Dear Life, what exactly do you want?

You preach one thing, you do another. You ask us to be humble, yet you allow arrogance overrun us. You teach us to be patient, yet you hand over the freshest fattest bone to the impatient. You tell us to serve only God, yet you allow those with side-gods to rule over us.

Dear Life, what exactly do you want? Our daughters and sisters who kept themselves have been waiting for Godot in the names of husbands, children, jobs. But, those who disobeyed you flagrantly and publicly -throughout their youth- emerging in the process as queens of runs and abortion, have never had to queue up for anything. They have the best of everything; the best marriages, the best children, the best jobs.

Dear Life, how well do you treat our sons and brothers who heeded your clarion call for integrity? Throughout their youth, they kept it clean, they chose not darkness: they stole nothing, they killed nobody, they destroyed nothing and nobody. Alas, as we speak, you have left them stranded; they are eking out a living serving those who unlike them disobeyed you. Why on earth do friends and princes and princesses of Life trek while enemies and slaves and such other wonky characters of Life ride on horses?

Dear Life, why is strong weak and weak strong? Why is good bad and bad good? Why do you allow the majority to successfully see the peacemaker as weak and the warmonger as strong? Why do you look away from oppression, from suppression and from all the other -sions of evil?

Dear Life, why are there no guarantees with and in you? Someone stands firm, against all odds, marries her heart instead of money as most others, toils nearly four decades but just as she settles down to enjoy her harvest, you give up her ghost? Dear Life, please, leave me alone, and for crying out loud, stop smiling: you are neither beautiful nor fair. Oh, Mummy Patience: Life, why?

Dear Life, what is all the mercy you dispense all too often if it doesn’t cover or work as well for Humble, for Obedience, for Patience, for Righteousness, for Virtue? You know far so much not to know that mercy is favouritism when it serves only the Proud, only the Sinner, only the Undeserving, only Vice, only the Wicked. Mercy should stop treating equals unequally and unequals equally. Mercy is only mercy when the poor and the rich, the righteous and the sinners are favoured on the same scale and in the same season.

Oh, Mummy Patience, how much this Mkpat Enin-born, Nsit Ubium five-star woman deserved mercy. Life, why? Named Patience, she personified the virtue to all and sundry, all the way to the very end. You never met grace and mercy and patience in one bundle or as a person if you didn’t meet Her Excellency, Pastor (Mrs.) Patience Umo Eno, wife of Akwa Ibom governor.

This writer met her four times; no, six. I can explain. The first was (during the Victor Attah governorship era when current deputy governor, Dr. Akon Eyakenyi, served as Industry, Commerce & Tourism Commissioner) at Metro Hotel, on Wellington Bassey Way, Uyo, in December 2004. Her last daughter, Ebenezer, was participating in Little Miss Akwa Ibom, a beauty pageant for children, and she had chosen to come along.

Where she sat in the large audience is where she remained throughout the six-hour event. Other mothers and guardians moved up and down, as things go in this country where parents pay for their children to have better grades. Yours sincerely was chief judge and, therefore, saw and knew everything. By the way, Hon. Itoro Etim, Ph.D., who today represents my local government area of Uruan in Akwa Ibom State House of Assembly and is chair of House Committee on Finance and Appropriation, was organiser-in-chief of that event.

Going by the way she ran her home and herself in public, it can be said that Mummy Patience was first lady long before 2023 when her husband, Pastor Umo Eno, came on as governor of Akwa Ibom State. I say that partly because when the beauty contest came down to two contestants, Ebenezer and Joy, both of them quite precocious, the movements increased. Still, Mummy Patience sat there, looking; wondering (as she told me a few days after when she again accompanied the Little Miss Akwa Ibom winner to a BUSH HOUSE NIGERIA breakfast television show on NTA 12, Uyo, AM EXPRESS XTRA) why there was so much hoopla over a children’s matter. One could not but learn self-confidence and parenting and public conduct from the matriarch.

