Aisha Buhari: From Wife Of The President To First Lady

 By Rotimi Fasan

I can’t be sure now how Aisha Buhari prefers to be identified. Is it as the First Lady or as the President’s wife? At present, she’s more often identified as the First Lady than as the wife of the president, which was the Muhammadu Buhari presidency’s own way of distancing itself from the abuse and overbearing tendencies of previous occupants of the “office” of First Lady.

*Aisha Buhari 

But things seem to have unravelled, and the hairsplitting is being or has been exposed for what it is – a mere academic exercise. With no constitutional provision, many Nigerians have in the past questioned the manner in which some so-called first ladies had gone about their duty, which was often characterised by misuse of public funds and resources. 

Poor Aminu And The Almighty First Lady

 By Dr. Ugoji Egbujo

The meek ones have, like Shakespeare, said, “The quality of mercy is not strained.” Other others have said, like Moses, “An eye for an eye.” In other words, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Yet Others have, like Jesus, drawn the line and said, “He who has never sinned alike, let him cast the first stone.”  

*Aisha Buhari 

A student of a university in Jigawa insulted the first lady. Then he disappeared. According to the Student Union, for days, neither the boy’s parents nor the school authorities knew his whereabouts. The Student Union’s president said after a nervous search that exhausted the parents and the union for days, the boy was discovered.

Abuse Of Power By Public Officers And Spouses

 By Femi Falana

Of recent, some serving and former public officers and their spouses have been using the police and other security agencies to intimidate journalists, students and other citizens for daring to expose them for engaging in corrupt practices and abuse of power. In spite of the several judgments of domestic and regional courts which have upheld the fundamental right of Nigerian citizens to freedom of expression, the anti-democratic elements have behaving like the former British colonial officials.

*Falana

Since the Attorney-General of the Federation and State Attorneys-General have failed to restrain the law enforcement agencies from from being used to harass the critics of public officers and their spouses it has become necessary to remind the Federal Government of its legal obligation to defend and protect the fundamental rights of the Nigerian people including the right to freedom of expression guaranteed by section 36 of the Constitution and Article 9 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights (Ratification and Enforcement) Act, Cap A9, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria, 2004.

Questions For Aisha Buhari

 By Promise Adiele

Titubi’s character in Femi Osofisan’s Morountodun attracts different interpretations from many people across the world. The ebullient daughter of the wealthy Alhaja Kabirat, leader of the market women, commits class suicide by repudiating the ideals of her class and identifying with the poor struggling, impoverished farmers. 

*Aisha Buhari 

Cast in the mode of the mythical Moremi of Ile-Ife, the splendour and opulence of Titubi’s bourgeois background do not impair her appreciation of the enervating realities suffered by the helpless, exploited farmers. In all her Spartan disposition, Titubi failed to save the people from the agony of losing Marshal her husband at the end of the play. The unanswered question for Titubi is – why was she unable to stop Marshal from embarking on that fateful journey at the end of the play thereby plunging the people into despair and grief? 

ASUU, Buhari And The Bull In A China Shop

 By Charles Okoh

From February 14, 2022 till September, our university students have been at home; meaning that for close to eight months that critical population of the nation’s demography has been kept idle and indolent. Indolent not because they are lazy as President Muhammadu Buhari once described them, but because they have been rendered so by a government that does not care a hoot how the people feel about the effect of their misgovernance and utter indifference to the plight of the people.

*Buhari and university dons

Last Monday, passengers travelling from Lagos to other states and other countries from the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA) were stranded and some missed their flights as the National Association of Nigerian Students blocked all roads leading to the airport. The students who came out in their numbers protested over the lingering strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU).

One of the protesting students puts it more succinctly when he said they want to prevent the elite from flying just so that their attention can be drawn to their plights.  He believed it was a welcome development to curb the excesses of the government’s nonchalant attitude towards university education in the country.

Nigeria’s Decaying Universities: Blame Govt, Not ASUU!

 By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

I have always had this lingering suspicion that apart from representing the deep-seated contempt that has come to define government’s attitude to the   welfare of public sector workers, its shoddy, often, disdainful, treatment of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) and its demands for improved working conditions might have been carefully conceived as a long term project to continue provoking ASUU to embark on industrial actions until it fatally hurts its case before Nigerians.

