Diezani’s Bra

SAM OMATSEYE

Few think it. No, many imagine it. Her bra, on or off. For a woman whose brand keeps shifting bragging rights, her bra will be hard to change.

Former oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke will not leave us alone. We pitied a photo of her pruned-down cancer image. We heard of her job in the Caribbean. And, who can forget her visage giving a virtual airhead talk to young people as a model. Since leaving office, she has gone full circle in the public eye. Pain. Gain. Vain.

We first wept with her, or pretended to weep with her on Ore highway as works minister. She was the pretty, naïve lady of performance.

When she left office, former Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole said John Kerry told him and others on Buhari’s visit to Obama that the woman had about six billion dollars stashed away in the U.S. banks.

Now some say part of it was to decorate her globular torso. A bosom that conquered boys when she was young and played cow, entrapping and suckling babies. Her boudoir is now bouquet for every eye.

With her bra up for auction, it reads like a surreal work of fiction, like something out of Genet, or Beckett or Ionesco. Imagine the day the bras go on the block, and we see men and women line up to name their bids and nip their libidos. It will make a complete picture to frame in the background. A big photo of the woman or the video of her striding about in her glorious gusto as a minister.

She failed her fellow women and society. Feminists like Betty Friedan, Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Caddy Stanton wanted men to view them outside their physical charms. Decades ago, in New York, some women created what was called “Freedom Trash Can.” They tossed away emblems of femininity like makeup, girdles, corsets, false eyelashes, hairsprays, and yes, especially bras. Some designated them “the bra-burning feminists.” They were protesting a Miss America pageant for making women just about looks. Such a phenom inspired Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Edible Woman.

When the US nationalists were duelling Britain and asked fellow citizens to shun their imports, Benjamin Franklin arrived home to see his wife with trinkets, necklaces and other jewels from England, and he exclaimed, “Alas it is by the luxury and vanity of women that empires decay.” He might have exaggerated but not with Diezani’s bra. It has tossed the internet into a storm of permutations as to their cost. She has company – Imedla Marcos, Maria Antionette,travelling Fergie, Princess Anne, Herod’s wife, et al.

She was not covering her breasts. Her chest was a tenant to an ornament that can tar roads, build schools and buy millions in baby formula for starving families.

It has been a bad few weeks for women. While one does not know how to bare it all in a cruise, another does not know what to wear or how. What a country.

– Omatseye, a respected columnist, writes for The Nation