After some time away from this space for reasons beyond my control, I am happy to announce that I am back. Of course, so many things naturally happened in my absence, including the good the bad and the ugly. That is to say, since I’ve been away, so much water must have passed through the bridge, as the saying goes.
In local parlance, we will simply say they all happened ‘in your very before.’ So, I am not going to bore you with all those issues you may all have witnessed, firsthand.
But let’s try and stick to this epic drama in the other room. Fiam and just from nowhere with no prior notice, a nicely crafted invitation card over a week ago began to circulate all over the social media inviting guests for a purported wedding of President Muhammadu Buhari to his new Minister of Humanitarian and Disaster Management, Hajia Sadiya Umar Farouq, as second wife.
In short, some people you may wish to call mischief makers, it would appear, must have met somewhere and decided it was time for our president to take a second wife.
And so, they went searching, found and introduced the preferred lady to the public, although I cannot tell if they presented their plan of action to the two persons involved. Nonetheless, they went on to fix the date and venue for the wedding. And it came to pass, but only the virtual world.
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And what better time to plan the wedding than when the wife of the president, Hajia Aisha Buhari, was out of the country on a long but unexplained vacation! It was indeed a very serious matter, which left many Nigerians at a lost as to what exactly was happening. To add to the suspense was the sealed lips of the Presidency to the rumour that gained so much ground and was about to take the change mantra of the present administration to the uncanny melody of a next level.
Ok, so it turned out the whole thing was a ruse, after all, as no such wedding took place on the said date in the real world. Instead, the Presidency, which had allowed the rumour to fester for many days without saying anything, decided, just much after the mischievous rumour had gone so viral and was almost sounding so real, to deny that any such marriage was in the pipeline.
Special adviser to the president on media and publicity, Mr. Femi Adesina, it was, who, very close to the rumoured date of the virtual wedding, debunked the story, describing it as a ‘deceptive manoeuvre by those who fabricated it.’
According to him, the news was far from the truth as he insisted that no such marriage would take place at the Presidential Villa.
And that was it! No such marriage took place, at least, on the said date and at the said mosque, where President Muhammadu Buhari, on that pregnant Friday of October 11, 2019, observed the weekly Jumaat prayer without the much hyped imaginary ceremony.
What happened, instead, was a hasty return to the country of his wife, Aisha, afterwards from her long holiday that had on its own, set many tongues wagging.
Nonetheless, and considering that the rumoured wedding had gained so much ground, the Jumaat prayer on that day at the Presidential Villa mosque, reportedly witnessed unprecedented number of faithful, who seemed to have stormed the venue to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the social media wedding reports.
Rumour mongers, who insist that the seriousness of that drama must have prompted the sudden return of the wife of the president to the country, also argue that same hasty return was enough food for thought on what could have been. In other words, the coincidence of Aisha’s return at that auspicious moment, they believe, is a pointer that truly, some people were planning to gift our president a second wife but had to hurriedly put it off.
They buttress this line of argument with what they claimed to understand from Aisha’s interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) few days after her return, where she neither denied nor confirmed the wicked rumour.
Her response: “I honestly don’t know what happened because I was not here. Secondly, it is Buhari they said will be getting married and not me, Aisha. So he will be in a better position to come and tell the public if it is true or false.”
You would think the wife of the President would stop there but she didn’t and went further to explain that “the lady they said that he (President Buhari) was going to marry and the person that told her the wedding was going to happen did not expect the wedding not to hold,” adding that it was after she saw that the wedding did not hold that she began to reached out. “So, I am not in the position to say they will get married or not, because I am already a married woman, so it’s none of my business,” Mrs. Buhari concluded.
Clearly, and if you had watched her earlier chat with reporters at the airport on arrival to the country via the British Airways on Sunday morning, October 13, 2019, you can decipher that all is certainly not well at the home front of the nation’s president.
Despite Aisha’s cheerful disposition and all that picture of being happy to be home after a well-deserved rest with the claim that she is “rejuvenated to continue the work on improving the health and well-being of women, children, and other vulnerable Nigerians,” many still believe that her sudden return was not just triggered by, but must have also given credence to rumored wedding that never held.
