The Presidency has described as fallacious and untrue the claim by a Mr. Gideon Samani that President Muhammadu Buhari is a shy person around women.
A newspaper report had quoted Samani as saying at a public function on Thursday that the President’s decision to constitute a cabinet with low number of female ministers was indicative of his being shy in the presence of women.
But Mr. Femi Adesina, Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, noted in a statement that while such claim was “totally fallacious”, President Buhari received the the assertion with shock and consternation.
Besides, Adesina noted that since Samani was certainly not an official spokesman of the President, “he could not have spoken on behalf of President Buhari, who is the President of all Nigerians, men and women alike.”
The presidential spokesman said, “The subsequent attribution of the supposedly ‘low number’ of female ministerial nominees to President Buhari’s alleged shyness around women is therefore baseless and a figment of the imagination of Samani, who was falsely described as a ‘Senior Special Assistant (Political Matters) to the President.’
“The assertion by the alleged Presidential aide that President Buhari is ‘very shy dealing with the opposite sex’ because ‘he has been interacting mostly with men,’ was received by the President with shock.
“For one thing, there is no Senior Special Assistant,
Political Matters, in the Office of the President for now and Samani who was said to have spoken as the representative of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation at a public function, is not an aide of the President.”
Adesina further observed that the President has a wife, many daughters and female relatives whom he loves dearly, adding that Buhari also has mother that he adores.
To this effect, he wondered why the President could then “be shy in the company of women, to the point of allegedly not appointing them into public offices, on account of not being comfortable in their company?”
Adesina further urged Nigerian women to rest assured “that the President holds them in the highest esteem and will always give them due consideration in the discharge of his official responsibilities.
“The statements attributed to Mr Samani are untrue and unauthorized. They should therefore be disregarded,” the statement noted.
-Leadership