In 2014, Nigeria’s First Lady wept on national television. Patience Jonathan, visibly distraught, broke down in tears at a meeting convened to address the abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok. “People are dying. How can you play politics when you see your fellow human beings dying,” she said, her voice cracking under the weight of what she was watching happen to her country.
Nigeria turned it into a joke. The clip went viral as a meme. Comedians mocked her grammar, her tears, her raw emotion. For years, Patience Jonathan’s Chibok breakdown was a punchline.
Comedian Cute Abiola apologized to her on behalf of Nigerians. He said her tears and emotional pleas had been unfairly ridiculed, and added that “your tears were not weakness.” The apology came the same week children and teachers were kidnapped in Oyo State, and it hit with a weight that’s hard to ignore.
Because this time, there were no tears from the First Lady.
This week, Senator Oluremi Tinubu stood in the Old Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa in Abuja and announced she was gifting vehicles to APC women leaders in five states controlled by opposition parties. The beneficiaries: APC women leaders in Abia, Anambra, Bauchi, Osun and Oyo. She said the cars were personal gifts, and told recipients to register them in their own names and use them for party work.
Oyo State, whose APC women leader got a car that same week, was also the state where bandits had kidnapped school children and were holding them in the bush. “Women are the heartbeat of our communities. I charge every Tinubu Torchbearer to tell our story, clearly, respectfully and relentlessly,” the First Lady said at the event.
You don’t need to add anything else to see the contrast.
One First Lady called emergency meetings, mobilized women’s groups, demanded answers, and cried in public when those answers didn’t come. She was ridiculed for ten years. The other launched a re-election support group and handed out luxury cars while children from one of the beneficiary states were still missing. Up to this point, she hasn’t made any public statement on the Oyo abductions with the kind of urgency the situation calls for.
Fresh abductions continue to occur. Families are still waiting for answers. Nigeria has not solved the problem that made Patience Jonathan cry. It has simply moved on to the next version of it, with a different cast and a noticeably different emotional temperature at the top.
Cute Abiola’s apology was really an apology to all of us. We mocked a woman for caring too much. We may be learning, too late, what the alternative looks like.
