Mallam Garba Shehu, former Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to ex-President Muhammadu Buhari, has disclosed that the story claiming rats invaded the Presidential Villa was fabricated to draw attention away from Buhari’s health issues.
In his new book, According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience,” which was launched in Abuja on Tuesday, the former presidential spokesman said he deliberately crafted the Villa rat invasion story to mitigate public anxiety about Buhari’s capacity to govern.
During his first term as president, Buhari had returned to Nigeria on August 19, 2017 after spending close to three months undergoing medical treatment in the United Kingdom.
Doubts about his ability to govern were further fueled with the announcement from the Presidency upon his return that he would be working from home instead of his office at the State House.
Read Also: AGF seeks adequate protection for whistleblowers
In a chapter of Shehu’s book titled ‘Rats, Spin and All That’, Garba Shehu revealed that the situation became a serious concern for him after Buhari’s Social Media aide, Bashir Ahmad, announced on Twitter (now X) that the former President had returned but would be working from home.
He said: “So in the few hours of the president’s return, I picked up a conversation in the office of the CoS (Chief of Staff), 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 might 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 recalled that the story about rodents invading the Presidential Villa instantly went viral, even ranking among the top five news items on the BBC World News bulletin.
“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 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.”