Last Thursday, the wife of the President, Mrs. Aisha Buhari, launched her book, Essentials of Beauty Therapy: A Complete Guide for Beauty Specialists, an event attended by the familiar gang of the All Progressives Congress big wigs: Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo; his wife, Dolapo; senators and state governors; distinguished and ordinary politicians. Coincidentally, the launch date also dredged deeply ugly memories for some Nigerians – the people of Chibok whose daughters were abducted two years ago; Nigerians who still remember them and care, and the girls themselves who, wherever they are, probably no longer have a sense of how much time has passed.
Mrs Buhari should be criticised for her insensitivity, launching a book on the Chibok anniversary. The idea of celebrating something as vain as “beauty” seems frivolous when compared to the harrowing experience the 219 abducted young women must be going through.
The very day Mrs Buhari was gathering a crowd of Nigerians wealthy enough to be sheltered from the ugliness that characterises the Nigerian social landscape – no light, no fuel, no money, no jobs, no joy, no hope – the United States Congress addressed the issue of the missing Chibok girls, promising they would do all they could to bring them back. You would think it is their country’s personal tragedy. In a number of places in different parts of the world, schoolchildren, politicians, artistes, and ordinary folk sent words of solidarity to Nigeria, joining hands in global humanitarianism.
Here in Nigeria? The wife of the President launched a book on “beauty therapy” before a crowd whose lives were already too privileged to ever need her book.
Perhaps, to preempt and stave off criticism of the insensitivity of timing, Mrs Buhari attached the book launch to the Chibok girls, the schoolboys murdered at Bunu Yadi, and the Internally Displaced Persons in various camps. Judging from the media reports of the event, it seems highly likely that the Chibok, Bunu Yadi, and IDP angle came as an afterthought. For, if the rather glamorous event were about these people, the theme should have been built around them; their story should not have been tangential to her book project.
Otherwise, how come the police turned the #BringBackOurGirls campaigners and Chibok parents back from Aso Rock when they staged a peaceful demonstration on Thursday? Why should the #BBOG campaigners who have kept the issue in public memory be outside the villa at an event for Chibok girls on the anniversary of their abduction? Why were the #BBOG campaigners not invited to the book launch? Why were they not part of the planning for the event? Since the money raised was meant for Chibok girls, Bunu Yadi boys’ family, and the IDPs, how come Mrs Buhari has yet to disclose the amount to the public? In the interest of transparency, why did the guests not announce the amount they were donating? What did they have to hide? Where and when does Mrs Buhari begin to disburse the money?
All that I have said is, however, secondary to this one important fact: the book launch should never have held. The decision of a sitting First Lady to launch a book is unethical, immoral, and a blatant act of corruption. One would think that the people who got to office by campaigning against the corruption that has eaten us out of house and home would stay afloat in the cesspool of power; but no, they are already plunging in headlong,
Can Mrs Buhari and her handlers honestly claim they were not bothered by the ethics of a sitting First Lady launching a book? For their equally ethically challenged followers who have argued she did nothing wrong, can they tell us how Mrs Buhari’s launching a book around her area of career specialisation – beauty therapy – is different from her predecessor, Mrs Patience Jonathan, who similarly muscled her way to the apogee of her civil service job – becoming a Permanent Secretary in the Bayelsa State Civil Service while sitting in Aso Rock?
When questioned, Mrs Jonathan said she had to take care of her career as she needed it to fall back on after their tenure expired. That manner of desperation in a First Lady would of course, result in a manoeuvring of public structures. She would indeed attain the height of her career but not because she worked her way through it. Mrs Buhari, in this case, is no different; promoting her deactivated career by writing a book to teach young people about beauty and fashion.
Mind you, this was not a hobby that preceded her husband’s tenure in office. There is no indication she was a prolific writer at some point and that she still writes because she cannot put her creative impulses on a leash. Instead, she merely showed she was another First Lady politician who cannot take the power and privilege of her office for granted. She has to bend power to accommodate her hustles. Like former President Olusegun Obasanjo who used the privilege of his position to harass a presidential library out of people, Mrs Buhari quickly gathers a crowd around herself to sell them a book they are not likely to read. She could not even wait a full year in office!
Mrs Buhari must of course know that all the people she could summon to that occasion, and all who wrapped their “agbada” around themselves to heed her call would not touch her with a pair of antiseptic gloves the very moment her husband is out of office. She, like other first ladies before her, must know these simple facts and that is why they take advantage of their office. She also probably knows that just like those who donated to Mrs Turai Yar’Adua’s N10bn cancer hospital no longer care about what became of that project once President Umaru Yar’Adua was out of power, nobody will enquire if the money raised at the book launch truly went to Chibok or the IDPs.
One only needed to take a look at the cross-section of guests – politicians, civil servants and some so-called captains of industry – and question which one of them needed a beauty book and why else they would have been present at that occasion other than mere eye service – to be seen by the Big Madam herself who can influence their lives and careers with the “Oga at the top”?
One also needed to listen to the VP’s speech at the occasion to understand that the whole event was a huge charade by sycophants. People who could not have dared to tell the First Lady hustling money out of their pockets that her action was just wrong. One can count on them smiling through it all just so they can remain in her good graces.
Mrs Buhari further said she wanted the book used in vocational schools to teach beauty to young people. Well, if she can summon people to come launch it, how hard can it be to influence placing the book in the curriculum as a compulsory read so that thousands of people can keep paying into her pockets? The Kogi State Governor, Yahaha Bello, after all promised that state governors would make the book available in all the local governments across the country. Pray, with whose money?
In all these, one wonders what the position of Buhari, the fierce anti-corruption fighter and ethicist, is on his wife’s smash and grab. On the launch date, he was far away in China but I bet he could not have been ignorant about the whole activity. Was he in any way supportive or like Pontius Pilate, he found a way to wash his hands off the whole affair? Or, did he stare outside the windows of his hotel, looked across the Chinese landscape and quietly wondered if he was not another Prophet Eli – Israel’s moral guardian who could not even sort through his own family’s conduct?
No comments:
Post a Comment