Aisha: Lady after my heart

If you have a daughter, give her the best education you can afford. She will make you proud someday. If you have a wife, encourage her to be the best she can be - educationally, professionally, socially and even politically. Your investment in your wife’s fulfilment is bound to rebound on you as testament to the age-long saying, happiness was born a twin.

President Buhari’s wife, Aisha, impresses me with her common touch. She may be Nigeria’s First Lady, she may be an accomplished professional woman in her own right, but she reminds you now and again that she is just another Nigerian mother and housewife who refuses to be insulated from the frustrations fellow countrymen and women go through daily. Instead of jetting abroad at the slightest discomfiture, she opts to use the so-called State House Clinic which turns out to be, like many hospitals in Nigeria, unworthy of the name and the fat budget it gulps annually.

Mrs Buhari couldn’t have chosen a better forum than the opening of a two-day stakeholders meeting on Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child, Adolescent Health and Nutrition organised by her pet project, “Future Assured”, where all the big wigs of the health sector, including the health minister, were gathered. Mrs Buhari recounted the story of how she was told that the State House Clinic did not have an X-Ray machine which she needed. A week earlier, her daughter had been told that there was no syringe in the hospital and that she had to buy one if the prescribed injection was to be administered to her.

The captivated audience was further aghast when the president’s wife contextualised the supreme irony in a situation where construction work was going on in the State House Clinic at a time when the equipment/ facilities were dysfunctional and drugs and medicaments were non-existent: “There are a lot of construction works going on in this hospital but there is no single syringe there. What does that mean? Who will use the building? … You are building a new building and there is no equipment, no consumables in the hospital and the construction is still going on….”

Mrs Buhari had to use a private hospital when it became clear to her that the famous State House Clinic was but a white elephant. “I had to go to a hospital that was established by foreigners in and out 100 per cent. What does that mean? So I think it’s high time for us to do the right thing. If something like this can happen to me, no need for me to ask the governors’ wives what is happening in their states. This is Abuja and this is the highest seat of government and this is the Presidential Villa.”

Sad. But behind the dark cloud of the pitiable state of healthcare delivery in Nigeria of which the First Lady’s unsavoury experience at the State House Clinic was but a sample, there is a silver lining. The fact that a person as privileged as Mrs Buhari could attempt accessing healthcare locally and was able to thereby experience what every plebeian goes through on a daily basis, gives cause for hope. And the fact that she went public with her experience and boldly called for a probe of how the billions of Naira budgeted for the SHC was being expended makes me want to break into a song.

In my books, little steps matter. I followed this matter on the social media and found that majority of commentators applauded Aisha’s indignation. One intrepid commentator who confessed to being an unrepentant critic of President Buhari saluted Aisha’s forthrightness and begged her to take the issue further by relating the story to the big man “in za oza room”. Another one identified as @Ogbenidipo said, “Aisha Buhari looking at all the mediocrity and nonsense going on and she’s saying, ‘No, I won’t have that. No, cut that crap’!”

Talking seriously, I wish our ministers and other top government officials were like the First Lady. I wish they could try to access public utilities as ordinary citizens so that they can have first hand knowledge of what is going on under their watch. Now, which government official is going to expose the uniformed supplicants and blackmailers at the Arrival lounges of our international airports when all big men and women are shielded from reality?

I doff my hat to Aisha for her forthrightness. I wish many more people around the corridors of power were like her. She is a good example of the wisdom in educating our women.

THE KACHIKWU/BARU FACE-OFF

Of the myriad commentaries that trailed the reported face-off between the Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr.Ibe Kachikwu and the Managing Director of the NNPC, Dr. Maikanti Baru, I found Segun Adeniyi’s intervention quite incisive:

“I believe the president should use this crisis to remove the incentive for corruption in the national oil company and clean up the sector by investing in systems that pass the smell test. The passage of the key components of the Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) is key in that direction even as I also enjoin President Buhari to inaugurate the Procurement Council as required in the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) Act so that the Federal Executive Council (FEC) can stop awarding contracts. Incidentally, this is one of the many promises in the All Progressives Congress (APC) campaign document.”