The First Lady of Nigeria, Aisha Buhari, has accused alleged Presidential Villa cabal chief, Mamman Daura of giving presidential orders without the knowledge of her husband, Major General Muhammadu Buhari.
Aisha, who has always been at loggerheads with the Daura family, said Mamman, the president’s nephew who lives in the Presidential Villa with his family, directed the scrapping the Office of the First Lady using a presidential spokesperson, Garba Shehu. She disclosed this in a statement she signed and sent to Daily Trust newspaper.
Major General Buhari had before his election in 2015 said he would not allow for the office of the First Lady. During Buhari’s first term in office, the presidency repeatedly referred to Aisha as the ‘wife of the president.’
However, after the president’s re-election, Aisha released a statement saying she should henceforth be referred to as the First Lady and her office as the ‘Office of the First Lady’.
Since then, the presidency has referred to her as the First Lady and Buhari has also assigned official aides to her office.
Stating that Nigeria’s development is hinged on the ability of public officials to execute their mandates professionally, and to be shining examples in their various areas of endeavour, the First Lady said it is not a good sign when officials abandoned their responsibilities and started clutching at straws.
She said, rather than face his job as spokesperson for the president, Shehu has shifted his loyalty to others who have no stake in the contract that the President signed with Nigerians on May 29, 2015, and 2019.
The First Lady also said that Shehu has presented himself to these people as a willing tool and executioner of their antics, from the corridors of power even to the level of interfering with the family affairs of the president.
“We all remember that the chief proponent appropriated to himself and his family a part of the Presidential Villa, where he stayed for almost four years and when the time came for him to leave, he orchestrated and invaded my family’s privacy through a video circulated by Mamman’s Daughter, Fatima, the public was given the impression that on arrival into the country I was locked out of the villa by Mr President,” Aisha said.
Alleging that Shehu failed to clear the air of the directive given by Daura, the first lady said the presidential spokesperson, who was privy and part of the plan and it’s execution, was shocked when he realized that she publicized her return to Nigeria in October and cleared the air on the many rumours that took over social media.
“Garba then, vented his anger on the National Television Authority (NTA) Management insisting that the media crew to my office must be sacked. He succeeded in getting them suspended for doing their job. I had to intervene to save the innocent staff from losing their means of livelihood by involving the Department of State Services (DSS) in order to ascertain roles played by key actors in the saga,” Aisha added.
Condemning his alleged disloyalty to the president, Aisha said in saner climes, Shehu would have resigned immediately after “going beyond his boundaries and powers.”
“The latest of his antics was to wage a war on the first family through an orchestrated media campaign of calumny by sponsoring pseudo accounts to write and defame my children and myself,” Aisha said.
She also said that Shehu’s misguided sense of loyalty and inability to stay true and loyal to one person or group has become apparent that all trust has broken down between him and the first family due to the many embarrassments he has caused the presidency and his family.
“We all have families to consider in our actions and therefore it is in the best interest of all concerned for Garba Shehu to take the advice of the authority, given to him sometimes in the first week of November 2019,” Aisha noted.
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