On May 15, this year, Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo State made history: He not only brought heavy weights from across the political spectrum to attend his marriage to a former Cape Verdean model, air hostess and lawyer, Miss Lara Fortes. He did what other people have not been able to do by getting his children to personally endorse his union to their new mother.
The heavyweights assembled included President Muhammadu Buhari( then president-elect), and his wife Aisha; former head-of-state, Gen Yakubu Gowon and the former governor of Cross River State, Mr Liyel Imoke. Others included Senator Bukola Saraki; former Delta State governor, Dr Emmanuel Uduaghan; Gov Abdul Aziz Yari of Zamfara; Gov Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto, then Speaker of the House of Representatatives; the All Progressives Party, APC, National Chairman, Chief John Oyegun; business moguls, Alhaji Aliko Dangote and Mr. Femi Otedola, among others.
They all retired from the wedding reception at Oshiomhole’s village marriage registry at Iyamho to his private residence in Etsako West Local Government home. In deed, bringing a delectable former beauty queen, who is also a lawyer, to Government House was not the only piece of history the former president of the Nigerian Labour Congress made that fateful day. The other aspect of history he made, by doing these, was effectively deconstructing the Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), which is a universally-accepted theory in clinical phsychology. According to the PAS, which is a controversial diagnosis that is often applicable in custody litigation, children often resist the idea of either parent re-marrying for a host of reasons, including persisting hurt from the loss of either parent, either through death or divorce. But in Oshiomhole’s case, however, re-marriage was not imposed by divorce but by death of his first wife, Clara, in September, 2010, no thanks to cancer. On hand to re-inforce the deconstruction of this popular theory were some of the populist governor’s older children (Steve, Jane and Adams as well as two grand-childfren).
They not only attended the wedding of their father and grand-father, but also endorsed his choice of someone not too far outside their generation as their new mother; someone whom the affable governor described as ‘mother of the house’. A legion of reasons exist why children either resist or may be antagonistic to the idea of either a new step-father or mother, according to Dr, Richard Adebayo, the Consultant Psychiatrist and clinical psychologist with the Neuro-Psychiatric Hospital, Yaba, Lagos. According to him, while resentment of the idea might be general to most off-springs, a majority might anchor their resentment on the fact that the woman their father, for instance, wants to marry falls within their age-bracket.
Those within this category, he said, might anchor their resentment on the fact that because the new woman is within their age bracket, she might eventually become pre-occupied with bearing children of her own, thus subordinating the primary responsibility of attending to the father’s needs which was the rationale for her coming into the family in the first instance. Providing a theoretical framework for why different women contract marriage with men across different age spectrums, he said that while some might prefer older men based on the preconception that because they are older and must necessarily be more experience and caring, others might do so out of desperation because they might have gone past the age that society demands that any self-respecting woman ought to have been married.
‘There are women who believe that an older man is more matured, hence more caring and reliable and if this type of woman has gone past the age that she feels that society might have set for her to do so, she is more likely to settle for an older man, even if the possibility of such an older man abusing her eventually has not been discountenanced’, he said. Dangling an even greater incentive for a younger woman to marry an older man, Dr Adeboye said that such a scenario was even stronger in a depressed economy like ours where older and better-established men are considered better investments.
He emphasized that although the economic factor in marriage can not be discountenanced, especially in a depressed economy like ours, ‘the reasons why different women go into marriage vary from one woman to another’. For Gov Oshiomhole who is in his 60s and his new wife about 35 years old, the allure, certainly, must have transcended economic reasons because, as a lawyer and former beauty queen, she had everything going for her to eliminate desperation as the primary motive. Fofr one thing, the populist governor himself alluded to this when he described her as the ‘mother of the house, very humble and understands my weaknesses’.
If indeed, the smashing former beauty queen ‘has accepted to be the mother of my children and they are at home with her’, even to the extent of being physically present at the re-marriage of their father, five years after their mother, Clara, died of cancer, then indeed Gov Oshiomhole may have, conclusively, smashed the parental alienation syndrome.
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