Our third and fourth last one-on-one meetings happened in the heat of the last governorship electioneering in Akwa Ibom. I was in Eket for a private session with the then Peoples Democratic Party standard-bearer. Before I met him, I spent quite sometime with her and I can confirm she was such a conversationalist: down-to-earth, open, witty. Of course, she was right by her husband’s side during Winnie BUSH and Tyler MacIntyre’s traditional marriage on June 11, 2022, in Uyo. 

It was really great to get so up-close and personal with the woman who taught us how to noiselessly transform mockery into a brand. She it was, remember, who named her husband Golden Boy, straight from the abusive tantrums thrown by political hirelings. Our two other meetings were only near misses; starting with when Ms. Ekemini Akpakpan invited me to some early morning event in which the first lady was going to lead women on a march against, I think, gender-based violence while the second was when we were on the same flight to Abuja. On both occasions, we came so close to meeting but you and I know that nearly does not kill a bird.

When she took ill, I followed like every of her teeming well-wishers the progress of her recovery and prayerfully believed she would bounce back. Indeed, at some point I thought she had convalesced in full. Reason being that not a fortnight passed without her press secretary, Uduak Ekong, reporting she had done this or said that or donated towards one cause or the other. It was last Monday when her husband, the governor, alluded at a Banquet Hall political event to her absence, and his loneliness and the challenges and sweetness of their marriage, describing her as a special gift and a unique asset to him and their children and grandchildren that I realised all the good she was doing was from her sickbed.

Dear Life, is that the kind of woman you walk out on? Is that the sort of mother you conveniently forget her lifelong sacrifices? Is that the type of grandmother you despise her uncanny hard work? Is that the variety of Patience you elect to cut short her harvest?

I read the breaking news online about 3.20am when Diamondabasi Ama BUSH, who sleeps in the day and keeps everyone awake at night, was doing her thing. It wasn’t quite ten minutes when I saw the ad hoc statement by the state Information Boss, Comrade Ini Ememobong. Where we come from, the timeous confirmation showed that our governor is a real man. Only real men sanction the release of such quick ejaculations to shut out unnecessary oral orgasms.

A very black Friday, that was. It was sadder than the saddest we ever witnessed. The hearts of all of us in The BUSH Clan go out to His Excellency, Gov. Umo Eno, the First Family and indeed all of us in Akwa Ibom state. Oh, our Mother!

Fortunately, for saints like First Lady Patience Umo Eno, death is not the end. There’s a better life, post-death. She is with God, in that realm. That is our comfort, forever.

Dear Life, is the foregoing the reason you are so lopsided? The fact that those who are double sure of eternal life don’t necessarily need to bother about a rewarding earthly life? Well, but what’s wrong in having both for the price of one? Or, is it that beautiful earthly life is poisoned chalice?

Quarter finally, Dear Life, teach us to number our days. Teach us to fear not, to not be dismayed. Teach us to remember that the Creator’s plans and thoughts for us are of good, never of evil, and that they are all targeted at an expected end. Teach us to seek first the kingdom of God and the righteousness of God since that is the only way all other sweet things shall be added on to us.

Semi-finally, Dear Life, please ensure we never build and another inhabits. Please ensure we never cook and another eats. Please ensure we never sow and another reaps. Please ensure we live in the Lord’s house all our lives, to marvel there at the Lord’s goodness, and to obtain the Lord’s guidance.

Finally, Dear Life, whatever happens, please keep us safe in God’s Temple and make us secure on a high rock. Never allow us, in spite of and despite what or who we encounter, to confess that we are conclusively tired. Being a people of the spirit, we know that particular confession is tantamount to suicide acquiescence. Guide and guard us to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and with all our souls and with all our minds considering that the sufferings of this life are not worth comparing with the glory to be revealed to us hereafter -as Her Excellency , Pastor (Mrs.) Patience Umo Eno now knows, for sure.

God bless Nigeria!