English poet, essayist,
critic, 1793, Anna Barbauld it was who said that when we carry out eyes back through the long records of our history, we see wars of plunder, wars of conquest, wars of religion, wars of pride, wars of succession, wars of idle speculation, wars of unjust interference, and hardly among them is one war of necessary self-defence in any of our essential or very important interests. Williams Ewart Gladstone also was quoted as saying that we look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessing of peace.
This power of Love, which breeds peace, was exactly what was expected of Dame Patience Jonathan, the wife of President Goodluck Jonathan, than the obverse we have been reading in many media outfits especially since 2010 when she visited Okrika and scolded Rivers Governor Chibuike Amaechi as if he was her school pupil, because of waterfront which Amaechi wanted to demolish and restructure, but our big madam said no.
The newest in the humiliating memu of some activities of Mrs Jonathan against Amaechi, was that which appeared with the caption in the newspapers: “Jonathan’s wife aborts APC leaders’ visit to Rivers”. This type of thing does not make some of us who hold women in high esteem happy and peaceful , regarding what Coretta Scott King had told us thus: “I am convinced that the women of the world, united without any regard for national or racial dimension, can become a most powerful force for international peace and brotherhood”. Does this statement about “international peace and brotherhood” concern Mrs Jonathan?
Women are life giver and promoter of peace, but the women who made many thousands of Governor Amaechi’s supporters, who hurricaned the Port Harcourt International Airport, Omagwa, on 5th November, to cheer up leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who were visiting the state, to go home disillusioned, is far from the women said to be “life giver and promoter of peace”.
The first woman to enter U.S. House of Representatives in 1917, but lost her seat in congress when she voted against entry in WWI, was Jeanette Rankin, (1880-1973). As if Rankin had Mrs Jonathan at heart, she had said” “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake”.
And, “the work of educating the world to peace is the women’s job, because men have a natural fear of being classed as cowards if they oppose war”. But is Mrs Jonathan not voting for wars with the way she is going about the politics of this country under her husband’s presidency?
In this case, men in the APC leadership opposed the ‘war’, by shifting their arrival time to the Port Harcourt airport, because Madam Jonathan was returning to Abuja after the burial of her mother, Mrs Oba, in Port Harcourt. We should be ashamed when some of our women want to prove wrong, Olive schreiner, a south African writer-feminist, 1911, as she said: “No tinsel of trumpets and flags will ultimately seduce women into the insanity of recklessly destroying life, or gild the willful taking of life with any other name than that of murder, whether it be the slaughter of the million or of one by one”.
Leo Tolstoy writes in “War and Peace” that “Nothing is so necessary for a young man as the company of intelligent women.” But are Nigerians sure if we are not missing one woman among “the company of intelligent women”, in Nigeria?
Aside politics and whoever that was perceived to be opposing Mr. President; in earnest, general Mohammadu Buhari (rtd.) and Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu who were billed to visit the Rivers State from the APC, were not just party folks, but among Nigerians leaders and stakeholders and they deserve respect as at when due. So, for Amaechi’s supporters to have been reportedly stopped at the airport roundabout on the ‘orders’ of Mrs Jonathan, was not only insulting but reminds one of what Leo Tolstoy writes in the book: “The whole world is divided for me into two parts: one is she, and there is all happiness, hope, light; the other is where she is not and there is dejection and darkness…”
Even as Mrs Jonathan may be harbouring animosities for Governor Amaechi, from news reports of his humane behaviour at the burial of the mother-in-law of President Jonathan, where Amaechi was said to have traumatized his opponents who had made frenzied efforts to do politics against him with the funeral, showed that he (Amaechi) had forgotten whatever it was that Nigerians thought was between Mrs Jonathan and him. This is how a leader should behave and not be walking with troubles everywhere as we have not stopped to experience around “her Royal Majesty”.
At the interment service of Mrs. Oba held at Okrika National Secondary School, those present said that Governor Amaechi sang and danced more than others in crowd. Chai! “This attracted thunderous ovation from surprised members of the congregation”, said a source. Whereas Mrs Jonathan’s ‘order’ was later at the airport causing what in the eyes of Leo Tolstoy sees as, “We are asleep until we fall in Love!”
Amaechi was also reported to have earlier gone to the airport, Omagwa, to welcome President Jonathan to Rivers State for the burial of his mother-in-law amongst all odds, thereby showcasing Leo Tolstoy’s comment: “Man cannot possess anything as long as he fears death.
But to him who does not fear it, everything belongs. If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know him.”
Amaechi has shown that he has the understanding as could be seen at the burial. But Madam Jonathan has to listen to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s comment: “Peace cannot be achieved though violence, it can only be attained through understanding.” Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love” advises us that, “we don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.” And, Amaechi is at peace with Mrs Jonathan and self!
In “Letters to a Young Poet” Rainer Maria Rilke counsels us to, “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart…. Live in the question.”
Governor Amaechi has proved Thomas Jefferson right by being himself in the face of daunting many made challenges. Jefferson had said: “Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.” Governor Amaechi has shown to us what is also written in “Warrior Wisdom: Ageless Wisdom for the Modern Warrior” by Bohdi Sanders.
It reads: “Never respond to an angry person with a fiery comeback, even if he deserves it… Don’t allow his anger to become your anger.”
Let Mrs Jonathan not see Presidency as the whole world, but should reason this that came from Virginia Woolf who hailed from England (1882-1941), and was also a woman like her.
Woolf said: “If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex Instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or protect either myself or my country. For, the outside will say, in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a women, my country is the whole world…”
Fereshten Gol-Mohammadi from Iran in 1983 directs people like Mrs Jonathan with this line: “If war boosts the economy of the industrial nations that own the war supplies, it smashes the economy of the nations that consume them.” Does Madam Jonathan know that there are younger ones looking up to her as their role model? Regrettably, Julinda Abu Nasr, Lebanon, 1980s, believed, “if a child grows up with the idea of violence, that you get what you can be force, what kind of world will this be?”
Odimegwu Onwumere,  Poet/Writer, resides in Rivers State.

Odimegwu Onwumere

Dame Patience Jonathan (middle), with her husband (left) and PDP National Chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, during a public function in Abuja, recently.