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.

Buhari Plagiarized Obama In “Change Begins With Me” Speech

By Adeola Akinremi

Plagiarism is not a trivial matter. President Muhammadu Buhari made a terrible mistake last Thursday. He plagiarized President Barack Obama’s speech to launch “Change Begins With Me.”

So you didn’t notice that our president lifted from Obama’s 2008 victory speech and passed it off as if the words were his own? The argument will rage, but the moral problem of plagiarism on a day Mr. President launched a campaign to demand honesty and integrity from the people is what we should concern ourselves with.

*President Buhari with US President Obama
 at the Whitehouse

I’m not a wailing wailer and I don’t like the downfall of any man but I also don’t like to be deceived. The very last thing you should do when you’re launching a campaign like this is to be dishonest with the people.

As Buhari talked down on Nigerians during the launch of the campaign spearheaded by no other person, other than the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Muhammed, known for his trash-talk, particularly for the opposition, I started following the speech line-by-line. I was alarmed to make the discovery. It was a scandal that escaped the attention of our newspapers. It is one of two things: either people don’t pay particular attention to Buhari’s words or we are a nation of anything goes.

Only in July, Melania Trump, the wife of the Republican White House hopeful, Donald Trump, was caught in the web of plagiarism after she spoke at the Republican National Convention. She plagiarized Michelle Obama’s speech. It was a big headline on television screen and national newspapers. Indeed it was a “global” headline. Yes, a prime part of Buhari’s speech to the nation last Thursday to launch a campaign encouraging new culture of transparency, attitudinal change and hard work among Nigerians was plagiarized from America’s President Barack Obama’s 2008 victory speech.

Buhari’s speech during the launch of the “Change Begins With Me”, a new national orientation campaign, contained largely the same sentiment and arrangement of words that President Obama used in his 2008 victory speech after he was elected the first American black president.

The president lifted a whole paragraph from Obama’s speech and passed it off as his own when he said: “We must resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship, pettiness and immaturity that have poisoned our country for so long. Let us summon a new spirit of responsibility, spirit of service, of patriotism and sacrifice, Let us all resolve to pitch in and work hard and look after, not only ourselves but one another, What the current problem has taught us is that we cannot have a thriving army of rent seekers and vested interests, while the majority suffers.”