Diezani Alison-Madueke turns 55 today

In the icy silence of her fate, Diezani Alison-Madueke probably rues the path she tread till she encountered misfortune. She is celebrating her birthday today without the customary pomp and exaggerated show of goodwill she enjoyed back when she was Minister.
As she is celebrating her 55th birthday, the gravity of her fall from grace to scorched earth would become even more pronounced. Unlike the past, her birthday will be markedly drab and shorn of the congratulatory adverts usually paid for in major newspapers by many of her underlings, business associates and lobbyists perpetually seeking her audience over one favour or the other. Hence when she opens many major newspapers, the pages will be bare of imposing pictures of her and accompanying well wishes.
She won’t see profuse eulogies describing her as ‘a woman of substance’, ‘a woman of distinction’, ‘the amazon of the Oil Sector’ and many other superfluous plaudits that erstwhile made her day on her previous birthdays.
As she grapples with the sad reality of her fall from grace to grass, Diezani cuts the pitiful portrait of a woman whose days are blighted by betrayal and her nights are chilled by a gale of everlasting nightmares.
Unlike fictional Brutus, the former petroleum minister need not wait for the cock to crow before she experiences the lacerating slash of treachery; some of her business associates and friends whom she helped turn into billionaire oil magnates, brazenly flaunt and flash their deadly daggers stained with her blood, before her very eyes and the full glare of the world. Diezani’s friends have betrayed her.
They have cast morality and decency to the winds to enact lethal deeds of treachery and deceit against the woman variously regarded as their benefactor and mastermind of their fortune.
This radical turn in the fortunes of the former petroleum minister has become the stuff of random gossip in Nigeria’s political circles as not a few people are eager to see how it will end for the erstwhile petroleum minister. Considering the way that her closest friends, associates and subordinates deserted her in the wake of her arrest and ongoing prosecution in the United Kingdom, the end looks nigh for Diezani Alison-Madueke.
However, in a sad contradiction to the sycophancy and goodwill she enjoyed while she served as Nigeria’s petroleum minister, Diezani has attracted no heartfelt or pretentious outpouring of goodwill. Her phones are no longer buzzing like high-pitched alarums. There is no retinue of aides , special advisers, lobbyists and powerbrokers at her beck and call. Diezani is no longer the quintessential or circumstantial love object of the political upper class. More interestingly, her gang of associates and self-confessed loyalists has depleted drastically.
Now, Diezani understands the actual difference between being everybody’s darling and a social pariah of sort. The last two months have been tumultuous for the beautiful woman who held sway in the Nigerian oil sector until very recently.
Diezani has finally come to terms with the cold, bitter truth that, it’s not actually her person that commanded the generous love and affection she enjoyed but her office.
Back when she sat atop Nigeria’s ministry of petroleum, Diezani was an enigma of sort. Sources within the immediate past administration revealed that by her sass and unrivalled wiles, Diezani won the heart of former President Goodluck Jonathan and subsequently turned him into her parlour pet; she got him to wag his tail in utter submission to her wildest whim, according to the sources.
Diezani allegedly exploited her position to amass great fortune for herself, her close friends and associates, often at the nation’s expense. She reportedly wielded money like a utility weapon, sometimes, like a hideous cloak, and often like a carving knife. Thus she became terror to the most daring of men. She could make or ruin a man and his business with an imperceptible smile. Yes, Diezani was as scary as that.