Dame Patience Faka Jonathan (née Faka, born 25 October 1957 at Okrika, Rivers State) was Hon. First Lady from 6 May 2010 to 29 May 2015 during the presidency of Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. An Ikwerre-Ijaw woman trained as a teacher at the Rivers State College of Education (NCE, 1989) and later as a banker (Bank of the North, 1990s), she met Goodluck Jonathan at Port Harcourt in the early 1980s and married him in 1990. They have two daughters, Faith and Ariwera.
She is the most institutionally aggressive expansion of the Office of the First Lady in Nigerian history. Her tenure produced — in apparent breach of the constitutional bar on creating federal offices without National Assembly authorisation — the post of Permanent Secretary to the Office of the First Lady (held by Mrs Oyemaechi Igbokwe, 2010–15) and a parallel Aso Rock secretariat of approximately 80 staff. She ran the Women for Change & Development Initiative (W4CDI) and the African First Ladies Peace Mission as her flagship programmes, but the wider public political role she assumed — addressing PDP rallies, denouncing opposition figures, openly campaigning in 2011 and 2015 — was unprecedented.
She is the only First Lady to have appeared as a defendant in EFCC proceedings. From 2016 the EFCC traced and froze approximately US$31.4m in cash and investment-account funds linked to Mrs Jonathan, held through nominees including Mr Esther Oba and through Skye Bank, Stanbic IBTC and Ecobank corporate accounts. The Federal High Court Lagos (Justice Mojisola Olatoregun) ordered the temporary forfeiture of $15.5m in April 2018; the substantive litigation has been adjourned repeatedly through 2024. Mrs Jonathan has consistently denied wrongdoing, characterising the freezes as 'political persecution' by the Buhari administration; no criminal conviction has been recorded against her.
Since 2015 she has lived between Otuoke, Bayelsa State (the Jonathan family compound) and Asokoro, Abuja. She founded the Aridolf Jonathan Foundation Hospital at Otuoke (commissioned 2017) and the Aridolf Resort World, also at Otuoke — both reportedly funded by family money and the subject of EFCC inquiry. She remains the only First Lady to have publicly criticised both her own party (the PDP, after its 2015 loss) and her successor; her recurrent television comments on the food-and-fuel crisis under Tinubu have made her an unusual voice in retired-First-Lady politics.