Today, I am dedicating our personality page to one of our own, and a onetime Nigeria’s First Lady, Mrs Maryam Babangida.
It is difficult for me to describe her in words, as she was a woman of many faces. She was so many things to so many people. With her captivating, simple, yet elegant dress sense, she was passionate about women and her pet project – “Better Life For Rural Women”.
Permit me, if I’m going to create a “look” for such an empowering woman, a great Amazon and a woman of high sense of humility, who, in her life time, desired a decent Nigerian society.
But sadly, death came knocking. She died in December 2009 at the age of 61. To many, it was the passing of a great Amazon, as she was reputed for using her influence and position to fight for a better life for Nigerian rural women.
She did her primary school education in Asaba. Her parents were Hajiya Asabe Halima Mohammed, from present Niger State, and Leonard Nwanonye Okogwu, from Asaba. She later relocated to Kaduna, where she attended Queen Amina’s College, Kaduna for her secondary education, and later graduated as a Secretary at the Federal Training Center, Kaduna. Thereafter, she obtained a Diploma in Secretarial Studies from La Salle Extension University (Chicago, Illinois) and a Certificate in Computer Science from the NCR Institute in Lagos.
Maryam was the wife of General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, who was Nigeria’s Head of State from 1985 to 1993 and was credited with creating the position of First Lady of Nigeria.
She launched many programmes to improve the life of women. Most importantly, the “Maryam Phenomenon” became a celebrity and “an icon of beauty, fashion and style”, which she retained after her husband’s exit from power.
It would be recalled that, after her husband became Chief of Army Staff in 1983, Maryam Babangida became President of the Nigerian Army Officers Wives Association (NAOWA). She was active in this role, launching schools, clinics, women’s training centres and child daycare centers. Her hobbies were gardening, interior decoration, music, squash, badminton, collecting birds, philanthropic activities and reading.
As First Lady of Nigeria between 1985 and 1993, she turned the ceremonial post into a champion for women’s rural development, founded the Better Life Programme for Rural Women in 1987, which launched many co-operatives, cottage industries, farms and gardens, shops and markets, women’s centres and social welfare programs.
The Maryam Babangida National Centre for Women’s Development was established in 1993 for research, training, and to mobilize women towards self-emancipation.
Also to her credit, she championed women issues vigorously, reaching out to the First Ladies of other African countries to emphasize the effective role they can play in improving the lives of their people.
Her book, Home Front: Nigerian Army Officers and Their Wives, published in 1988, emphasized the value of the work that women perform in the home in support of their husbands.
Working with the National Council for Women’s Societies (NCWS), she had significant influence, helping to gain support for programmes such as the unpopular SFEM (Special Foreign Exchange Market) programme to cut subsidies, and to devalue and fix the currency. She also established a glamorous persona.
Talking about the opening of the seven-day Better Life Fair in 1990, one journalist once said, “She was like a Roman empress on a throne, regal and resplendent in a stone-studded flowing outfit that defied description…” Women responded to her as a role model, and her appeal lasted long after her husband left office.
Painfully, this great and illustrious daughter of Asaba was snatched away by the cold hands of death on December 27 2009, in her hospital bed at the University of California (UCLA) Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles over complications arising from terminal Ovarian Cancer. Her husband, we were told, was at her side as she died.
On March 19, 2020, former Delta State Governor, Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa, accompanied by former Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal immortalised the memories of Maryam Babangida by commissioning the Maryam Babangida Way in Delta State capital, Asaba.
Immortalising her name that way was indeed a commendable initiative by the then-Governor Okowa administration, as many saw it as a way of honouring and appreciating a worthy daughter of Asaba, the now Delta State capital. He husband was in office as the Head of State and Commander-In-Chief when Delta State was created, with its capital in Asaba, where she came from. It was, indeed, a most commendable and befitting way for that administration to have honoured and immortalised a worthy daughter of the soil.
The Times of Nigeria once reported on her death that she was “considered to be one of the greatest women in Africa today”.
