By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
When I publicly voiced my concerns in 2018 that Muhammadu
Buhari was too cognitively and physically ill to have the capacity to govern
Nigeria and that the country was being ruled on his behalf by an unorganized
and unelected gaggle of corrupt cronies and family members, some people didn’t
believe me.
But his wife’s unprecedentedly stinging public censure of presidential
spokesman Garba Shehu and Mamman Daura, Buhari’s nephew, on December 11, 2019
provides evidentiary grounding for what most of us have always known and said:
that Buhari is too weighed down by dementia and physical infirmity to even
control his immediate family, let alone rule a country of nearly 200 million
people.
In my January 19, 2019 column titled “Buhari’s Physical and Mental Health is Now a National Emergency,” I noted the following:
“On November 23, 2018, for instance, I tweeted that a doctor
who has met Buhari during a personal, non-medical visit told me he was troubled
that Buhari appeared to evince tell-tale symptoms of dementia (of which
Alzheimer's disease is a type), which is often characterized by repetitiveness,
unawareness, mental deterioration, impaired memory, diminished quality of
thought, slurred speech, and finally complete helplessness. That’s why
neurologists call dementia ‘failure of the brain.’
“A friend whose dad has dementia and who has also met Buhari
in the recent past had earlier told me Buhari reminded her of her dad whom she
forced to retire, adding, sadly, that Buhari’s dementia is way worse than her
dad’s is. She was, and still is, concerned that Nigeria has no president. She's
right, and the evidence stares us every day. Buhari barely has any awareness of
his existence, much less the requirements of being president…
“People around the president are intimately familiar with
his considerably diminished sentience and his notoriously declining short-term
memory. As a consequence, he is being taken advantage of by several people
close to him. Aso Rock insiders say Buhari doesn't remember anything, so no one
even obeys his instructions--if he gives any at all. The last person to see him
gets him to do whatever they want. Someone from the Presidential Villa told me
it’s precisely because of this fact that governors frequent the Villa several
times in a week; they are in a race to be the last people to see the president
before he takes decisions and signs off on them.
“If you think with Buhari as president Nigeria has a
president, you should sue your brain for non-support; you're NOT thinking! We
have a national emergency on our hands. Buhari appears infirm both in mind and
in body. Without a doubt, other people are ruling on his behalf, and his own
wife hinted at that when she said her husband’s presidency had been hijacked by
a three-man cabal.”
Aisha also told TVC’s “Journalists’ Hangout” that she doesn’t
have private conversations with her husband. “There is no pillow in the villa,”
she said. “No, because we are always busy listening to one story or another. I
think the people he puts in the cabinet, they should just sit up and do the
needful. That is why it is not good to have godfatherism.”
A lot of people were flustered by the revelation that she has
no access to her husband. But I am not. I actually hinted at that in my October
22, 2016 column titled “Aisha Buhari and the Evil Aso Rock Cabal.” Here’s what
I wrote:
“This [her BBC Hausa interview chastising her husband’s government]
can only mean that although Aisha is formally married to President Buhari, she
is actually isolated from him. This is consistent with what I’ve heard from
inside sources about the relationship between the first couple. Buhari is held
hostage by an evil, sneaky, corrupt, vulturous, and conniving cabal that
ensures that his wife doesn’t see him even in the ‘kitchen,’ the ‘living room,’or ‘the other room.’
“The BBC interview was Aisha’s vigorous ventilation of
pent-up anguish against a cold, calculating, and corrupt cabal that has made
Buhari a stranger to his own wife.”
And I had written about Aisha’s December 11 revelation that
Garba Shehu and other Aso Rock media aides have no access to Buhari and take
directives from Mamman Daura and other unelected Buhari cronies and family members.
In my August 26, 2017 column titled "Garba Shehu,Presidential Villa Rodents and Bad PR," I wrote the following, which Aisha
just confirmed:
"First, it’s obvious that both Adesina and Shehu don’t
have a robust, direct access to the president. Directives don’t seem to always
come directly from the president to his media aides. It’s usually, it would
appear, from the president to a tortuous labyrinth of surrogates before it gets
to the media team. Most of the times, it’s actually influential people
connected—or thought to be connected—to the president who dictate what the
presidential media team says to the public.
"I recall an incident in late 2015 that left me in no
doubt that the president’s media team members don’t enjoy the respect usually
accorded to presidential spokespeople. I was having an argument with someone
close to the Buhari presidency over something, and he suddenly said, 'I will
tell the president’s media team to issue a statement to clarify this.' A few
hours later, a statement was issued expressing the exact sentiments of my
interlocutor who isn’t even officially a part of the government. That blew me
away.
"So, basically, the presidential spokespeople are mere
errand boys of Buhari’s shadowy surrogates and a motley crowd of official,
semi-official, and unofficial power brokers who pull the levers of power in the
presidency.
"No public relations person, however smart he might be,
can function optimally in the kind of politically toxic and factious
environment that the Buhari presidency exemplifies."
I warned Nigerians in the run-up to the 2019 election that
if they voted APC, they were voting Mamman Daura and Abba Kyari, not Buhari who
is barely aware of his own existence. People who thought I was merely being
mischievous are now coming to terms with what I said.
For selfish reasons, Aisha won't reveal the true state of
her husband’s mental and physical health, but she's opportunistically railing
against someone who is taking orders from people who hold the real power. As they
say, nature abhors a vacuum. If Buhari can’t exercise power, others will exercise
it on his behalf and in his name.
If Nigeria weren’t
the dysfunctional theater of the absurd that it is, the revelations from Aisha
Buhari would be regarded as a national emergency.
The National Assembly would
have constituted an independent team of medical experts to examine the state of
Buhari’s physical and mental state. If he is found to have dementia, as I
strongly suspect he does, he should be declared incapacitated and removed from
office. That’s what Section 137 (c) of our constitution requires.