The expectation, it would seem, is that as students continue to spend several months at home due to prolonged strikes, which might sometimes lengthen the duration of their academic programmes, parents and other stakeholders who bear the brunt of these constant disruptions will gradually review their sympathy for the teachers and begin to confront them as the problem instead of the government whose continuous reneging on agreements it freely entered into with ASUU created the mess in the first place.

Muhammadu And Aisha Buhari: Very Early In Their Marriage

 Muhammadu Buhari and Aisha Buhari got married in 1989. Here is a picture of the couple during the early days of their marriage...

Aisha Buhari: Our First Lady Deserves Respect

By Dan Amor

To be candid, I have never met Dr. (Mrs.) Aisha Buhari, wife of the Nigerian ruler, President Muhammadu Buhari, neither am I one of her fans. But I detest all cynical attitudes toward her based on social pretensions. I'm highly contemptuous of any attempt to put a family seal unto a divine arrangement whose antecedent can be traced to God Himself.

*Aisha Buhari 

It is patently absurd for grown up men who are supposed to be responsible family heads in their own right to be harassing another man's wife in her husband's official home more so when the husband is the president of an independent country. The reported fracas in Aso Rock Presidential Villa penultimate week, which culminated in sporadic gun shots and arrest and detention of the aide de camp (ADC) to the President's wife, is scary and condemnable, to say the least.

It is also unfortunate that some Nigerians could open their mouth so wide to condemn the First Lady for trying to protect her nuclear family from dangerous interlopers who are threatening not only to manipulate the President but also to usurp the rights of his wife to gain access to her husband.

President Buhari, Bring Leah Sharibu Home!

By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye

As President Muhammadu Buhari, the commander-in-chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces, spends his two weeks “private visit” in the United Kingdom surrounded by all the luxury, comfort and care our oil money can afford, with his own family members safe and well-provided for anywhere they chose to be in the world despite the unspeakable hardship tormenting the Nigerian masses at home due to his failed leadership, a 16-year old, tender, innocent girl called Leah Sharibu is at the moment a hapless, pathetic and traumatised captive of Boko Haram terrorists, obviously, under the most dehumanising conditions.

*Leah Sharibu 

Given what has, reportedly, been the horrible experiences of young, beautiful girls like Leah who have been very unfortunate to be captured by these terrorists, one is really scared to imagine what she might have been subjected to for over a year now. Most painful is that she hardly gets mentioned again these days by those whose job it is to rescue and bring her home!

Musings On President Buhari’s Eldorado

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

By not preceding his quest for re-election with an apology for his current poor performance, President Muhammadu Buhari has taken the citizens he is seeking their votes for granted. His is a campaign driven by the notion of the citizens as not being discerning enough to know what is right for them. Buhari and his party are propelled by the illusion that the political enlightenment of the majority of the voters is still at an inchoate stage. 

*Buhari 

Buhari would only realise the falsity of this notion when he has been sent back to Daura. In Daura, he would rue his not taking cognisance of the fact that it was the same voters whom former President Goodluck Jonathan and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) disdained by not living up to their expectations who sent them out of Aso Rock.

Aisha Buhari And The President’s Men

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

A justification for an inevitable return of President Muhammadu Buhari to Aso Rock in 2019 has not unexpectedly accompanied the frenetic campaigns in some quarters. The president’s political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the leaders of his government reel off the epochal achievements that have validated an end to the citizens’ serial negation of his quest to occupy the presidential office.

*Aisha Buhari 

For them, these achievements redound to the bid for his return as a means of completing the good governance he has espoused and enthroned. And more importantly, they want the citizens to appropriate a campaign for his return as serving a purgatorial purpose – a way of discharging their obligation of gratitude to him for bringing uncommon integrity to bear on governance.

Waiting For Atiku’s Women

By Banji Ojewale

There is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women

—Kofi Annan (1938-2018), former UN Secretary-General.

I am among millions of Nigerians who can’t wait for the day God will bless our dear country with a visionary and radical female president, along with a great host of the fairer sex of kindred spirit governing the states and heading the MDAs. The tragedy of an effete economy, social stagnation and political paralysis that we have lived with over the years is the consequence of the neglect of this formidable section of society by our leaders. 

*Atiku  Abubakar 

Developing society and its constituents boils down to making use of all the functional human capital at your disposal. The moment you succumb to so-called imperatives of culture, false religion or superstition, and you drop the women, youth and the working class from your strides, you begin to enter a reverse march. That’s been Nigeria’s misogynist history, always drawing us into the bottomless depths of backwardness. 

