For more than one week now, the media space has been awash with reactions to the interview which the Wife of the President (First Lady), Aisha Buhari, granted the BBC Hausa Service to the effect that her no-nonsense husband, Muhammadu Buhari, and his government have been hijacked by a cabal in the Aso Rock Villa, Abuja.
Her outburst did not come to me as a surprise. There is hardly any regime under the sun that is not dogged by a tiny clique that calls the shots. I am not a good student of cabalisation… the process of cannibalising a government to suit the interests of some powerful people in the corridors of power.
Now, let us turn back the hands of the clock: There was a cabal during the Shagariera. Remember UmaruDikko? Was there any cabal during the Obasanjo regime (1999 – 2007)? I can’t remember. Can you remember any?Check it out. All I can remember was that OBJ, as the fiery ex-General is fondly referred to, was himself a one-man cabal. No one could mess around him let alone cabalise him.
There was a cabal that held the late President Umaru Yar’Adua captive. His cabalisation was made easy by his failing health. While he was undergoing treatment overseas, the cabal seized the Villa and the vice president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, was left in the lurch. It took the Doctrine of Necessity to wrestle power from their grip.
When Jonathan became president, the initial arrangement was that he would complete his principal’s tenure after which he would hand over the mantle to another northerner to complete the region’s second term. But for where? A powerful cabal soon sprang up to convince him not to surrender power which the Constitution allowed him to hold on to. Jonathan was even persuaded to run in 2015 on the premise that his tenure (2011 -2015) was his first term in office, constitutionally. Eventually, he actually ran but away from the Villa! Aside from the cabal that kept him under its thumb, he also had the ubiquitous Ijaw chieftain, Pa Edwin Clark, to contend with as a godfather… just as President Buhari is said to be under the thumb of his nephew, Malam Mamman Daura.
I found the Buhari-under-Mamman-Daura-thumb claim a bit strange. Strange because Buhari is known to be a tough guy and the Mamman Daura I used to know was a highly respected and harmless fellow. He was my editor when I joined the New Nigerian Newspapers in the early 70s. He was so revered that when I visited the head office of the paper in Kaduna one afternoon, my colleague on the sports desk, Ndanusa Alao, who later became the managing director of the giant media house, asked me to remain in the background as Mamman Daura walked into the newsroom en route to his office, looking majestic in his white babanriga. He was a very handsome young man… any woman’s dream man for the other room. Which was why I found it a bit difficult to buy into that claim! Well, that was Mamman Daura of the 70s. May be people CHANGE!
The Wife of the President has been under the hammer for coming into the open to express her frustration about how her man is surrounded by strange faces… characters that were unknown to her in her close to three decades of being the President’s alter ego. She warned that the over 15m Buharists might take up arms against the state because Buhari has been offering bananas to the baboons, while the monkeys are hugging starvation, driven by recession. She swore that if the baboonery is carried into 2019, she would not be there for her man. She would not campaign for his re-election… that is if Baba is interested in running for the second term.
Buhari was in Germany on a state visit when the amiable First Lady dropped the bombshell. When asked to react to her interview, the President reached for his bag of humour, saying that his wife belongs to his kitchen, his living room and the other room. For a humour-meister like me, that was a three-star response. He merely stated the obvious.
A woman’s place starts at the kitchen, then the sitting room where she refuels the man and then the other room which is the ultimate and dream destination of every (married) woman. All those critics at home and abroad who have taken the President to Golgotha on account of coating the truth with humour are hypocrites. Even Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor and one of the most powerful women in the world today, who stood next to Buhari, cannot deny the fact that she started her marital life from the kitchen and still ends up in the other room ever and anon despite being Germany’s numerouno.
Cooking is a primordial responsibility of a wife. Nature has prepared her for that critical role right from creation. And were Buhari a misogynist as he is being painted all over the place, he would not have picked a school certificate holder, beautified her, and sponsored her to the university for her first and second degree programmes. That is not the hallmark of someone who denigrates women.
Have we forgotten so soon how the wife of the former Ogun state governor, OtunbaGbenga Daniel, took over her kitchen when her spouse came down with food poisoning and had to be flown abroad? Women who abdicate their kitchen throne do so at their husbands’ peril. There are also instances where housemaids have philtered their oga’s meals and took over the other room, via the kitchen because of madam’s dereliction of duty.
We should be careful how we dabble into problems involving a husband and his wife. This is because by the time they settle the matter in the other room, after a sumptuous meal, they will make you and I look really stupid.
Finally, any woman out there who does not love the other room should stand up to be identified… none!
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