PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

President Yar’Adua: The Home Front

In its double issue of 2004, The Economist (December 18-31) carried an interesting article on what it called “Powerful women in Africa.” Half satirical, half serious, the article was like a history of the influence of women over the men of power in the continent.

“No modern African state”, the magazine said,

... has been ruled by a woman – to Africa’s cost say students of development. In Africa, they sigh, women bring up children, draw water, turn the earth and stir the stew, while men make merry and make war.

This, it added, was however only half the truth. The other half was that African women wielded tremendous influence over powerful African men. “Behind an African big man,” the magazine said, “has been a substantial woman.”

Since the magazine’s article, Liberia has produced the first woman president on the continent. Even then, the fact remains that most African women’s best hope of gaining power – and wealth - is to acquire it through a man.

One authoritative illustration of man as a woman’s most reliable vehicle to power is to be gleaned from a booklet by a former First Lady, Maryam, wife of military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, arguably the most powerful military head of state Nigeria has had. In the preface to the booklet, The Home Front, published in 1988, Maryam tells the probably apocryphal story of how a man thrice rejected each suitor his daughter brought home as prospective husband.

On the last trip, the girl, in desperation, asked her father why he was so impossible. To which the father reportedly replied

Can’t you fall in love with an Army Officer? All these years, I have spent so much money to send you to school and now you want to marry ordinary teachers and civil servants. Or don’t you think I should enjoy the fruits of my labour? Find an Army Officer. Anyone!

Maryam should know. She was, and probably remains, the most glamorous and the most powerful First Lady Nigeria has ever had. Not that when she married Babangida in September 1969, she knew for sure he would one day become head of state. But it certainly did not hurt her apparently latent wish to have a say in policy matters once he became president in August 1985.

Two years later, she established the famous – or infamous, depending on where you stood in the debate over the value of the office of the First Lady – Better Life for Rural Women, which critics derided as better life for ruling women on account of the ostentatious ways in which its affairs were often conducted. The organisation was also criticised for its funding initially from state coffers.

This funding prompted one of its severest critics, the activist lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi (SAN), to sue the organisation and everyone involved in it for spending public funds for private ends. Fawehinmi’s action forced the office to look elsewhere for financing its unofficial activities.

Influential and ostentatious first ladies, have not, of course, been peculiar to Africa, as The Economist acknowledged. “Imelda Marcos,” it said,

... tried to turn the Philippines into a giant shoe rack… Yet, for consistent big shopping and big ambitions in the office of the first lady, the poorest continent stands alone. In Africa, chaotic and corrupt, where proximity to power is paramount, first ladies can wield greater influence than any minister.

Examples of such powerful first ladies on the continent are legion. There was Nana Konadu Agyeman, wife of Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings, the country’s longest serving head of state. Her 31st December Women’s Movement, named after the day of her husband’s first coup in 1979, was one of the most powerful political organisations in Ghana for a long time.

There was also Cecilia Kadzamira, consort for 30 years to Malawi’s life president, Kamuzu Banda. So powerful was she, The Economist said, that she got her man to ban the popular song Cecilia by Paul Simon and Art Gerfunkel because it contained the lyrics “Cecilia, I am down on my knees / I am begging you please to come home.” And then when the man became senile, the big woman sponsored her uncle to act in his place.

Again, there was Grace, first as Robert Mugabe’s consort and secretary and eventually as his wife, as Sally, his first wife of Ghanaian origin, lay dying of kidney disease. Grace, whom The Economist described as “a creature of unsurpassing greed”, was forty years younger than Mugabe. She went on to become famous for her shopping sprees abroad as Zimbabwe’s First Lady until the economic sanctions on her country put an end to her foreign junkets.

However, to quote The Economist again, “Of all Africa’s big ladies – as with so many of the continent’s excesses – none has been bigger than Nigeria’s.”

To date, for glamour and influence – at least the image of influence – Maryam remains the First Lady to beat. A not-too-distant second was the other Mariam – spelt with an i – General Sani Abacha’s wife whose rivalry with the first Maryam was one of the worst kept secrets in Nigeria. Not long after her husband threw out the interim government Babangida cobbled together on stepping aside in August 1993 – this was in November – Maryam dismantled “Better Life,” and set up her own Family Economic Advancement Programme (FEAP).

One of her more famous acts as First Lady was to decree that the wives of state governors and local government chairmen should stop using the title, because there was enough room for only one First Lady in the country.

