In a startling revelation that pulls back the curtain on the inner workings of Aso Rock, former First Lady Aisha Buhari has disclosed that a powerful clique within the presidency poisoned her husband’s mind against her, leading the late President Muhammadu Buhari to physically lock her out of his room.
These explosive details are contained in the newly launched book, “From Soldier to Statesman: The Legacy of Muhammadu Buhari,” written by Dr. Charles Omole and presented on Monday at the State House Conference Centre, Abuja.
According to the book, the former First Lady explained that her husband’s 2017 health crisis was not the result of a mysterious ailment or poisoning, but rather stemmed from a long history of malnutrition exacerbated by the mismanagement of his dietary routine by his close aides.
The trouble began, she recounts, when the machinery of the presidency took over their private lives. Aisha Buhari detailed a critical meeting with key staff: “When the presidency’s machinery took over their private lives, she says, she sat with his close personal staff (the physician, the CSO, the housekeeper) and even the Director-General of the DSS in a final meeting.
She explained the plan: daily, at specific hours, cups and bowls with tailored vitamin powders and oils, a touch of protein here, a change to cereals there. Elderly bodies require gentle, consistent support.”
She recalled her specific instructions to them: “We are sitting for the first and the last,” she remembers saying. “He doesn’t have a chronic illness. At this age, you care for them like a child, immune systems are not the same. Add this, remove that. Keep him on schedule.” She explained her long-standing role in managing his malnutrition symptoms with supplements in Kaduna before their move to the Villa.
However, the narrative took a dark turn as palace intrigue set in. The book reveals how staff began to sow discord. “Then, in her account, came the gossip and the fear mongering. These same personal staff began planting ideas and suspicions into her husband’s mind. ‘They said I wanted to kill him.’ She sounds more wounded than angry when she recalls it, but the decisions that followed were not neutral.”
The psychological impact on the President was immediate and profound. “My husband believed them, for a week or so,” she says. “He started locking his room, changed small habits.”
Simultaneously, the crucial dietary regimen collapsed. “And the kitchen, the heart of the routine, went off script. Meals were delayed or missed, the suppliments (used for years, she says) were stopped.”
The physical toll was severe. Aisha Buhari noted that her husband, already slender, began to waste away. “For a year, he did not have lunch,” she revealed. “He maintained a routine. They mismanaged his meals.”
The conflict centered on ownership of the President’s well-being. Aisha claims she was overruled because she was told Buhari was now “State Property” and not just her personal husband. Consequently, “her regime was overruled, and his Villa personal team (and their backers) went on a frolic of their own.”
Dispelling rumors of assassination attempts, Aisha Buhari insisted her husband was not poisoned nor suffering from an exotic fever. Instead, his compromised nutrition was the culprit. She vindicated her approach by noting that when Buhari was eventually rushed to London, the doctors prescribed an even stronger regime of the very supplements she had been advocating for all along.
