Mrs Aisha Buhari, the wife of President Muhammadu Buhari, last night set Twitter on fire when she tweeted that the Ekiti state governor, Ayodele Fayose is a ‘mad dog that isn’t chained’.
The tweet from her verified account @ABuhari had gotten hundreds of retweets but has now been deleted after many Nigerins commented saying that she should not have descended to Fayose’s level with her choice of words.
“Enough is Enough Fayose. A mad dog that isn’t chained. I refuse to keep quiet,” the President’s wife posted on her verified Twitter handle.
“If Buhari is 73 years old, I Aisha am 45 years old. I have more than enough energy to face you”.
The two tweets have now disappeared from her account.
Aisha had rebuked Fayose for linking her with Halliburton scandal and a former US House of Reps member, William Jefferson.
It all started after the EFCC blocked Fayose’s private account at Zenith Bank.
In an off-target reaction, Fayose alleged that President Muhammadu Buhari and his family members are not saints after all.
” Even the President cannot claim to be an angel. The estate he built in Abuja is known to us. His wife was indicted over the Halliburton Scandal. When that American, Jefferson, was being sentenced, the President’s wife was mentioned as having wired $170,000 to Jefferson. Her name was on page 25 of the sentencing of Jefferson. We can serialize the judgment for people to see and read,” Fayose’s press secretary, Idowu Adelusi said.
In an earlier reaction, Nigeria’s Presidency dismissed as “laughable’’ the attempt by Gov. Ayo Fayose of Ekiti to link President Buhari’s wife, Aisha, to US Congressman William Jefferson’s bribery scandal for which the American lawmaker was convicted in 2009.
Malam Garba Shehu, Senior Special Assistant (SSA) to the President on Media and Publicity, said this in a statement issued in Abuja on Tuesday.
He said that ordinarily the presidency would have ignored Fayose because “he is a man childishly obsessed with the desire to grab the headlines and insulting people at will because of his incurably boorish instincts.’’
He said that the presidency chose to respond on this occasion for the sake of innocent Nigerians who might be misled by Fayose’s “shameless and blatant distortion of facts.’’
Shehu said:
“Ignoring Fayose carries the risk of giving traction and credibility to outright and brazen falsehoods inconsistent with the status of anybody that calls himself a governor or leader.’’
The SSA explained that Aisha had no direct, indirect or the remotest connection with William Jefferson’s corruption scandal in the United States.
He challenged Fayose to tell Nigerians “if the so-called Aisha whose pictures he proudly, but ignorantly shared, was the same Aisha married to President Muhammadu Buhari.’’
He also challenged Fayose to tell Nigerians “if the Aisha of his idle imagination had any relationship by blood or any relationship in whatever form with the President Buhari’s wife.’’
Shehu further challenged Fayose to produce evidence from the records of investigation and subsequent trial of Jefferson to prove that Buhari’s wife was in anyway linked to the scandal.
He said, “common names alone are not enough to automatically link innocent people to crimes or scandals, especially in an era of identity thieves.’’
The SSA called on Fayose to show proof when and where Aisha Buhari was invited for interrogation in connection with William Jefferson’s bribery scandal, let alone indicted for a crime locally or abroad.
He said that free speech does not entitle Fayose to falsely accuse innocent people of crimes they knew nothing about.
He warned that Aisha Buhari was entitled to protect her reputation from being recklessly maligned, adding that “political opposition is not a licence to attack people’s reputation brazenly without legal consequences.’’