Beyond Obasanjo’s Letter To Buhari

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

No profound insight has been offered in former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s declaration of President Muhammadu Buhari as having not passed muster. He only articulated what has not only been in the public domain but has equally been kept in focus in the domestic sphere of the president. Of course, we cannot forget so soon that Aisha, the First Lady, has been warning her husband of the political misfortune that could trail his re-election bid if he fails to make necessary amends and rescue his governance style from being a blight on the citizens’ lives. Even in the early days of this government when it was still unvarnished amid the seeming towering popularity of Buhari and when the whimpers of protest against his lack of leadership acumen were easily dismissed as emanating from ‘wailers’ who were nostalgic for a dark past of the nation, Mrs. Buhari was already giving forebodings of the sad end of this administration.

*President Buhari and Obasanjo 

Yet, we must appreciate the significance of Obasanjo’s letter which lies in its ineluctably ominous character. Obasanjo could be seen as an angel of death or an undertaker whose letters only serve as the hearse to convey a government that has irredeemably crashed to its grave. This was the case of former President Goodluck Jonathan.

Do We Have A Budding Grace Mugabe In Nigeria?

By Reno Omokri
There appears to be a lot more in common between former Zimbabwean First Lady, Grace Mugabe, and Nigeria’s present First Lady, Aisha Buhari, than immediately meets the eye. I don’t even know why few people have connected the dots before now, seeing as they are both almost always in the eye of a media storm.

*Grace Mugabe 

For one, they are both breathtakingly beautiful although I favour Grace Mugabe. My gosh, Grace Mugabe is beautiful! If I had ever been Mugabe’s deputy, I may have preferred to inherit her rather than the Presidency were anything to befall my boss. I hope I am not giving Mr. Emmerson Mnangagwa any ideas.

But I digress, and I beg your pardon. I am, after all, a man, and women like Grace Mugabe naturally tend to have this type of effect on our reasoning faculties if truth were to be told. But beyond their ravishing beauty, both Grace and Aisha married men that were vastly older than them and this more or less made them trophy wives. Grace Mugabe is just 52 while her husband, Robert Mugabe is 93. The age gulf between them is 41 years.

'Mainagate'And The Hypocrisy Of The Buhari Regime

By Ikechukwu Amaechi

The hypocrisy of the General Muhammadu Buhari-led All Progressives Congress (APC) government is nauseating. The behaviour of some of its officials is childish, to say the least. They probably think Nigerians are idiots who don't have the capacity to reason.

*Buhari 

Take for instance this Abdulrasheed Maina fiasco. The Ibrahim Magu-led Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is now jumping up and down claiming to be seizing Maina's properties in Kaduna and Abuja and they have journalists to video it and write the stories and create the impression that, indeed, Magu, like his Oga, Buhari, is an anti-corruption czar. And you ask, why now?

Corruption And Aisha Buhari’s Testimony

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is increasingly becoming obvious that the President Muhammadu Buhari government is chafing under the affliction of a one-week-one-scandal syndrome. Unless they are irrevocably befuddled by their partisanship, Buhari’s loyalists who have been consumed with the notion of his unrivalled integrity would not fail to observe the dark atmosphere of corruption in which the administration is immersed. But of course, while most of these loyalists are apologising for allowing themselves to be used to pave the way for the Buhari presidency, there are some who would counter that those who accuse the government of corruption are the shellacked members of the opposition. After all, the Kachikwu-Baru affair which is the latest scandal in the Buhari government has not been declared by a competent court as an unimpeachable case of corruption.

*Aisha Buhari 

But the evidence of financial sleaze such unalloyed believers in the integrity of the Buhari government may not be able to dispute is no longer from the members of the opposition and other citizens whose moral sensibilities are daily affronted by corruption cases. Now, the evidence is from an unlikely quarter. It is from Aisha Buhari, the wife of the president. Just a week after the nation was scandalised by the $25 billion heist in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) which has no rival in the alleged financial misdeeds committed by the Goodluck Jonathan government, Mrs. Buhari alerted us to the possible mismanagement of over N4 billion at the Aso Rock Clinic in less than two years. She was shocked that despite this allocation, the clinic did not have a single syringe. Mrs. Buhari’s alarm came shortly after her daughter Zahra was outraged at the lack of syringe and common drugs like paracetamol at the clinic. 

BREAKING NEWS: President Buhari Returns To Nigeria

Pix:Sunday Aghaeze/State House

After 103 days in London receiving medical attention for an undisclosed ailment, President Muhammadu Buhari arrived Abuja today at about 4.35 pm. 

