SONALA OLUMHENSE FROM PUNCH
First, she arrived as a ghost, almost a myth: a foreign spirit but with her clutches firmly around the Nigerian story.
It was in 2002, during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, when Nigerians would learn that she somehow appeared in a United States court trial of one William Jefferson that involved our then Vice President, Atiku Abubakar.
Jefferson, a Louisiana congressman, was accused of “selling his congressional office with the intention of enriching his family with hundreds of millions of dollars in bribe proceeds and concealing more than $478,000.00 in actual bribe payments.”
I told a part of that Aisha story here in 2016, recalling the 2007 Government Sentencing Memorandum of Jefferson, which identified a “$170,000 wire transfer from [an] account in Nigeria in the name of Aisha Buhari to an account in the name of The ANJ Group, LLC, identifying “William Jefferson” as Beneficiary.”
Aisha Buhari? Yes. Read page 22. That is exactly why the matter returned to prime time in Nigeria in 2016. That was when one Muhammadu Buhari ruled.
“His wife was indicted over the Halliburton Scandal,” gloated Ayo Fayose, the then-governor of Ekiti State, himself in trouble with the EFCC at the time. “When that American, Jefferson, was being sentenced, the President’s wife was mentioned as having wired $170,000 to Jefferson…”
Fayose meant the Jefferson matter, not Halliburton. In Nigeria, Nigerian leaders fall into two types: implicated, or afraid to touch the reports.
Nonetheless, several “insiders,” some of them with seedy files of their own, ventured forth to defend Aisha at that time. But the feisty lady seized the microphone for herself, denouncing Fayose’s “very wild, unfounded and false allegations and imputation.” She demanded a retraction in five days or she would sue him.
Aisha did sue, following which she curiously threatened to punish Ekiti State by halting its statutory monthly allocations unless Fayose desisted. At that time, Muhammadu, his government wilting considerably, had not disclosed whether he would run for a second term.
That was when Aisha returned. In September 2017, ‘Mama Taraba’ and Minister of Women Affairs, Aisha Alhassan told BBC Hausa Service that should Buhari be tempted by prospects of a second term, he would have to do without her support.
Her support, she said, would go to former VP Abubakar, her political godfather. “If because of what I said, I am sacked, it will not bother me because I believe in Allah, that my time has elapsed.” It was a level of courage that no male member of APC could match.
And it was thereafter that a scorched-earth ‘Buhari Family War’ broke out on foreign soil when Aisha Buhari challenged Muhammadu on BBC—and he responded on VOA—that his government was being run by “two or three” people—and that she might not vote for him in 2019 unless he repented.
Remember how he indelicately denounced her before then-Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany as belonging to no room that was important. But Aisha takes no prisoners. Remember that after her husband won re-election, hand-to-hand combat broke out in their Aso Rock palace as she openly accused Mamman Daura, her husband’s nephew-confidant, of leading spokesman Garba Shehu against her.
“Based on Garba Shehu’s misguided sense of loyalty and inability to stay true and loyal to one person or group, it has become apparent that all trust has broken down between him and my family due to the many embarrassments he has caused the Presidency and the first family,” she said in a press statement in December 2019, demanding his resignation.
