There ought to be a law prohibiting certain categories of people from obtaining higher degrees in obscure higher institutions in their localities. Even without one, there is an obvious risk for both the student and the institution.
I have covered Mrs Jonathan for years and yet did not know, until she mentioned it in her church appearance this month, that she holds a Masters degree ahead of her “PhD” degree journey, for which she chose Ignatius Ajuru University of Education.
If Mrs Jonathan genuinely earned a degree, I commend her. She put on a show to testify that she did.
To begin, she has no idea what a higher degree is about. “It’s just to keep the brain moving,” she said.
That is false. For that purpose, you read books—lots of them—but I am not sure she has ever been seen in a bookstore in Abuja or Port Harcourt.
“My children were the people who came here first,” she said in her speech. “Every Sunday, I come here to praise God.”
She did not sound like someone who had been through a strong secondary school, let alone an undergraduate programme. Of her PhD experience, she spoke about how she would sit “on the bench” to obtain her tuition. “The teacher will be teaching, I will raise my hand and ask questions because the younger ones will understand immediately, but, as a Mama, I have to ask questions three times before I understand one thing.”
She said nothing about any research efforts she may have engaged in, providing only a vague allusion to having written a doctoral dissertation.
You only have to remember that as first lady in Abuja, she claimed the job of permanent secretary in Bayelsa, depriving someone educated. Mrs. Jonathan did not say how people who have been impoverished and looted blind by two generations of politicians and their spouses are to pay high university bills with “determination.”
Nor did she disclose that before she became a beneficiary of the university, she was first its benefactor, including donating the library, which is shamelessly named after her.
There may be little surprise, then, that the institution speaks the infamous Patience Jonathan ‘English,’ writing of the facility: “The history of the library could be traced to the establishment of the College of Education in 1971…”
It would be interesting to read Mrs Jonathan’s thesis—if indeed there is one—to learn who her supervisor and doctoral dissertation committee members were, and whether she personally defended her work.
The problem is that the former First Lady was wrongly advised, perhaps by children too young to know exactly who she is, a money launderer, or where she has been.
Her early public record, as briefly summarized by the American Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in 2007, read like this:
“In 2006, [Patience Jonathan] was indicted by the national EFCC for money laundering and related offences. [She] is considered by some to be the “greediest person in Bayelsa State. She is also seen as cruel; she ordered the fiancée of a prominent Ijaw leader thrown in a detention and turned down all pleas to have her released.”
And then it got worse. In 2016, as I summarised in “The Riches of Mama Peace,” she was, as Mrs Vice-President, powerful enough to bring a bank to her home to open several bank accounts.
“What kind of person opens five accounts in one bank in one day? It is probably a silly question, but I will provide the answer: it is the kind of person who has or is expecting more money than will fit into one account!”
Do you have a BVN? Through that exercise in 2014, the EFCC froze a $15m-account which turned out to belong to Mrs. Jonathan: medical money, she called it.
And in September 2016, the EFCC froze $31.5 million in other bank accounts she owned. She went to court, affirming her ownership.
It was a different story in January 2018 after the EFCC unveiled the scope of its international investigation of Mrs. Jonathan, including two domiciliary accounts in which she had stashed $11.8m and shopped the world, including spending $36,458.40 in one day in China.
She responded with an out-of-court “amicable resolution of all cases” proposal.
One problem, as I have described here since 2008, is that Nigeria’s EFCC is a reputable organisation only on paper, on which its enabling law is inscribed.
In practice, it is the most corrupt anti-corruption organization there is. The EFCC empty “archives” are empty.
Twenty years of investigations, and yet when you search its site, there is not a single mention of one Patience Jonathan, not even the Supreme Court decision on seizing $8.4m from her in 2019. Maybe the commission did take the bait, after all.
The other problem, then, is that nearly 20 years after she introduced herself to Nigeria in the EFCC’s $13.5 money-laundering scandal, Mrs. Jonathan has returned to her soliloquy with God.
Remember that in February 2013, she testified that God brought her back to life when even her doctors in Germany had given up, that she had endured about eight surgeries within one month, and spent seven days in what was probably a coma.
“It was God himself in His infinite mercy that said I will return to Nigeria,” she said during a Thanksgiving service. “God woke me up after seven days.”
I did not believe her, but she promised, “I will [from now on] be doing things that will touch the lives of the less privileged. God gave me a second chance because I reached there [death]. He knew I had not completed the assignments He gave me, that was why I was sent back.”
Has the Patience Jonathan who pledged herself to God served God, or Mammon? Remember that many disclosures about her emerged after February 2013.
Is Patience Jonathan still greedy and cruel? Did she return any illegal funds to the Nigerian people?
She did not say what God wants her to do with the PhD, or what she has done with her “second chance” pledge, or which of Nigeria’s multitude of poor and hungry she has helped.
Only in April 2025, it emerged that as many as 15 of Mrs. Jonathan’s former domestic employees have been in detention for six years, accused of theft, reminiscent of the CFR’s characterisation of her as being very cruel.
Just imagine if Mrs. Jonathan had been thrown in jail in 2006 and left to rot there, or if someone had not spent vast sums of money in foreign hospitals one decade ago, or if God had not shown to her the very mercy she described.
Those who wish to enthrone Mrs. Jonathan, including the EFCC, can go ahead. But if someone confesses God, particularly on video, into a microphone and in a church, he knows God’s justice cannot be bought.
By Sonala Olumhense
