does. It is no use blaming APC for bombings without furnishing any proof. Your husband gets security reports. If he has any proof that any APC chieftain is sponsoring Boko Haram, let him publish the report and see what Nigerians would do to such a degenerate. Bottom line we are tired of all this buck-passing and politricking. We want action against terrorism and the ball is in your husband’s court.
- Please tell your husband that all the conflicting numbers given in the last three weeks have proved in relation to the missing girls is that our security and investigative capacity is a joke, a miserable joke. Do our police and security services not have a Standard Operating Procedure any time a crime is committed? Was the first priority not to gather all possible information about the criminals, the crime and the victims before going off half-cocked to state numbers they had to keep changing? Does our military not depend on accurate intel and logistics in order to mount effective military operations against the insurgents? If we had the most rudimentary mechanism for information sharing among our security services how could the army go on record to say it had rescued all our girls when it had rescued not a single one? You see now why I am convinced that your husband’s government was doing nothing all along? And why I am convinced that the war on terrorism cannot be won with such a rotten system? And guess who I am holding responsible for this state of affairs. Guess, madam.
- Please tell your husband that he is in the middle of an opportunity to become the greatest Nigerian ever. But he has to master the challenges facing us. If he protects the people of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa from their killers; if he demonstrates that their lives and safety means everything to him, they will show him their gratitude in ways that will shock him. Nigerians are like that. We are satisfied with very little, but it must amount to something. He must provide effective security, not the sham that sees the military go AWOL every time Boko Haram strikes, only to reappear and carry out reprisal attacks on innocent villagers in order to show they are ‘doing something’. In order to provide that security, he must as a matter of first priority conduct a complete overhaul of our security apparatus. It goes beyond sacking and replacing our service chiefs every six months. It extends to ensuring that across the board improvements in equipment, training, logistics, welfare and motivation are effected. It means your husband must change his attitude to constructive criticism. I well remember his reaction to the news report that exposed the hellish conditions at Nigeria Police College Ikeja. Rather than take the opportunity to roll some heads in the sand and stop the rot, your husband was more concerned with finding out who allowed the media such an opportunity to ‘embarrass the government.’ It seems your husband is easily embarrassed. The trouble is, he is not proactive at eliminating potential sources of embarrassment before they occur. And his unwillingness to deal with the corruption stinking under his nose right in his cabinet makes us doubtful if he is the sort to take the decisive action to make our military fit for purpose. We are observing.
- Please tell your husband that he is free to ignore this message, as indeed every message from well-meaning Nigerians calling on him to man up and stop eyeing 2015 so hungrily to the detriment of the demands of 2014. But remember this; there is no guarantee that Nigeria as we know it will still exist by this time next year if things continue as they are. It may shock him, but his personal welfare is tied to the destiny of Nigeria, for good or for evil. Your friends in the political class may spend the next few months bartering oil blocks, scamming subsidy payments, bilking our banking system and carrying on as if all is well in Nigeria. Not one of them will lift a finger to save you if a reckoning should come, and the way you are carrying on, all bets are off. Marie Antoinette told starving Parisian women who asked for bread to go and eat cake. You just virtually told the crying women of Chibok to go and eat shit. There are some cries that go directly to the throne of God. You’ve just threatened to go spiritual, so I am sure you understand me.
You know your husband better than any of us madam, so you know the secret codes that unlock his heart, soul and imagination. If he has any iota of compassion for the people of Nigeria in his heart, you are in the best position to reach in and tap into that vein of empathy. If you husband can be activated to act like a president, you are the best person to do the activating. The time to make the effort is now, madam, not tomorrow. Our enemies have already planned what they will do to us tomorrow. For all you know the target may be Aso Rock itself.
Exactly.
Please accept the sincerest expressions of my highest estimation.
Peter Oshun Esq.
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