Aisha Fever

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.

An apparently sulking Aisha soon abandoned Aso Rock for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with a bevy of governors’ wives appearing at her feet in February 2020 to celebrate her birthday.  Nobody indicated who was hosting a foreign first lady in that country, or for how much.

In March 2021, news broke that she was back in Nigeria after six straight months away in Dubai.

Aisha reappeared in the headlines last week, this time in Grenada, where she appeared to be inviting Nigerians to bear witness to her ability to define the time of day.  To what appeared to be the collective gasp of two nations, for seven days she switched on the cameras of one, and the viewership of the other.

In Grenada, Aisha Achimugu was spending some serious hard currency at her 50^th birthday, the presence of at least one Nigerian state governor generating various speculations.  But she was defiant, was Aisha, as she prosecuted her Grenada conquest.

The beach.  The boat.  The narrative.  The parties.  The clothes.  The games.  The massive cake.  Someone had clearly invested time, attention, and expertise in every aspect of her plan.   You can’t begrudge an individual for obtaining return on investment.

Was it overdone?  Maybe.  But you get what you pay for, and if you can pay for it, the question of whether you should, is a moral—not a practical—one.

The way I see it, this was a woman who, along with her children, might have perished four years ago when COVID-19 arrived at her doorstep and claimed her spouse before we even knew what it was.  Over seven million persons have died since then, 3155 of them Nigerians.  If that is motivation for an individual to seek to celebrate as hard as they can afford, across continents and time zones, I have no quarrel.

The truth is that Nigerians have been known for their pomp and pageantry for decades, in countries near and far, renting expensive yachts and sailboats and resorts.  Nobody knows about them because most are bankrolled with stolen, suspicious, or official funds, and because social media was no participant.

Not only has Aisha openly spent her money before an audience where layers of kleptocrats and their collaborators stash our money abroad, in holes in the ground, or in uncompleted estates, she did it without apology, aided by social media.

This Aisha is an employer of labour and a philanthropist in a country in which there are almost no significant local philanthropists.  Among her fiercest critics are some of the people responsible for our state of decay, because, as the Igueben people say, the dog in the hunt, hunts for itself.

In a culture in which well-placed men avoid women they cannot control and fear strong, assertive ones, I say: let a thousand Aishas bloom!

Have you ever heard Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”?

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

As Nigerians we should be asking ourselves why the same facilities that rich Nigerians patronize abroad are impossible in Nigeria.  Where is the infrastructure and the security that would free up travel and tourism, and their freedom and jobs?  Why is our #1 airport an international shame?

Let us be clear what our real grievance is.  This Aisha may be no saint, but her preference of personal celebration is no sin against her country.  In any event, she appears determined to play a recurring part in our story.  Don’t be the hypocrite squealing in her kitchen chair, your pretentious throne smashed.