The first family and that of President Muhammadu Buhari’s aides had been at war in Aso Rock long before details of acrimony started seeping out to the open.
A recent video clip has set Aisha Buhari and her sisters-in-law making claims and counter claims over an incident in which the first lady apparently stamped her foot as the matron of the presidential villa.
“This is the villa. We have over 200 soldiers guarding us, over 200 policemen. Why do you have to lock this door? What for, what for? Enough is enough. Let me know when you are leaving this place, let me know,” she admitted saying this in the viral video.
The she told the BBC on Monday how Buhari sacked Mamman Daura, an aide and member of the so-called cabal, from an apartment re-allocated to Aisha’s son that got in an accident in 2017.
“It was Fatima, the daughter of Mamman Daura that shot the video in front of my security and everybody there. She was actually recording the whole thing right in front of me and was laughing and mocking me.
“They did that because my husband sacked them from the house. He told them to get all their belongings and leave the house for my son (Yusuf) to occupy.
“I left them and wanted to get to one of the rooms but they prevented me from getting through, I left them and took another way yet I met the store locked,” she added.
But one of Mamman’s daughters involved in the stand-off denied mocking or blocking the first lady. And the president never sacked them.
According to her, she recorded the video as evidence in case anything happened—because Aisha was raging and cursing and threatening and smashing things.
“Our dad stayed there for three years now until when the president’s son, Yusuf, had an accident and went to Germany for treatment,” said Fatima in another BBC interview.
“When he returned, the president told our dad to move out of that apartment to an even bigger one in the villa, that Yusuf is going to stay and be treated in the Glass House. The Glass House is closer to the main presidential apartment and that will make easier access to him by his mother. It is not in her apartment, which is in the main apartment.”
She said they planned to park out then and have even concluded moving all the things until the afternoon when they heard noise from outside.
“I was in an inner room in the house while my sister was in an outer one close to the main gate of the apartment. So my sister went out before I could come out.
“On getting there, it was the wife of the president. When she came, the door was locked and she picked a metal chair and broke the door. I have sent the picture to you. My sister that went out was almost hit by the chair. She threw the chair which broke through the door and almost hit my sister.
“I was so shocked and afraid of getting there because she was shouting and reigning abuses words and saying we should move out of that apartment. That she has never seen this kind of thing before. I then went back and picked my phone because if one is to say that she acted that way, no one would believe it without a proof. She has already been saying a lot of things depicting that she is being suppressed.
“So I recorded it to show our parents and the security, so that they will know the truth should anything happen. Because the way she was raging and shouting, I was thinking that she would pick something and hit us with it or something like that. That was why we recorded it. Had it been we wanted to release the video, we would have done it earlier. But you know if a video clip enters one or two hands, you can’t control where it will get to.
“There are even other clips that have not been released, I will send them to you to see how she was insulting the security and how she drove them away saying who are they protecting and calling them bloody idiots. It’s all on the video clip. That was what happened.”
It’s public knowledge that Aisha doesn’t spare the Aso Rock cabal in her public diatribe whenever she takes on issues in her husband’s administration.
Her statements most time even serve as fodder for the opposition PDP and critics to fire the the president and his party APC.
Many have considered the adversarial role she played in public as a vent for domestic bitterness penned up in a jealous wife.