- The concern and suspicion about Buhari’s identity, status of his health and capacity to lead grew when the Presidency announced that Buhari would be working from home instead of his office at the State House
The Former Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to ex-President Muhammadu Buhari, Garba Shehu, says the popular story of rats invading the Presidential Villa was a fictional incident he concocted.
He revealed that he fabricated the story to shift the growing public focus and media attention on Buhari’s health issues on something else.
Shehu He made the revelation in his book “According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience,” launched on Tuesday in Abuja.
Recall that during his administration, Buhari was away from Nigeria from May to August 2017, receiving medical attention in the United Kingdom.
The Indigenous People of Biafra leader, Nnamdi Kanu, had claimed that Buhari was dead and 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 concern and suspicion about Buhari’s identity, status of his health and capacity to lead grew when the Presidency announced that Buhari would be working from home instead of his office at the State House.
In Chapter 10 of the book, titled “Rats, Spin and All That,” Garba Shehu revealed that the situation became a source of headache 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.
He said he had to look for a way to distract the impatient public from the unending fixation on Buhari’s health, hence he came up with the rat invasion story.
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.”
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