Let’s agree straight out of the gate that inaugurations are not the most eventful things that happen in Nigerian politics. They’re the SAED lectures of political gatherings. An outgoing governor shows up for his last day of work, a new governor shows up for his first. These inaugurations are pretty textbook stuff. But they don’t do textbook stuff in Anambra State.
Shortly after Governor Willie Obiano handed over power to his successor, Charles Soludo, at the inauguration ceremony on March 17, 2022, something shifted in the universe. Everybody was having a great, boring time until Obiano’s wife, Ebele, decided to spice things up.
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First, a little backstory
Bianca Ojukwu is a member of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), same as Governor Obiano. Her late husband, Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, was one of the party’s founding leaders and he was a presidential candidate in 2003.
Bianca has not been a great fan of the party over the past few years due to what she believes is the disrespect of Ojukwu’s legacy. She believes Obiano has been trying to wipe her late husband’s legacy from the future of the APGA. This escalated when the governor failed to attend a memorial lecture in Ojukwu’s honour in 2019. So she regularly steps on his neck in public.
Some of the bile might have something to do with the fact that she lost the party’s primary election when she contested for a Senate seat in 2018. It was a popular sentiment that she should have been gifted the ticket based on her Ojukwu association. She blamed Obiano for hijacking the process that resulted in her loss.
Bianca’s public lashings of Obiano have naturally not always sat well with Ebele. Tension has been high between both enough that there was a rumour in 2019 Ebele invoked thunder on Bianca.
In her denial of that rumour, Ebele said she’d never attack Bianca in a manner “marked by a total lack of decorum and elegance”.
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Back to the present
Bianca woke up at 3:30 a.m. on inauguration day and posted this on Facebook, “Now I know just how those Israelites felt on the day they took those tentative first steps out of the land of Egypt. Just the sheer excitement and anticipation of liberation, the long-awaited return to the promised land must have kept them awake through that night.”
The only thing you should be waking up to do at 3:30 am is to drink water, but Bianca was stirring up the discontent of Biblical proportions. We imagine she attended that inauguration with this energy:
She wasn’t even hiding it:
When Ebelechukwu left her husband’s side to where Bianca was sitting, the former First Lady is reported to have asked the ex-beauty queen what she was doing there. She might also have called her a witch according to other reports. So Bianca said:
She stood up to Ebele and delivered a violent love tap on her face:
The former First Lady tried to get her own slap in but couldn’t, so she called Bianca “ashawo”. That’s usually all the sign you need to know that someone has just lost a fight and needs to save face.
A protocol officer tried to force the media to switch off their cameras, but good thing he didn’t succeed because this is how it went down:
And that’s how you have an inauguration that stands out.
Did Ebele’s day ever get better?
There was a report back in 2014 that Ebele slapped Oby Okeke, the wife of Anambra State’s deputy governor. She denied it but her history of conflict with politicians made it hard to believe her. In addition to the fact she was seen as the instigator of the clash with Bianca, she didn’t have a lot of fans siding with her. Some have even called for the arrest of the former First Lady.
Governor Soludo has apologised for the fight between these two women. Imagine that your first act as a governor is apologising for a fight that has nothing to do with you. Bianca and Ebele did that. We don’t advocate for violence, but we look forward to more interesting inaugurations.
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