TheCable

Garba Shehu, senior special assistant to the president on media and publicity, says Ayodele Fayose, Ekiti state governor, is “childishly” obsessed with being in the news.

Shehu was reacting to Fayose’s statement regarding a bribery scandal involving a certain Aisha Buhari and William Jefferson, US congressman.

The governor had claimed that the wife of President Muhammadu Buhari was the one indicted in the Halliburton scandal.

But the presidency dismissed the claim, saying it was laughable.

“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,” Shehu said in a statement.

He said the presidency decided to respond only so “innocent Nigerians…might not be misled by Mr. Fayose’s shameless and blatant distortion of facts”, adding that silence might cause the allegations to gain “traction and credibility”.

Shehu denied that the president’s wife, Aisha, has links with the William Jefferson’s corruption scandal in the United States.

He said the pictures of the said Aisha looked nothing close to the president’s wife or any of his blood relatives.

Shehu asked Fayose “to produce evidence from the records of investigation and subsequent trial of Jefferson to prove that Mr. Buhari’s wife Aisha was in anyway linked to that scandal”.

The spokesman said “political opposition was not a licence to attack people’s reputation brazenly without legal consequences”, adding that the president’s wife is “entitled to protect her reputation from being recklessly maligned”.