By Demola Olarenwaju
© CC BY-NC-ND 2014This is the article I promised in my last post here which was last week titled Demola Today – The Simple Reason Fayemi Lost And Fayose Won And Why I Predicted It. My aim in this piece is not to castigate His Excellency the Governor of Ekiti State or his wife, Erelu Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi (or Erelu Bisi Fayemi as she is now called) or claim that she is the sole reason he lost the election but to draw out lessons as always for future political couples who find themselves in power. I went to Ekiti state last week Friday and incidentally, the okada guy who took me to the place I intended to stay mentioned Fayemi’s wife as one of the reasons he lost the election.
A man’s wife is an extension of the man himself so we cannot really hold a woman responsible for her husband’s defeat since all that she is emanates from all that he is or has put in her (as with every rule, there are exceptions). Formed from his ribs, one of the first duties of a man is to erase the imprints of other men from his woman. In addition to this, a woman must know a man more than he knows himself – must know his strengths, weaknesses and limitations better than he himself understands and nowhere is this more played out than in the area of public office and the political process that leads to it. A woman must see a man as he sees himself but also as the world sees him and help to bring that gap. She must clearly understand his life blueprint and see how she fits into it towards helping him to achieve it. They say beside (or behind) every successful man is a woman but sometimes, she needs to stay in the shadows and let him be the obvious head of the family even if she is the heart that keeps everything going…
With the Fayemis, it was never clear who the governor was and anyone with half a knowledge of goings-on in the Ekiti Government house could see this. Dr. Kayode Fayemi himself once said – “I’ll like to say that she is a quiet pillar behind the scene but definitely she is not passive and she is not a silent supporter either. She is very active, to some people too active to a fault. But I genuinely feel that not only has Ekiti got two for the price of one but that they are not even sure sometimes who is governor”. Great words spoken in appreciation of the femininity that has kept the world together for so long but when people are confused as to who the governor is between a husband and the wife, it may do the husband in eventually.
People like their leader to be accessible to them and there are even some things that some will not say in the presence of the wife of the leader (if the leader is a man). A woman’s insistence on being present at all meetings does not always help. I worked with a political couple once and noticed that anytime we went for a political meeting where his wife was absent, the women felt much freer to hug and hold him and flock around him but when she was, they maintained a respectable distance (this is the reality of politics in our society). A woman married to a public officer must step back from playing the role of mother-hen and understand that she shares her husband with the public from that point forward. Erelu Bisi Fayemi (by her own admission in an interview with The Sun Newspaper) was the one who determined who saw her husband outside official hours and had to cope with decisions of ‘who to serve a bottle of coke and who to serve a bottle of wine’.
Only little is known of Mrs Feyisetan Fayose – she carries no title, often wears simple Ankara outfits smartly sewn and does not wear earring – not your posh image of a first lady but in a state like Ekiti where many voters are largely rural dwellers and very traditional in outlook, this resonates powerfully. Her husband is known as less than a gentleman but she softens that image. I was a student leader in the University of Ado-Ekiti when we heard of how she’d seen a vision that her husband would be sent packing from the government house – it came to pass. In December 2012, she publicly said that her husband would return to power and then in January this year when Ayo Fayose was yet to win the PDP primaries ticket and many analysts still saw him as a clown, she gathered a mammoth crowd of women at his campaign office in Ado-Ekiti and said: “I am not a politician but a woman that believes in God. As the Lord liveth, I have simply come to announce to you and any other doubting Thomases of the inevitable return and restoration of my husband, Mr. Ayodele Fayose, to his seat as the next governor of Ekiti State. By the special grace of God, his return is certain and so destined. I am telling you that nothing can stop it. Ayo Fayose is a man with fierce outlook, but with a good heart”.
With a wife speaking so powerfully in public and with obvious depth of spiritual conviction that cannot come from the physical realm, any man will go to the ends of the earth to prove himself worthy of her proclamation. A woman has a legitimate spiritual right to see what the future holds for her husband especially if he is a political leader. I once heard of a woman whose husband fell in love with another man and moved out of his house with her to live with his gay partner. The wife stood on the marriage covenant they had and for six months kept calling the man to come back: he finally returned to her and their kids.
A woman can make or mar a man – that much is clear, but a political wife can be either an asset or a liability to her husband. Bisi Fayemi is an invaluable asset to her husband – she brings much to the table in terms of intellectual conversation and so on – a partnership of two great minds but in Ekiti, they both found it difficult to connect with the people. Bola Tinubu isn’t the most handsome man in town but his wife’s good looks only make him look better. Bisi Fayemi is a good first lady – better than many but in terms of political campaigns, her image worsened her husband’s and became almost a confirmation that the man is haughty and out of touch with the people, whereas, Feyi Fayose’s image enhanced her husband’s image of a man with simple tastes – just like the common man on the streets.
Women should have a life of their own but the lives of some men do not always permit this. A politician’s wife, a Pastor’s wife and an artiste’s wife can rarely have their own lives. The idea of a power couple was quite attractive to me at some point but I quickly saw it for what it would turn out to be – competing egos, public perception rubbing off on each other (negatively more often than positively), both vying for the spotlight and persistent insecurity that one person’s public exposure may lead them to cheat on the other. Knowing this and my desire to attain public office at some point in my life played a crucial role in my choice of a wife. Whether she’ll be an asset in public office is another matter entirely – especially as she refused to see anything bad in Bisi Fayemi holding a week long birthday where she invited a Nobel Laureate to deliver her birthday lecture. This may not be bad in itself but the problem with governance in Nigeria is that any display of ostentation is assumed to be an indication that one is embezzling funds so Chubby Cheeks, please beware.
I extolled the electoral value of a woman like Dame Patience Jonathan in this article and also in this one but I also talked about the political strength of a woman like Michelle Obama in this one, and this one then asked Gilda Amata to go and make her own Obama in this article. Both Dame Jonathan and Michelle Obama are clearly different in mannerisms yet are of political value to their husbands. Gilda Amata of course is the woman who wants to steal the man some woman has laboured to build. If you’re married to a politician or a future politician, you should read all those articles and share this one with your friends on social networks.
