There
has been a lot of buzz around Nigeria in recent times about President
Muhammadu Buhari's fallout with his wife in the public domain. Jibrin
Ibrahim hereby lends his voice to the growing argument.
Aisha and President Buhari
There must be multiple messages embedded in Aisha Buhari’s recent
interview with the BBC. If the wife of our president felt the need to
send her husband and the nation a message through an international radio
station, the first message might be that she is concerned about a break
in transmission between the president and his people that requires
urgent response. The second message might be that there is inertia in
the pinnacle of power and citizen action is required to jumpstart the
process of governance. Thirdly, we might be hearing a call for
assistance to resolve a conjugal or family problem.
Whatever the message might be, the president’s response from Germany that: “I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room”
misses the point. My understanding is that if the president had ensured
his wife did her bachelors and masters degrees under his sponsorship
and encouraged her to open a business a long time ago, then his comments
are demeaning to his own history and actions. Thanks to Reuben Abati
and Femi Fani-Kayode, we now know that Nigerian presidents live in a
haunted house full of demons and high-level stress. If this is indeed
true, then the president’s handlers have a responsibility to draw his
attention to where the demons might be pushing him to and return him to
the path of his own virtues and high standards. I however do not believe
the issue in the Villa is demons, we might just be seeing mundane
politics at play.
The office of the “first lady” is a fascinating school that teaches
us that the power of husbands relative to their wives is often greatly
exaggerated. Former President Obasanjo had announced to the world,
following his inauguration in 1999, that he is an African man and would
have no “first lady”. When Stella Obasanjo opened her office of first
lady and all the “powerful” Obasanjo could do was to swear under him
breath and grumble, I realised immediately that like so many of us, he
had an exaggerated notion of his powers over his wife. My classmates
WhatsApp network has often discussed the theme of how many of us thought
we were the bosses in our households in the first phase of marriage
only to realise decades later that it was a combined lie we told
ourselves and our wives told us to massage our egos while they were
effectively in charge of the household.
My suspicion is that when they become the president of Nigeria, our
leaders imagine that an excellent definition of first lady would be a
Victoria Gowon model. A woman that would completely stay out of the
power game and make herself available, with smiles, to accompany the
spouses of visiting presidents for photographs and dinner. Some of our
presidents may even have preferred the Shehu Shagari (non) model in
which Nigerians never saw a spouse, or even knew whether he was married
or not. The world has since moved on and first ladyship has become part
of the dynamics of the seat of power for decades. As is well known to
specialists, one of the most effective elements of the 2015 APC
presidential campaign was when Buhari’s wife and daughters hit the
campaign trail. By putting his family on campaign, Buhari reassured
people outside his cultural zone that he was not a reactionary
conservative hiding his wife in Purdah. That he was a progressive and
open-minded Nigerian. The fact that his wife and daughters were highly
educated, intelligent and articulate boosted Buhari’s progressive image
and increased the love Nigerians from other parts of the country had for
him. It also increased the self-esteem and real power of his wife and
children.
The expansion of the powers of first ladies embarked on its
globalisation trend when a certain Hillary Clinton read her feminist
speech: “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human
rights” in Beijing on September 5, 1995. The State Department had tried
to stop her reading the speech, arguing that she was crossing the line
by raising issues that would cause diplomatic and political
controversies. She ignored the State Department, settled the matter in
the “other room” and made her speech. What was even more interesting
about Hillary Clinton as first lady was her argument that she did not
marry a politician but that she and Bill as a young couple decided to go
into politics together. She therefore rejected the role of a first lady
being one of dressing up for dinners alone. It was on that basis that
she carved out a policy domain for herself – health policy – and devoted
her energies to improving American health policy. Her position also had
negative consequences as most Americans were of the view that she was
not elected and had no right to engage directly in the policy arena.
Coming back to Nigeria, in her acceptance speech after being sworn
in as a permanent secretary in the Bayelsa State civil service in 2012,
Dame Patience Jonathan had made a passionate appeal that first ladies
should be given a constitutional role in our political system. She was
promoting the concept of “joint presidency” that Maryam Babangida had
articulated during her own reign. The week of Patience Jonathan’s
swearing in also provided the occasion for the bitter conflict between
her and the previous occupant of the position, Hajia Turai Yar’Adua over
land allocation for their “pet projects”. This is the arena of concern
we all have about the first lady syndrome when spouses of men in power
use their position for personal gratification. Over the past three
decades, the first lady phenomenon has created a dynamic in which
political space has being appropriated and used by the wives of the men
in power, for their personal aggrandisement, rather than for furthering
the interests of women and the wider society.
The 1995 Clinton speech was famous but even before that, the first
lady syndrome had hit the globalisation track following the 1992 World
Summit for the Economic Advancement of Rural Women hosted in Geneva at
the initiative of six first ladies, three of whom, Maryam Babangida,
Elizabeth Diouf and Suzanne Mubarak, were Africans. For the first time,
wives of heads of states sought to play an autonomous and co-ordinated
role in international and national politics in their capacities as
wives.
