The Former Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to ex-President Muhammadu Buhari, Garba Shehu has said that the story about rats invading the Presidential Villa was a distraction to cover PMB’s health issues.
Shehu recently revealed that he made up the false story to divert attention from Buhari’s health and capacity to rule.
In his book titled, “According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience,” Chapter 10 to be precise, he shared that the President’s health challenge called for concern after Bashir Ahmad, PMB’s social media aide, announced that Buhari was back in the country but would be working from home.
According to him, it all started when he and other officers noticed damage to a cable at the Villa, a fault that someone immediately guessed might have been caused by rats who took over an office that wasn’t in use for a long time.
Garba stated that the rat story eventually came in handy when Nigerians started questioning why the president was working from home if he had truly recovered from his sickness.
“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,” he wrote.
He further noted that the rodent story became so popular that it went as far as ranking among the top five news items on the BBC World News bulletin.
Shehu concluded by saying that while the spin succeeded at the time, Lai Mohammed and Yemi Osinbajo thought it was too much.
“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,” he added.
