By Abdulrahman Zakariyau
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The Former Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to ex-President Muhammadu Buhari, Garba Shehu, has revealed that the story about rats invading the Presidential Villa was fabricated as a distraction from Buhari’s health issues.
In his book “According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience,” launched on Tuesday in Abuja, Shehu disclosed that he crafted the Villa rat invasion story to divert public attention away from concerns about President Buhari’s health and capacity to govern.
Prior to Buhari’s return to Nigeria on August 19, 2017, after nearly three months of medical treatment in the United Kingdom, the Indigenous People of Biafra leader, Nnamdi Kanu, had alleged that Buhari had been replaced with a clone named Jibrin from Sudan.
Upon Buhari’s return, some Nigerians began to question whether it was truly him or the so-called clone, Jibrin of Sudan, as Kanu claimed.
The situation grew more suspicious when the Presidency announced that Buhari would be working from home instead of his office at the State House, further fueling doubts about his health and leadership capability.
In Chapter 10 of the book, titled “Rats, Spin and All That,” Garba Shehu revealed that the situation became a serious concern for him after Buhari’s Social Media aide, Bashir Ahmad, announced on Twitter (now X) that the former President had returned but would be working from home.
Shehu narrated, “So in the few hours of the president’s return, I picked up a conversation in the office of the CoS, where the chief, a few principal officers and the permanent secretary sat over lunch, a damage to a cable was noticed and it needed fixing.
“Someone speculated that rats may have caused that damage, given that the office was unused for a long time.
“When the surge in calls for explanation of why the president would be working from home, if truly he had recovered his health and fit for the office came, I said to the reporters that the office, which had been in disuse, needed renovation because rats may have eaten and damaged some cables.”
Shehu recalled that the story about rodents invading Nigeria’s Presidential Villa and damaging furniture and the air conditioning system went viral, even ranking among the top five news items on the BBC World News bulletin.
The ex-presidential spokesperson in the book continued, “With reporters wanting to know more, the number of calls increased, with some, including the BBC Hausa, interrogating me on the type of rats we had in the Villa that could eat wire cables.
“To get them (journalists) off my back, I referred them to the strange rats that invaded the country in the 1980s during the rice armada that came here aboard ships bringing the commodity from Southeast Asia.
“As was known of them, in their destructiveness, those rats ate just anything anyone could imagine. Many critics disagreed with me, saying that we were covering up the president’s ill health. Some people had a good laugh over the narrative, and an insignificant few believed me.
“At a later meeting, the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed and Vice President Prof Yemi Osinbajo asked me why I had toed that line of story.
“I said to them that the choice I made was deliberate: I wanted the discussion to shift, to move to any other issue besides the president’s health and his ability to continue in office as the leader of the country. In my view, that spin succeeded. Both of them disagreed, saying that this was well off the mark.”
Abdulrahman Zakariyau
Abdulrahman has nearly ten years of experience reporting on political parties, elections, religion, civil society organizations, the Nigeria Governors Forum, and more
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