In the shoes of Mufti Balarabe Musa

Readers of this newspaper couldn’t have missed the fatwa (religious ruling) offered by Malam Balaraba Musa, on the cabal controversy between President Muhammadu Buhari and his wife Aisha. While speaking to our reporters, as published in the Daily Trust of Thursday this week, he opined that the controversy was totally un-islamic.

Spoken like a true mufti (a Muslim scholar well-versed in religious injunctions) the former Kaduna state governor said the presidential spat was wrong: ‘I dismissed it as unislamic and not in the culture of Islam because you don’t expect this to happen between leaders, husbands and wives and even between friends.’

Yet when asked to advise the First Couple on the way forward, he said there are other national leaders more credible than him to give them advice. And this is where I disagree with the elder statesman. Though he was the first Nigerian governor to be impeached, it is well known that he was a victim of political intrigues because he headed a government whose legislature was filled with members of the opposition party, NPN; which additionally was the government at the Federal level.

Over the years, his disdain for corruption and self-aggrandisement, as shown by his ascetic lifestyle, have served to prove that he was indeed an honest politician and a selfless leader. In fact, over twenty years ago, when my husband and I found ourselves at a dinner table with late Malam Aminu Kano’s biographer, the American Alan Feinstein, Balarabe Musa’s name was the first choice when Mrs Feinstein asked if any Nigerian politician was emulating the exemplary Aminu Kano.

This is why I disagree with him that there is anyone more credible than him to give advice on marital harmony or leadership responsibilities. But since he has turned down the chance to play marriage counselor to Mr and Mrs PMB, I would like to step into his gigantic shoes, despite my lack of qualification to do so.

In my borrowed robes, I will direct my intervention largely to the First Lady, not because the President is too high up for me to advice, but because the cabal issue was triggered by her and the President’s response had been a case study in maturity. He simply said to the VOA reporter ‘That’s her business’ when reminded that like his detractors, she also said that he was being controlled by a cabal.

I would like to remind our dear First Lady, that in this part of the world,  the first thing a young bride is told by her elders, before she’s taken to her husband’s house is ‘to hear no evil and to see no evil’ regarding her new life. In Hausa ‘ki ji, ki qi ji, ki gani ki qi gani’.

No one would therefore expect someone who was cautioned to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to her husband’s personal shortcomings, almost thirty years ago, to now go public with what she perceived to be his official weaknesses. If indeed the president is being tele-guided by people who do not mean him well, who are so averse to progress that they make him achieve in three years what he could have achieved in one, then the public domain is not where she needs to warn him about them. It is at the home front, in ‘the other room’ or through close relations who could talk to him without making it seem like criticism.

If all these didn’t work, then as a mother to a number of adult children, some of them married, Mrs Buhari could have urged them to go and advice their father against listening to or keeping company with so and so because that person is selfish or not a patriotic Nigerian.

Though many husbands aren’t good at listening to their wives, that can’t be said of most fathers. Modern fathers keep company with their children a lot and listen to their suggestions and complaints. All Mrs Buhari needed to do was to tell her adult children to sit with their father and advice him that he must not soil his past track record of integrity and hard work by associating with certain people. And he must keep in mind the legacy he wanted to be remembered by so that he should listen to only those who will help him achieve that good legacy.

But to come before a group of party supporters and claim that your husband is a puppet on the strings of a few individuals, is to disqualify him for a future role in that seat. It does not matter that there may be truth in what you said, the fact that you said it in the public arena, where nothing can be gained by the pronouncement is what makes it wrong.

Some American media had reported that in the week the affair between President Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky became public, First Lady Hillary was so heartbroken she had to leave Washington and spend the weekend with her mother at their home state. Yet when she reemerged and was asked her views about the affair, she simply said that her husband was the victim of a right-wing conspiracy and showed that she was not ready to criticise him.

Even when the issue dragged on and Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives, Mrs Clinton didn’t change her stand on the subject. Her husband eventually retained his seat because the Senate couldn’t garner enough votes to ratify the impeachment.

The lesson of this anecdote is that loyal wives stand by their men through thick and thin, especially if they are men in the public eye, because dragging them down means dragging yourself down. And like the saying goes you don’t stab yourself with a knife and start to sing your own praises.

And this is my contribution to the presidential cabal crisis. I hope Malam Balarabe Musa will forgive me for borrowing his mouth to eat onions, as the Hausa proverb goes.