The freestyle ravenous slap that punctuated the inauguration of Prof. Chukwuma Soludo as the governor of Anambra State last Thursday has all the trappings of a slapstick. In dramatic literature, slapstick is a boisterous form of comedy marked by chases, collisions, clumsiness and embarrassing events. It is characterized by broad humour, absurd situations and exaggerated physical activity that exceeds the boundaries of normalcy. Slapstick is ultimately violent in action.

On that day, normalcy took flight. Ebelechukwu, the wife of Willie Obiano whose tenure as the governor of Anambra State ended that morning, flew off the handle. The drama she enacted bore all the imprint of a chase, a collision and an embarrassment. In her predatory display, she went in pursuit of her prey. A collision had to occur in the process, and an embarrassment took place. All this happened with the speed of light. Many were stunned by the suddenness of it all. In the end, she left the distinguished audience that had come to witness Soludo’s swearing-in ceremony perplexed.

She respected neither marriage nor office. Royalty or authority of any sort did not matter to her. She was a one-woman riot squad. Her mission was to embarrass and ridicule Bianca, the wife of the Biafran warlord, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu. In the frenzy that took the better part of her, she embarked upon a disruptive course. The setting reeked with absurdity, the variety that you would consider most unbecoming of a woman of her stature. The outcome was the violence that ensued. In fact, if Ebelechukwu’s boisterousness was not brought under check by Bianca, the absurd drama would have graduated to a full-blown physical comedy. She wanted to enact a ‘Faction of Fools’ before the very eyes of the watching world. She was out for a drag-out fight. She wanted to tar Bianca with a paint brush and by so doing diminish her image and stature. Her action was premeditated but ill-thought-out. That was why it boomeranged. Now she has her indiscretion to contend with.

But what was it that played out in Awka? The story is that of a certain First Lady called Ebelechukwu. Those who had or did not have anything to do with Anambra State during the eight-year reign of Obiano as governor know a lot about this woman. She was said to be brash, brusque and uncouth. Civilized conduct was alien to her. She had no abiding standards and maintained none. She was one who would not shy away from a street fight. As a matter of fact, the street was said to be her forte. Her First Ladyship mattered nothing. Those who addressed her as Her Excellency were merely dressing her in borrowed robes. She cared nothing about excellence and did not aspire to anything close to it. Stories had it that she was such a horror to the lowly placed and the high and mighty. Those who must have anything to do with her in order to survive in government endured her like a crown of thorns and her husband, the governor, in his helplessness, carried her like a cross.

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While her husband was in the saddle, Ebelechukwu may have come to see herself as invincible, an impregnable concrete fortress. She could demolish strongholds. She cowed everybody around her to the point of stupor. She was the mistress of her environment. This was the mentality that drove her into the impudence that she enacted on March 17. With this disposition of a conquistador, Ebelechukwu could not understand how Bianca, her implacable foe, could grace the occasion that brought them together. To her, Bianca, by stepping into Government House, her special reserved area, had dared her to a combat. She felt scorned and would not fight shy. Then she had to display in words and action that truly “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

If Ebelechukwu were not the goddess of Anambra State during her husband’s reign as governor, something would have restrained her to act with decorum. But she had been acting all along without a restraining influence. That was why she went loose in public. She was completely oblivious of her husband’s presence. It did not matter, because it never really mattered, how her husband would feel about her embarrassing conduct. The man has been living with such oddity. It has become an accepted way of life in their home, in the office and in public. That is the extent to which some women have shoved their husbands aside and have become masters unto themselves. In fact, if Ebelechukwu had any modicum of respect for her husband, she would have restrained herself from such a shameful public display. If she was not deluded by an expired sense of entitlement, she would have remembered that she was no longer the First Lady of Anambra State by the time she threw caution to the wind. That realisation alone would have sobered her somewhat. But she had no such consideration. It did not matter to her what creating a scene would amount to. What would it really matter? Has she not been having her way all along?

But she was unlucky this time. Her nemesis was Bianca. A beauty queen, urbane, suave and cosmopolitan, Bianca was not one of those women she could ride roughshod over. Apart from her personal attributes, Bianca is the wife of the most revered Igbo man, dead or alive. Therefore, an affront on Bianca would naturally touch the raw nerves of most Igbo people. Ebelechukwu did not consider this. That was why she got it all wrong. If her husband were not already used to disgraceful conducts of hers such as the one we are talking about here, I would have said that he must have been embarrassed by his wife’s untoward display. But he must have become accustomed to such odiousness.

Ebelechukwu’s impudent behaviour says a lot about the warped sense of liberation that some Nigerian women are parading. A good many of them who know next to nothing about the history of women liberation in civilized climes have come up with their own ideas of how not to be dominated by the menfolk. Their lack of appreciation of the stabilizing role of women in various homes has led the misguided ones into grave errors. It is obvious that the likes of Ebelechukwu belong to the myopic group that hardly sees the environment they operate in clearly. If she were not suffering from a false sense self, she would have known when to apply the brakes. Regrettably, her indiscretion has led her into an error for all time. What a way to end up after eight years of operating with a Maginot line mentality.