Mrs. Patience Jonathan

The All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Organisation on Wednesday described the wife of the President, Dame Patience Jonathan as “an incredibly crude woman.” The party also commended Nigerians for putting up with her.

The campaign organisation was reacting to a report that Mrs. Jonathan described the APC Presidential candidate, Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), as brain dead at a campaign rally in Lokoja, the Kogi State capital, on Tuesday.

The President’s wife also warned women against voting for Buhari because, according to her, the APC presidential candidate would put women in purdah and trample on their rights.

Patience had added that old people might not reason very well because of their ageing mind.

She said, “Vote for my husband, Jonathan. Do not vote for Buhari. He is an old man. People, when they become old, may not reason well and their brain may even be dead.”

But in a statement signed by the APC’s campaign’s Director of Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, in Abuja on Wednesday, the party said the President’s wife was insultive.

Shehu stated, “It is not only insulting for Mrs. Jonathan to describe Buhari as “brain-dead, it is also demeaning of her status as the President’s wife to speak in the manner with which she did.”

The APC campaign urged President Jonathan to caution his wife.

Shehu said it was “discourteous and inexcusable for a wife of any President with a modicum of decency to make such a false and infantile pronouncement about the health status of another man on account of politics.”

The APCPCO recalled that in recent times, Mrs. Jonathan had made statements “invoking violence like she did in Calabar over the weekend, when she urged the PDP supporters to stone all those canvassing for change.”

Shehu stressed that it was below the standard of a wife of a President to stoop so low to call for violent attacks against members of the opposition.

The statement noted that while a good number of Nigerians were not taken by surprise by Mrs. Jonathan’s “incredulous pronouncements, it is important for her husband to put her in bridles in the spirit of the Abuja Peace Accord.”

The statement partly read, “The APCPCO similarly observed that much as indecent and disgraceful as the outbursts of Mrs. Jonathan was in an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of Nigerians about her husband’s incompetence to lead the country, it is typical of the PDP’s modus operandi to confuse Nigerians with mundane issues instead of the issues of corruption, for which her husband has achieved an unbeaten record; his appalling lack of capacity to secure life and property of citizens and a glaring incompetence in dealing with the challenges facing the country.”