In the icy silence of her fate, Diezani Alison-Madueke probably rues the path she tread till she encountered misfortune. Diezani is a haunted woman. The former petroleum minister lives in dread of her next ‘best friend’ and billionaire associate that would stab her in the back.
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.
Yes, call her a painted devil but Diezani made a lot of men, turned their star-less nights to bright days, when she was in power. Beyond her two major cronies, Kola Aluko and Jide Omokore, there are so many young businessmen who made a kill under her and if permitted then, would have killed for her. Alas, life has happened. She is no longer the saviour of yore.
In fact, she is now a pariah. Those who wined and dined with her in the good days have gone into hiding not wanting to be seen or associated with her. It bears asking however where the likes of Ben Peters of Aiteo Group; Haruna Momoh, former managing director of the Pipelines and Product Marketing Company (PPMC); Tope Shonubi, the Sahara Energy head honcho; and Donald Chidi Amamgbo, hitherto a California-based lawyer who was dragged into the oil business by her cousin, the former minister – would have been if not for the beleaguered former minister.
Perhaps, mere bystanders in the corridors of affluence. It is however an irony of life that now in her darkest hours, when security agents are on her trail, these same people who benefitted immensely from her position have kept her at arm’s length as fear of being roped into her monumental fraud case has become the beginning of wisdom.
