WHY IT IS DIFFICULT FOR ME TO RE-MARRY – OSHIOMHOLE

Why have you not remarried since you
lost your wife?

I wish you would have avoided the
question because really when I talk about my late wife, people may not
understand why? You are in a position to judge whether to agree or disagree.
When a man in my own case has the privilege of being elected as a state governor
or president, your wife’s status changes automatically to the first lady of the
state or the country with all the glamour that goes with it.

 To have the kind of wife I had, who
was familiar with all the police stations in Kaduna and outside, and sometimes
searching for her husband who might have gone to work and detained by Police on
account of trade union work, it was her lot to stand by me and she bore all the
deprivations of a husband you were never sure where he was going to be at the
next minute. At a point, she called me an absentee husband.

In one interview she said ‘I have
donated my husband to the Nigerian workers’, so she went through all that pain
and the day we were inaugurated is usually the day where women put on their
very best, befitting a stature of the first lady of a state. But  on that
occasion, we discussed how to appear  because we didn’t have the
opportunity of long planning.  I was declared on the 11th as the winner of
the election and was to be sworn in on the 12th.

So I said to her, I can’t change my
identity now because I have been a worker and have used khaki as a factory
worker and President of the NLC, and I don’t want to look different and she
agreed. Rather than going to buy lace, she opted to wear the same khaki, except
that my own was better sown than hers because the woman who made her own was
not used to sowing khaki for women.

So I looked around and imagined that
she should have been by my side today to share the joy of my 5th year
anniversary. If you come from my background, any woman who agrees to marry a
man who is not rich, a man who alternates between police stations and cells and
lives in a one or two bedroom apartment, that is your real love.  When my
wife said I love you, it was from her heart.

I just imagined how she would have
felt seeing all these people. The only worry she  ever had was  who
was going to employ our children owing to my agitations with big
establishments, because as an organized labour, when we leave the NLC,  we
fear that our lives would be lonely because it would be a payback time for all
those big people I have harassed in the course of my work. So, it would have
been joyous for her to see that five years down the road , I have more people
around me than I have before.

Her second fear was that she never
approved my involvement in politics because she was very proud to be referred
to as the wife of Oshiomhole because then she gets all the favour and saw the
affection because most Nigerians were happy with my stewardship at the NLC.

She was worried that once I get into
politics, I would be ridiculed and all of that would go. She felt I should keep
the name. But I told her even before I went into the NLC. NLC was a write off
as military apologists, the human rights community distanced themselves from
the NLC and I said you can always chose how you want to be remembered; that I’m
going into politics to redefine and demystify governance and reconnect with the
very ordinary people and politics offers that platform for anyone who believes
the ordinary man deserves a better deal.

So for all that and for many other
reasons, that is one thing that I regret that she should have been there to
also see the other side of life. I have seen it all, in this state now, they
are people who  will call me the oppressor and you know who they are, the
oppressors of yesterday.

If you ask ‘Mr fix it’ who I am, he
will tell you I’m oppressing him because I have de-fixed him. It would have
been nice for my wife to see life’s full circle; that those guys who feasted on
us and cheated, that we have reduced them to political vegetables and placed
them on permanent political oxygen.