THE NATION
Everyone knows we are not going to pluck our first female governor like a low-hanging plum. The story of Mama Taraba, with its breathtaking drama of a near miss, only gave a hint. But no one expected that the second time, it would look like a story of Jacob and Esau, or the narrative of Leah and Rachel. That is, the cheat of a switch.
In the first story, a woman. That was Mama Taraba. She was the broken heroine of her theatre. But she was not the arbiter. The role fell to the partisan imagination of her supporters chockful of feminists, APC members and many across the country partial to the novelty of her ambition. The imagination, as arbiter, was like Rebecca, who symbolized a dangerous imagination for the ages. Like Esau, Mama Taraba had no power to change the end result. Unlike Esau, she was not cheated. But some of her followers wanted to believe so.
She fought. She lost. She sulked and moved on. Rebecca cheated Esau for her beloved Jacob. Rebecca, according to Bible scholars, was a failure because that incident of a maternal trickster led to a dysfunctional family of feud, death and fear. So, she seemed to have won in the beginning. But, at last, her efforts yielded nothing savory. So, too, it seemed Mama Taraba, Aisha Alhassan, was on her way to victory in the gubernatorial poll in Taraba State. She fired the feminists into an expectant frenzy. It became an anti-climax. In mama Taraba’s case, we had two failures. One was the failure of a partisan imagination, and Mama Taraba herself who could not muster enough numbers at the polls.
In another tale, another man would cheat the same Jacob by disguising a bride on his wedding night. He had Leah instead of the winsome Rachel. He had to wait in lust and toil for another seven years. The father of the brides was an example in the nexus of capitalism and romance.
However, the cheat in the Leah story was like the cheat in the Adamawa tale. It was a man named Laban, the father of the two girls, who cheated. Jacob was a victim of what is called a switcheroo. Rachel the pretty had to wait another seven years for the man. Leah was the interim love. But unlike the resident electoral commissioner, there was no one to hold Laban to account for foisting an unwanted damsel on a thirsty suitor.
