Even if Mrs. Buhari’s weight gain was due to an underlying illness, which is likely the case, Mr. Muhammad isn’t legally obligated to be sensitive, and that makes the arrest an unmistakable abuse of power.”
By Gimba Kakanda
At 23, unknown and studying in a dormant Northern town, Aminu Adamu Muhammad couldn’t have imagined himself in this movie-like plot featuring the wife of the President. He’s become a trending hashtag because of a tweet in which he attributed Aisha Buhari’s sudden weight gain to, in the simplest inference, corruption. “Mama has eaten her fill of poor people’s money,” he wrote in Hausa on the microblogging site, along with the image of a conspicuously overweight Mrs. Buhari.
The #FreeAminu campaign on social media is a clamour for his release, but it’s still unclear whether Mrs. Buhari or some sycophantic security chief authorised Mr. Muhammad’s arrest. The account of the victim’s father, as told by BBC Hausa, painted that the young student of Federal University Dutse called to share that he was abducted from school and taken to the Presidential Villa, where he was brutally punished and detained.
Before Mr. Muhammad’s phone call, his whereabouts, in the account of his uncle who also spoke to BBC Hausa, were unknown. The distraught man shared that “We were not aware of it until five days later, (when) Aminu’s friend called my brother (Aminu’s father) and told him that he hadn’t seen Aminu for the last five days.” Even if absurd, this is a familiar pattern of arrest, a high-handedness long regularised by our security agencies, especially when acting on the “intelligence” of the political class.
Mr. Muhammad’s dilemma has brought to the fore various moral hypocrisies and a polarising debate on the limits of free speech. But, wherever one stands in this chaos, his human right overrides any ethical observation. Even if Mrs. Buhari’s weight gain was due to an underlying illness, which is likely the case, Mr. Muhammad isn’t legally obligated to be sensitive, and that makes the arrest an unmistakable abuse of power. If the intention was to intimidate the young man, that move has already sparked a multi-million Naira public relations disaster.
It’s human to appeal for empathy in analysing anyone dealing with a weight problem, only that it’s illogical to cite “fat-shaming” as a problem in a story where the supposed provocateur has been illegally arrested and allegedly brutalized. The victim in this story is the helpless citizen abducted from his school, held against his will, and subjected to dehumanising treatment, if the accounts of his family are accurate.
The partisan lens adopted to play down Mr. Muhammad’s rights is also unfair. So many of those who described his criticism of the First Lady as extreme have turned out to be guilty of similar extremism in attacking the wife of the then President Goodluck Jonathan. Some of President Buhari’s aides who jumped on the bandwagon to accuse Mr. Muhammad of discourtesy have also been found guilty of double standards, as the public dig out and publish receipts of their vile mockery of Dame Patience Jonathan.
When Mrs. Jonathan was in the klieg light, exhibiting a poor grasp of grammar and speech impediment, and often resorting to pidgin to save her dear life, this legion of philosophers preaching decorum and sympathy wasn’t available to save the poor woman from her obsessively unsympathetic trolls. But this whataboutism isn’t going to save Mr. Muhammad. There shouldn’t have to be a hashtag for him in the first place. There shouldn’t have been an arrest.
Mrs. Buhari can’t say she’s unaware of what it means to be in the eyes of the public. She had a choice. Before her husband took charge in 2015, he made it clear that there wouldn’t be the office of the First Lady. But she made sure that she was not unnoticed. She created a non-existent office by merely wearing her Salvatore Ferragamo and Oscar De La Renta dresses to public events, parading herself as the occupant of the office her self-proclaimed frugal husband had abolished.
So, Aisha Buhari is the mastermind of the scandalisation of Aisha Buhari. She’s the one who called out her husband for refusing to appoint more deserving party loyalists in his government. She’s the one who made her spat with her husband’s nephew, Malam Mamman Daura, a public affair. She’s the one who called out her husband’s spokesman, Malam Garba Shehu, in the media for allegedly sabotaging his principal. She took to social media to make confidential and family matters public, entertaining the very public she doesn’t want in her business.
In December 2019, amidst a spat with Garba Shehu, she took to her Facebook to say, “Mr. Shehu has presented himself to (those who have no stake in the compact that the President signed with Nigerians on May 29) as a willing tool and executioner of their antics, from the corridors of power even to the level of interfering with the family affairs of the President. This should not be so. The blatant meddling in the affairs of a First Lady of a country is a continuation of the prodigal actions of those that he serves.” This was also an acknowledgment of the office her husband had abolished.
President Buhari got enough of his wife’s meddling in his government’s affairs that, when asked by a journalist during a media parley abroad, he said quite condescendingly, “I don’t know which party my wife belongs to,” and that “she belongs to the kitchen, the living room, and the other room.” This sounded like a tasteless joke, but that was intended to be a stern reminder that the wife was transgressing—and becoming a recurring protagonist of national scandals.
The hostile media coverage of Mrs. Buhari’s life lately was her making, and too many cameras have been stalking her and invading her privacy. They are always quick to sensationalise even her ill-timed parties—either openly celebrating her children or in-law’s graduation while the nation’s public universities were on strike or holding opulent weddings that don’t align with her husband’s frugality. At the wedding of her son, Yusuf Buhari, and Zahrah Bayero, iPhone 12s and iPads were shared as souvenirs in yet another case of bad optics. No matter who funded the acquisition of the devices, it didn’t speak well, and Mrs. Buhari, as the visible parent at the wedding, faced fierce backlash.
Power or proximity to power comes with the responsibility to tolerate dissents and caricaturing, and courtrooms are always open for any public servant or their relative who feels defamed by a critic or “hater.” If Mrs. Buhari believes Mr. Muhammad has no proof that her weight gain—which is strangely a sign of good living in the warped Nigerian mentality—is a testament to eating poor people’s money, the courts are there to seek justice. Any other way only scandalises her.
□ Kakanda is a newspaper columnist and public affairs analyst.