Like it or leave it, this is simply well outlined, well presented, well portrayed. Read it and may be you will see in between the lines and not just read in between it. I need you to see lol
Like him or hate him, no one can deny that President Goodluck Jonathan is a man that women love to love. Of course, he is not the first Nigerian head of state or president in recent history to give women very important roles in government. Military president Ibrahim Babangida thought that urban women were all over the map, so he promised rural women better life, which ironically boiled down to a glamorous office for the first lady.President Olusegun Obasanjo had a different style. A man with legendary testosterone, he had no need to make any special public statements about where he stood on the psychedelia of women empowerment. He looked for women, found and invited them and gave them very prominent roles in his government.There have been malicious stories about how Obasanjo sometimes allowed his libido get ahead of the task, but it is generally believed that once he gave his appointees a job to do, on the whole, he did not get in the way. Who can deny that the Nenadi Usmans, the Oby Ezekwesilis and the Okonjo-Iwealas first made their mark in public service under Obasanjo? Or that these women were behind the first real attempt to change the face of accountability in public finance?Jonathan wanted more for women. And he promised more. He said women would fill 35 per cent of cabinet posts and he hasn’t done badly to deliver. Either because of his emphasis on women or as a result of sheer statistical freak, a number of women in and around his government appear to have the equivalent or greater force of Jonathan’s entire cabinet combined. Even if Jonathan doesn’t make history as the first Nigerian president to hire the greatest number of women in his government, he could become the first women’s hostage-in-chief.Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission DG, Arunma Oteh, and the House of Representatives traded allegations of bribery. When the dust settled, the legislature produced a report that indicted both its own member, Herman Hembe, who was chair of the SEC committee, and Oteh. Under fire, the House of Reps removed Hembe as committee chair. Despite calls for Oteh’s removal, including outright refusal by the legislature to appropriate revenue for SEC, the president has stood by his woman.If Oteh was a test case of the president’s oedipal complex, the case of the petroleum resources minister, Diezani Allison-Madueke, is in a class by itself. I don’t know what it is about Diezani that makes her so vulnerable and so unflappable all at once. But I know she has changed a good deal from the federal transport minister who once wept publicly at the scrappy state of the Benin-Shagamu expressway.That was under the presidency of Umaru Yar’Adua. Jonathan later moved her from mines and power to petroleum, and the word out there is that the sweet smell of crude oil has dried away every tear from her eyes. Her ministry is one of the intersections in the famous Bermuda Triangle – the other two being the ministries of Aviation and Finance.On her watch, the price of oil has hardly slipped below $100 per barrel, yet the government can hardly pay its bills, while crude oil theft has reached an industrial scale. The increasingly difficult business environment is forcing international oil companies to scale back or fold up, yet the Petroleum Industry Bill, the framework that is supposed to reinvent the sector, leaves the minister with even more discretionary powers.But the woman will not leave. Even if the roads in Abuja were paved with petitions against Diezani, the president would ride them without taking notice. He has said most of the petitions are spurious and politically motivated; he’ll stand by his woman.Today, the president is doing pretty much the same for Diezani’s political cousin and aviation minister, Stella Oduah. It would be uncharitable to say she has a death wish for aviation, but each step she takes leaves you wondering if it could be otherwise. She must be very good at many other things in life, obviously including being one of the president’s most valuable fundraisers. After two plane crashes that claimed over 200 lives and a dozen near-misses in two years, I’m unable to understand why she still retains her office. Not even the scandal about two BMW cars that Oduah purchased for $1.6million (N255m) would make the president mad enough to free himself from being the women’s hostage-in-chief.How could he? The madam-in-chief, Dame Patience Faka Jonathan, has declared that Diezani and Stella are the best things to have happened to this government. Given the testy relationship, which insiders say exists between Diezani and Dame Jonathan, I’m not sure that was supposed to be a compliment. But who can dismiss the opinion of the dame or even claim ability to figure her out?One thing is sure: It’s almost impossible to even try to understand the role of gender power in this administration without paying tribute to the indomitable essence of the dame. She is President Jonathan’s defining gift to gender science; the talisman of the most durable ministers, male or female, performing or non-performing.Her extraordinary power and influence are secrets known and shared not only by many of the women in cabinet who are obviously from Mars, but also by their male colleagues from Venus who pay regular visits to the other side to be in Madam’s good books. In Jonathan’s world, Mars rules.Still On The Road To KoreaLast week, I wrote a sidepiece wondering why the heck First Lady Dame Patience Jonathan was getting an award from a South Korean university when Nigerian universities had been on strike for four months. Inside sources told me during the week that the award may be part of a “thank you” arranged by two South Korean firms – Korea Electricity Power Corporation, which recently bought the Egbin Power Plant for $450million, and the Samsung Heavy Industries, which won the $4billion Floating Production Storage Offload deal.FPSO is a special ship that produces oil offshore and transships onto a vessel, and this one promises to be a vessel with a 120-room hotel. It’s a gold field. Even though Hyundai came tops in the technical and commercial bids for the FPSO, powerful figures had swung the bid in favour of Samsung. Heads or tails, Korea wins…the local partners get the crumbs, the first lady an award and the rest of us get a whitewashed deal. What a country!
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