In Africa, the first “First Ladies Summit” was hosted in Yaoundé,
Cameroon, by Paul Biya’s wife, Chantal Biya, during the 1996 OAU Summit.
The communiqué of the meeting of spouses, which focused on strategies
for improving the lives of rural women, was incorporated into the
official communiqué of the OAU meeting. Nana Rawlings was the first
great African first lady. During her husband’s rule, she had no official
position in government but was all the same playing a major role in
formulating and implementing policies relating to women. The main
organisational structure that Nana Rawlings developed was the 31st
December Women’s Movement (DWM), named after the second coming to power
of her husband in 1981. The DWM was a huge organisation with a
membership of over two million members.
Nigeria is the country where the phenomenon has flourished the
most. The late Maryam Babangida was the pioneer when her husband became
president and she opened a first lady office for herself in the
presidency and became a prominent figure in Nigeria’s public life. This
would be the first time that the wife of a Nigerian head of state would
use her spousal position as a basis to play a prominent role in the
nation’s public life. In 1987, Mrs Babangida launched the Better Life
for Rural Women Programme (BLP). The wives of all senior state officials
were incorporated into the organisation. The wives of military
governors in the states became chairpersons of the state BLP and wives
of local government chairpersons acted likewise at their level. A lot of
state resources were directly channelled to the BLP.
In 1993, General Sani Abacha took over power and his wife, Mariam
Abacha occupied the office established by her predecessor. Her eldest
daughter, Zainab, then had the brilliant idea of also opening her office
of the first daughter in the Presidency. Mariam Abacha was sufficiently
confident of her powers to openly declare in a BBC interview that
although she was not taking decisions herself, ministers and even
foreign diplomats who are seeking for an appointment to see her husband
should come to see her and she has the capacity to fix their problems
(Punch, 4/11/99). In their “professional careers” as wives of army
officers, Mariam Abacha had developed an apparent rivalry with Maryam
Babangida. Having got her turn, she set out to dismantle the work of Mrs
Babangida. The BLP was dissolved and a “new” similar organisation, the
Family Support Programme (FSP) was established. A state instrument to
implement it, the Family Economic Advancement Programme, was also set in
motion and significant state funds were devoted to it. State officials
were incorporated into the structure, just as Maryam Babangida had done.
The Maryam Babangida Centre for Women and Development was taken over by
the state and renamed the Women’s Centre. Power is ephemeral. Maryam
Abacha for her own posterity established the Maryam Abacha Hospital for
Women, which was also subsequently taken over by Government and
converted into the National Hospital. When Patience Jonathan set out to
dismantle the legacy of Turai Yar’Adua, she was clearly drawing from the
rich history of that office embedded in the Villa.
There is, of course, an exception that proves the rule. Justice
Fati Abubakar, whose husband was Head of State in the one-year
interregnum following the death of Sani Abacha, consciously avoided
playing the power game. She established a real NGO, Womens’ Rights
Advancement and Protection Alternative (WRAPA). Unlike the two previous
first ladies, she started by formally registering the organisation at
the Corporate Affairs Commission and refused to use her husband’s
position to make state governors and government departments contribute
to WRAPA’s purse. WRAPA today is generally recognised as one of the most
serious and most effective non-governmental organisations fighting for
the advancement of women’s human rights in Nigeria.
The syndrome, however, returned after Mrs Abubakar. On June 24,
2003, the late Stella Obasanjo called the wives of state governors to
Abuja and publicly declared that: “There is only one First Lady in
Nigeria. Period.” (Africa Woman no 4, 2003:1). She warned them in front
of television cameras that henceforth, she alone was entitled to be
called “First Lady” and they should be addressed as governor’s wives.
When President Buhari therefore announced that he had no first lady and
Aisha is simply the president’s wife, while wives of governors were
being called first ladies, he introduced a protocol problem. In
addition, since Maryam Babangida, a first lady infrastructure exists in
the Villa with dedicated staff and offices. Even more important is the
tradition that had been established in which public officials believe,
wrongly or rightly, that the first lady can “facilitate” things. Aisha
Buhari therefore moved into a situation with a 30-year history and it
must have been difficult to stay outside that history.
I have listened carefully to the Aisha Buhari interview and there
is nothing that she said that is not common conversation in the country
today. I have myself raised many of the said issues in this column. The
problem posed was not about content but about tone and loyalty. Many
people were shocked at the idea of a wife publicly criticising her
husband. The tone is then projected into loyalty, or rather the lack of
it – that the criticism is an indication of disloyalty. The problem with
loyalty is that it is only sustained when it is mutual and goes both
ways. Her core message was that the president has not shown loyalty to
those who fought for him to get into power and the consequence might be
an internal revolt that might push the first family out of power. It
could be read therefore as a “technical” approach to ensure long-term
mutual loyalty within the party and within the family. Moving forward,
we must all continue to wish and pray that the first family has
satisfaction, longevity and happiness in conjugal and national political
life.
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- Premium Times
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