A second act, but this time far from harmless, was to hive off child immunisation from the Federal Ministry of Health and turn it into a parastatal that became a cash cow for first ladies until not so long ago. The most malign consequence of this was the sharp drop of child immunisation in Nigeria from 70% during Babangida’s era to less than 15% until very recently.

After Mariam, came Fatima, wife of General Abdulsalami Abubakar who ruled for only 11 months. This gave her little time to have a lock on the First Lady’s office. As the country’s most educated First Lady so far – she is a judge in the High Court of her native Niger State – she set up a modest women’s rights NGO, WRAPA, which seems to have survived beyond her role as First Lady.

WRAPA tried to get its funds from the private sector. However, even this did not seem to have impressed critics like Fawehinmi and Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, not without good reason. The way such NGOs raised funds for their activities, Soyinka once told the defunct Tempo (June 14, 2001), was essentially “a blackmail against corporate institutions, against other tiers of government which are made to kow-tow.”

The reincarnation of Olusegun Obasanjo as civilian president in May 1999 brought hope that the role of the First Lady as an interloper in public affairs would become a thing of the past. As military head of state in the late seventies, not much was known about his home front. So when he said, the second time around, that his wife, the late Stella, would not occupy the office of the First Lady, most Nigerians thought the First Lady Syndrome had happily come to a decisive end.

Their hope was soon dashed; somehow, Stella found the guts to defy her husband and not only did she assume the office, she went on to imitate Mariam, Abacha’s wife, and decree that only herself was fit to use the title of First Lady. This was regardless of the fact that her husband’s was supposed to be a democracy, not a military tyranny.

There is no doubt that first ladies have a positive role to play in any country. In any case, as the spouses of rulers, they invariably exercise influence over them for better or for worse. However, because they come to the job of First Lady not so much on merit or because they have a mandate, it is somewhat difficult to define what their roles should be.

Hillary Clinton, probably the most powerful first lady America has ever had, put her finger on it when she said in her 2003 memoirs Living History, that “There is no training manual for First Ladies. You get the job because the man you married becomes President.” Still, most people, I suspect, will agree with me that precisely because the role comes by accident rather than by design, it should be essentially social and symbolic.

Hillary would, I am sure, be the first to admit that most Americans did not see the lack of a training manual for first ladies as justification for her husband’s decision to appoint her the chair of a committee for the reform of America’s huge healthcare programme. Americans generally resented the decision even though Hillary came to her role as First Lady even more brilliant and more accomplished as a lawyer than her husband, Bill.

As he himself acknowledged in his 2004 memoirs, My Life, he knew his decision to give her the assignment and to move her office from the East Wing where the social affairs of the White House are run to the West Wing where the policy section is, was bound to provoke controversy.

As a senator for her adopted New York State and currently the leading Democratic contender for next year’s presidential race, she has since proved that she is a formidable politician in her own right. Even then, many Americans still resent her precisely because she tried to play more than a social and symbolic role as First Lady.

The lesson from these twists and turns of the First Lady Syndrome at home and abroad should be obvious to President Umaru Yar’Adua. He may have been portrayed as a radical in the cut of the late Aminu Kano, famous for his fight for the rights of the poor and of women in the conservative North, but even the late revolutionary knew his limits when it came to allowing his wives to play active political and social roles in society. Until he died, little was known about his home front.

All indications so far are that Yar’Adua’s wife, Turai, has ambitions similar to Maryam’s, Babangida’s wife. He should apply a firm brake on such ambitions for his own good and hers as well and for Nigeria’s. His wife is a pretty lady, but she does not possess the style and the sophistication to play the glamorous First Lady.

But even if she does, glamour is essentially a sexist notion and is therefore not a respectable role for a first lady to play even in liberal America and Europe. In the conservative North she comes from, glamour is simply taboo.

Again, the president’s wife does not seem to possess the literacy and linguistic flair, in English especially, to be her own spokesperson even on social issues. Any attempt to do so before she can receive appropriate training would only provoke sniggers behind her back.

For a long time now, the office of the First Lady at all three levels of government – federal, state and local government – has been widely regarded by the public as an object of abuse. In his inaugural speech, the president pledged that he will rule by example. The president can start by showing that, beginning from his home-front, he is the commander-in-chief who would not tolerate the excesses that have since been associated with the office of the wives of the country’s heads of state, governors and local government chairmen.