First, she acknowledged the fact that she was the one in the leaked videos that went viral where she lashed out at the Mamman Daura family and the president’s close ally, angrily, saying they should pack out of the Villa. In the said video, she was fuming and complaining of being locked out of certain areas of the Villa that naturally should be occupied by members of her family.
Further information on the incident revealed that the video was shot over a year ago by Fatima, daughter of the presumed head of the cabal, Daura, a family that the wife of the president has consistently insisted to be leading the cabal that has been controlling her husband and his presidency.
Surprisingly or otherwise, Aisha would soon apologize to her children, immediate family members and Nigerians over the embarrassment that the online videos had caused.
To many however, Aisha’s openness about the videos as well as the apology tendered thereafter merely robbed the ugly incidence right on the noses of her ‘tormentors’ rather than make her look bad in the public eye, which must have been the intention of those that leaked the videos.
And many also are still wondering why in the first place a whole family like the Dauras would be so accommodated in the Villa meant for the First Family.
One thing, however, remains clear in all of these, which is that the commotion that has been festering in the home front of Mr. President for as long as we can remember in the life of his government, doesn’t seem to be abetting. And that is very worrisome as it is the last thing that Nigerians wish to be burdened with at this most trying time in the history of the country.
With all the biting problems confronting the nation, it is unfair for long-suffering Nigerians to be burdened with the Aso drama featuring the internal problems of the First Family.
What an average Nigeria is asking of government at these most difficult times is how it is planning to fight hunger, poverty, diseases, insecurity among numerous vices ravaging and bringing the country down on her knees.
This is even more annoying coming at the same time a certain government official will uncharitably announce to the world that there is no hunger in the land, when in the real sense the people are made to bear untold hardship brought upon them by bad governance.
And to think this was coming from a government official in a country that has been globally declared as the world capital of extreme poverty goes to indicate the extent of the precarious situation we are living in.
That Nigeria is undergoing one of the worst economic recessions in its history is no longer news. As a result, prices of basic necessities are hitting the roof, coupled with mass retrenchment of breadwinners, which naturally have left scores dying of hunger, with children who are said to be leaders of tomorrow, the most vulnerable.
As a matter of fact, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) to end extreme poverty by 2030 is reportedly unlikely to be met, no thanks, in large part, to Nigeria’s situation. If still in doubt, check out a report by The World Poverty Clock, which clearly shows that Nigeria has overtaken India as the country with the most extreme poor people in the world.
Considering that India has a population seven times larger than Nigeria’s, or thereabout, the struggle to lift more citizens out of extreme poverty is an indictment on successive Nigerian governments, which have mismanaged the country’s vast oil riches through incompetence and corruption.
About 86.9 million Nigerians are said to be living in extreme poverty, a figure that represents nearly 50 per cent of its estimated 180 million population. And as it faces a major population boom, Nigeria is projected to become the world’s third largest country by 2050, meaning that its problems will likely worsen, if nothing is urgently done now to arrest the ugly trend.
The level of decay in both public infrastructure and services is so alarming that anywhere you look to, what you will likely see is hopelessness. Practically, all the roads in major cities across the country, for instance, have collapsed. They are hardly renovated and as population increases at an alarming rate, hardly will you see any new roads added.
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Should we talk about electricity supply, where nothing much is done for appreciable improvement? Or the issue of potable water supply? It is indeed a shame that a country so richly blessed is so badly run down by just a few politicians that appear to have looted and continue to loot the commonwealth of the general populace running into 10 generations.
That is why the drama playing out from the other room of the First Family’s home front and the so-called cabal that have been holding the country down, should be taken exactly for what it is – distraction.
Perhaps, you will understand better what I am talking about if you try to ask yourself why the sudden attention and fortification of Office of the First Lady, which our president that preaches integrity had earlier ruled out as unconstitutional and said he would abolish on assumption of office.