Patience Jonathan, The Inimitable Dame!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

It is a classic case of ‘One Week, One Controversy’!  And the inimitable Dame, Mrs. Patience Jonathan, has been in the news again. She hardly disappoints. Perhaps, before your read this piece, Mrs. Jonathan would have returned from Germany where she had gone “to have some rest,” or receive medical treatment, or both, depending on whom you choose to believe between the media, opposition parties  and Aso Rock spokespersons.  Or her husband, our president, would have decided to come clean about her exact state of health and whereabouts. 

*Mrs Patience Jonathan  

(pix: onobello)

But the latter may eventually not happen. Indeed, President Goodluck Jonathan understands this game very well. So, he is not unduly perturbed by all the din saturating the polity because of what his wife chooses to do with herself or not to say about her health condition. Yes, he does not “give a damn” because he knows full well that no sooner than his wife’s plane touches down in Abuja, and she sweeps across the red carpet like the marvelous Dame that she is, than she would stumble onto another controversy which would immediately and effectively kill and bury the present one over which the media and the opposition have raised ear-splitting cries. And so life goes on. Who, for instance, is still talking about her controversial appointment as Permanent Secretary in Baylesa State or the famous purchase, (or is it donation or lending or all three?) of posh cars scandal that embarrassed us all during the African First Ladies Summit in Abuja recently.

The Return of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

When President Goodluck Jonathan appointed Dr. (Mrs.) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala Finance Minister and also named her the “Coordinating Minister of the Economy (CME),” I was greatly surprised that several Nigerians appeared to share the president’s rather lofty expectations that she was coming with fresh, workable ideas to turn the country’s ailing economy around.

*Dr. (Mrs.) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria's Minister of Finance
and Coordinating Minister of the Economy (CME)

If it were in 2003 when most Nigerians who were encountering her for the first time were unduly tantalized by the then President Olusegun Obasanjo’s lavish stress on her impressive credentials as a brilliant World Bank expert who had accepted to make the “great sacrifice” of coming here to salvage our country’s economy, their naivety and misplaced enthusiasm could easily have been forgiven.  

But what would ever remain inconceivable is how any person or group of persons could stretch optimism far beyond its malleable limits to invest such high hopes in the capabilities of a person who had served as finance minister and head of the Economic Team in a regime under which unprecedented earnings from crude oil exports had translated to further deterioration of the economy and untold suffering among the populace.  

Nigeria’s Last Virgins!

(First published Tuesday, February 6, 2007)

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye
If you are a parent or grandparent, whose children or grandchildren are enrolled in Nigerian schools, and you read this article, and decide that the current attempt by a tiny clique of clearly depraved minds within the nation’s educational system, to carefully disrobe Nigerian kids of their prized innocence and healthy mind and titillate them to perdition should not attract your unreserved indignation, conscious action, and, in fact, public outrage, then, just know that you are not qualified to answer a parent anymore. 

In fact, your children and grandchildren will certainly wake up one day to curse your memory for watching passively while some desperate fellows, for totally self-serving reasons, subjected their tender minds to vile and ungodly lessons that are carefully and solely designed to make them become animals in human skins.

*Weep Not, Child!

A couple of months ago, when I was shown the topics to be treated under the subject called “Sexuality Education” or “Sex Education” which tender children in both junior and secondary schools in Lagos State are now being forced to learn, I could not imagine that anyone outside a mental home could be wicked enough to design a subject with such insidious contents, even for the kids of his worst enemy! In fact, as I think about it now, I consider the introduction of that subject in our schools the worst case of child abuse – brazenly endorsed by the nation’s education authorities and unleashed on today’s kids like a poisonous live snake. What kind of madness is this?