By Pascal Oparada
Aisha Buhari is perhaps the most controversial First Lady Nigeria has seen in recent years. Sightly, second wife, a fashionista, an entrepreneur, an organiser and a famously blunt woman, Aisha
seems to be on a mission to rescue her husband, President Muhammadu Buhari, from the choke hold of a cabal whom she has not hidden her disgust for.
The Cartier controversy
She had barely stepped into her role as wife of the President, (she does not like the term, First Lady), than she stirred her first controversy. The wristwatch on her on the day of her husband’s inauguration was said to worth millions of naira, an irony compared to her husband’s minimalist lifestyle, critics said.
Till date, Mrs. Buhari neither replied nor said anything about the true worth of her Cartier wristwatch.
But, that was just a prelude to the personality of Aisha Buhari.
A fighter
She is not just outspoken, she is a fighter. Once her husband’s Traducer in chief, Ekiti State governor, Ayodele Fayose, picked a fight with her. She was quick to jump in the ring with him.
“Enough is Enough, Fayose,” she said.
“A mad dog that isn’t chained. I refuse to keep quiet,” the First Lady posted on her verified Twitter handle.
She told the governor that even though her husband was old, she was young enough to fight him to a standstill.
International player
Her famous interview to BBC is still fresh on people’s minds. She had alleged that the people surrounding her husband did not mean well for him and the country. She threatened that she would no longer stick out her neck for her husband if “things continue this way”.
“I have decided as his wife that if things continue like this up to 2019, I will not go out and campaign again and ask any woman to vote like I did before. I will not do it”, Aisha threatened.
It remains to see if the ‘things’ she talked about had been addressed, or are they same or have gotten worse.
But suffice it to say that Aisha is not of the bird brain stock. The Yola-born woman has stuck to her guns and continues to throw missiles at her husband and his cabinet at the slightest chance she gets.
Animal Kingdom
She popularised the hyenas and jackals cliche after Senator Shehu Sani of Kaduna said because the Lion King is away, hyenas and jackals have plenty room to play kings of the jungle.
Sani took to his Facebook page to write, “Prayer for the absent Lion King has waned; until he’s back then they will fall over each other to be on the front row of the palace temple.
“Now the hyenas and the jackals are scheming and talking to each other in whispers; still doubting whether the Lion King will be back or not.
“Now the Lion king is asleep and no other dare to confirm if he will wake up or not. Its the wish of the Hyenas that the Lion King never wakes or comes back so that they can be kings.
“Its the prayers of the weaker animals that the Lion King comes back to save the Kingdom from the hyenas, the wolves and other predators.”
She reacted almost swiftly.
“God has answered the prayers of the weaker animals. The Hyena’s and the Jackals will soon be sent out of the kingdom.
“We strongly believe in the prayers and support of the weaker animals.
“Long live the weaker animals, Long live Nigeria”, she tweeted.
Aso Clinic quakes
Aisha had taken ill and needed to get treated. The option of being treated overseas like her husband, is at her beck and call. But she decided, like a patriotic Nigerian, to make inquiries if the Clinic in the Presidential villa could treat her illness.
She asked that they place a call to the clinic to see if they had basic equipment like x-ray machine. But it turns out, like everything Nigerian, the clinic for which billions of Naira had been appropriated, lacked the equipment.
This, again, put Aisha on the spotlight.
“A few weeks ago, I was sick as well. They advised me to take the first flight out to London, I refused to go. I said I must be treated in Nigeria because there is a budget for an assigned clinic to take care of us. If the budget is N100 million, we need to know how the budget is spent.
“Along the line, I insisted they call Aso Clinic to find out if the X-ray machine was working. They said it was not working. They didn’t know I was the one that was supposed to be in that hospital at that very time.
“I had to go to a hospital that was established by foreigners 100 per cent. What does that mean?”
Rustling tweeter feathers
Just on Friday, January 19, the president’s wife threw what many had seen as her biggest sucker punch yet. She re-tweeted a video of Senator Isa Missau, representing Bauchi Central, in which Missau was berating President Buhari as not being in charge of his government.
Senator Ben Murray-Bruce tweeted afterwards that from the way things are going, it does not appear Aisha Buhari still belongs to Buhari’s other room.
Few wives of Nigerian presidents have had the courage to look their husbands in the eye, albeit, subtly and tell them the blunt truth.
Aisha has cut herself a place in Nigerians’ mind.