What instantly seized my attention was the mention of “Governor’s wife”.
The reporter’s instinct in me immediately got into fine fettle.
Like the character Al Barney in James Hadley Chase’s thriller An Ear to the Ground, I became all ears in an eavesdropping manner.
The fair-complexioned well-built beautiful lady who was superintending over the gathering said to her lady mates: “We went to see Her Excellency (Mrs) Nonye Soludo.”
According to the lady, they paid a courtesy visit to the wife of Anambra State Governor, Prof Chukwuma Charles Soludo, and met her working assiduously in her farm behind the Governor’s Lodge.
“So Mr. Governor’s wife also has ugbo azu-uno (backyard farm)?” asked one of the ladies, looking somewhat startled.
“The First Lady was sweaty with work and her hands were soiled with red earth,” explained the fair lady, stressing that the Anambra First Lady applied the same level of seriousness she exhibited in her Saturday exercises as per her farm work.
There were a few gasps amongst the handful of ladies whom I could espy were members of the women’s wing of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) party.
The First Lady took out time to share with the ladies the importance of farming on any available patch of land, advising that idle hands that failed to work the land would eventually lead to mouths starved of oil.
The Governor’s wife informed the ladies to cultivate a particular health-giving seed called Mkparakata – I don’t know if I got the name right!
Then in the course of the discussion, the ladies begged the First Lady to submit their names to Governor Soludo so that they can be appointed as Special Assistants (SAs) and Senior Special Assistants (SSAs).
The fair lady telling to story of the visit stated that the First Lady pointedly told them that she can never place such a request before her husband.
The First Lady stated that her husband does not believe in dishing out political freebies, that all his attention was geared toward squeezing out any money from anywhere so that he could to develop Anambra State now that the allocation from the Federation Account was on a downward turn.
For good measure, the First Lady revealed that she was only using the car her husband bought for her before he was elected as Governor!
What struck me in the end was that the visiting ladies did not leave the Governor’s Lodge with frowning faces because they took a necessary lesson in good stead that they should be more interested in always asking to do more for Anambra State in the manner that President JF Kennedy charged Americans: “Ask not of what America can do for you, but what you can do for America.”