The writer is the Managing Director/Editor-in-Chief of The Interview magazine based in Abuja, Nigeria.
ABUJA (IDN) – Whether Jean-Jacques Rousseau mis-credited the words to Marie-Antionette in Confessions or not, Nigeria is happy to supply a modern-day princess who has earned the title of Her Royal Spite-tress without controversy.
And unlike Antionette reputed to have tossed the infamous pate, “Let them eat cake”, out her window when the mass of ordinary people in France were dying for breadcrumbs, her Nigerian cousin travelled thousands of miles to find her groove.
Ebele Obiano is the wife of Willie, governor of one of Nigeria’s five south eastern states, with a long list of grievances against the Federal Government.
Let’s be clear. Anambra is not one of the basket cases in the south east, even though it has a wretched reputation for nasty politics. In the last seven years, Governor Willie Obiano, building on the solid work of his predecessor, the legendarily “stingy” Peter Obi, has managed to raise the performance of the state in competitive public examination and agriculture.
But in less than two years, a second episode of extravagant indiscretion by the governor’s wife now casts a long shadow over the legacy of the state’s first family.
The commissioned and published video of the governor’s wife sitting in the “owner’s corner” of her jeep and receiving the COVID-19 vaccine in the US while coronavirus-related deaths are spiking back home makes Antionette look like a saint.
Ebele Obiano took care to ensure her jab was not just medical tourism at its ludicrous best. It was also a calculated fashion statement. There she was ensconced in her 4X4, in brown pants and a black-sequins blouse, with a reporter on the deck to capture the historic event for posterity. It was a Nollywood moment. 
As the tape was rolling in faraway Houston, Texas, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) was reporting more COVID-19 infections back home and the number of the dead was climbing. You would think that the wife of a public official who truly has the interest of her people at heart but could do nothing to improve their safety, would, at least, do nothing to compound their misery.
It’s hardly so with government officials and their families. It’s a global plague, but somehow, Nigerian officials always manage to squeeze themselves into notoriety’s reserved list. In October, thousands of angry mobs broke into warehouses across the country to help themselves to large amounts of foodstuff and staple which could have been distributed at the height of the government-imposed lockdown but were left to rot, while huge supplies were diverted or weaponised for politics.
Anambra, where Ebele Obiano’s husband is governor, was one of the worst hit states by the “palliatives riots”. Protesters estimated at 2,000 broke into a warehouse in the state capital and, in a moment of genius lacking in the French Revolution, helped themselves to bread, noodles, grains and whatever else they could find.
If there was a vaccine strongroom anywhere in the country today, after watching the video of Ebele Obiano’s designer vaccination, distraught citizens might be obliged to ask themselves why they shouldn’t breach the storage.
Ebele Obiano is not a stranger to controversy. She once spotted a pair of crystal-studded Gucci glasses estimated by some to be worth only $2,755 or the equivalent, at current prices, of three years’ minimum wage in the country.
To be fair, the governor’s wife was wearing something much plainer than Gucci – and perhaps cheaper – on the day she took vaccination in Houston.