Buhari is known to throw up exceptional women, home and away. When in power, his wife was exceptional for being ignored by the power vortex of his uncle, Kingibe, Malami, et al.
She was the counterfoil to an iridescent tribe of grasping intriguers and fuddy-duddies. Now, we know more. We know now that the sins of his humanitarian minister had little humanity. She didn’t display the showy vanities of Jonathan’s Diezani, who is now in a picaresque saga from country to country running away from her iniquities back home.
Buhari’s humanitarian minister is a dodger, too, if not artful enough for a suspenseful plot line. My view may be premature, though. When the pastor-led EFCC invited her, she first ignored him until she found the right excuse. She borrowed from former PDP National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh, who found refuge in a neck brace.
Soyinka mocked him in his new play, The Wheel of Justice, staged by Tunde Awosanmi, in which a Metuh’s character materializes in court on a wheel chair in the comic and burlesque glory of a neck brace.I don’t want to imagine Sadiya Farooq in a neck brace.
It would not be funny but a delinquent recast of history. The woman who was supposed to run a hospitality extravaganza for the poor already has followed the hospital line. She said she was not well enough to heed the EFCC summon. The drama is still unfolding, while another unfolds with NSIPA’s CEO Halima Shehu, who President Tinubu fired over N17 billion intercepted on its way to infamy, into unauthorized accounts.
Meanwhile, about N37b fraud charge hangs over Farooq’s head. More, we hear, is coming. It was the same woman who never had rest on false charges as Buhari’s amour until the news that she disbursed two billion naira on school feeding to students who were not in school. She never got punished for that. Perhaps that is why the corn has grown into a tree. If there is no consequence, corruption festers.
It is amazing that women should be in the news. We have rid them of their innocence. See what Farooq’s successor has done. Betta Edu cannot plead naivety. She was a commissioner in Cross River. She has just embarrassed her employer and women who see her as role model. Before we had women like Dora Akunyili and even Oby Ezekwesili, whose derailed obsession in the last polls defaced her otherwise sturdy public profile.
-The Nation