He was received at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport by a Federal Government delegation led by Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo. Prof Osinbajo has functioned as Acting President while Buhari was away in London.

For the past few days, a group of activists had protested in Abuja demanding that Buhari should either return to Nigeria or resign from office. 

The protesters were attacked by an angry mob sympathetic to President Buhari when they carried their protest to the popular Wuse Market in Abuja. 

But a pro-Buhari group who organised a counter-protest receive protection from the police. The attack on the anti-Buhari protesters has received widespread condemnation.  

Buhari’s Search For Jackals And Hyenas

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

It is a Monday morning. President Muhammadu Buhari has just resumed in his office after his over two months’ medical vacation. He would have loved to have more rest. But he has been inundated with tales of the intrigues to take over his job. He just has to muster every ounce of energy to take back his office. A file is presented to the president. In it is a list that contains the names of those who were hell-bent on scuttling his presidency while he was away. On the list are ministers. There are also special aides and other officials in the presidency. All these are to be sacked. Welcome to the post-London Buhari era in Aso Rock.

*Buhari 

The criteria for the mass cleansing are only clearly known to the helmsman of Aso Rock. However, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo who was the Acting President while Buhari was away is not on the list. He has been found extraordinarily loyal despite all the machinations and intrigues of some people to intimidate and blackmail him into resigning, Buhari considers him as having judiciously represented his interest while he was away. What exemplifies Osinbajo’s fidelity to Buhari’s vision is his maintaining the position of the president that the acting Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) could remain in office till 2019 despite his not being confirmed by the Senate. Again, Osinbajo refused to succumb to the clamour for restructuring that ruled the polity.

Buhari has always believed that nobody should tweak the structure of the country as it is. He is on the same page with former President Olusegun Obasanjo who also fought the civil war to keep the country together. But as for former Military President Ibrahim Babangida, Buhari would respond to him appropriately at the right time for taking a position on restructuring that is different from that of the president. Of course, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar has always been coveting the president’s job. But there is a way to also pay him for turning himself into a jackal.

President Buhari On Life-Support Since June 6 – Gov Fayose

*Gov Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State  

Full Text Of Governor Ayodele Fayose's Address At A Press Conference in Ado-Ekiti On Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Today, it makes 53 days since our President; Muhammadu Buhari left Nigeria to attend to his health challenges abroad. No official information as to his whereabouts and his state of health.

Like every other Nigerians, I do not wish the president dead, I have therefore maintained dignified silence since we were told that the President embarked on his second medical trip abroad this year.

However, the recorded audio message which was released by the Presidency as the President’s Ramadan message to Nigerians necessitated my setting the records straight today.

No doubt, the audio message was only a damage-control strategy aimed at further deceiving Nigerians.

I have therefore elected in good conscience to state as follows:

Buhari And His Divided Government

By Rotimi Fasan

President Muhammadu Buhari sits atop a government that is very divided. The administration is apparently in confusion with close members at war with one another. The confusion that has resulted in Buhari’s warring and, one might say, fumbling administration began, it can now be said with insight, when the president decided to form a so-called kitchen cabinet of close associates and relatives, persons directly or indirectly connected to him by marriage, blood or religion.

 

*Buhari 

These people feel answerable only to the president and exploit their closeness to the president to wrongfoot his policies including his arrowhead anti-corruption war. The president’s self-inflicted injury was exacerbated by a National Assembly that was dominated by a divided All Progressives Congress, APC, whose members elected a leadership that has enjoyed neither the support nor trust of the party leaders.

The frosty relationship that this would engender between the legislators and the executive arm of the administration (particularly the presidency and anyone thought to be connected to it) can be seen in the fate that has befallen Ibrahim Magu in his failed bid to be confirmed as chair of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.

But I’m a bit ahead of my explanation. So let me return to how President Buhari brought all this upon himself and what this now implicates for his government. Muhammadu Buhari The first appointments made by Buhari were of a nature that got many Nigerians complaining given its lopsided arrangement. The appointments, mostly of his immediate minders, were almost to the last person made up of Muslim men of northern extraction. It both reflected as well as demonstrated a tendency for mind-closure and parochialism.

But this was apparently lost on the president who couldn’t be bothered about it, not even the fact that the Igbo presence in the government is almost of cipher value. He ignored all questions raised about this and, when he chose to respond, simply went ahead to defend the appointments, explaining it all in terms of the pattern of votes that got him elected.