Garba Shehu: Aso Villa rat invasion story was a ruse to divert attention from Buhari’s illness

Garba Shehu, a former presidential spokesperson, says the statement about a rat invasion of ex-President Muhammadu Buhari’s office at the State House, Abuja, in 2017 was made up to divert attention from his health challenges.

Shehu made the startling revelation in his book titled ‘According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience,’ launched in Abuja on Tuesday.

In 2017, during his first term as president, Buhari spent several months abroad receiving treatment for an undisclosed illness.

Buhari stayed away from his main office for over two months and worked from home instead when he returned from his medical trip in the United Kingdom (UK).

While defending his principal’s decision to work from outside his office at the time, Shehu said the edifice was undergoing renovation because of “devastation by rodents”.

“Following the three-month period of disuse, rodents have caused a lot of damage to the furniture and the air conditioning units,” he said at the time.

However, in chapter 10 of his new book, Shehu said he sold the rat invasion narrative to Nigerians following a barrage of enquiries about the former president’s health.

“So, in the few hours of the president’s return, I picked up a conversation in the office of the CoS, 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,” Shehu wrote.

“Someone speculated that rats may 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.

“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 (journalists) 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.”