Suckless patching, static variable in .h file error (C)

Thank you for the replies @andreas85 and @Strit and sorry for the late response.
Thanks for providing the links regarding forum good practice, I will follow them the next time I use the forums.

I found what was causing the problem yesterday, After applying the patch, I forgot to remove the old config.h file. I am assuming that this prevented the generation of a new config.h file that included the changes from the applied patch.

simply :
rm config.h
and recompiling the program did the trick.