By Femi Odere
It is now a little over a year that President Muhammadu Buhari and his wife, Aisha, have been in the nation’s consciousness. Not a few Nigerians are wondering how they are able to live such unblemished lives in a society where your upward mobility on the socio-economic and political fronts has direct correlation to how morally bankrupt, criminally minded and fantastically corrupt you are.
Just as Buhari continues the socio-economic re-engineering of the polity in accordance with his electoral mandate, thereby changing the way the Nigerian people think about governance, there’s also a tectonic shift in the way Nigerians now look at the wife of their president. In deference to her husband after the president said that the Office of the First Lady was not known to the country’s constitution, Mrs. Aisha Buhari is comfortable with simply being called “the wife of the president.”
From this officially humble beginning, Mrs. Buhari started her own quiet ‘revolution.’ Mrs. Buhari’s interventions in the lives of everyday Nigerians, though tremendously significant, are not what would normally generate sensational headlines. But, as her husband continues to do the heavy lifting in his old age in remaking a new and saner Nigeria, a paradigm shift is taking shape in how Nigerians look at the First Lady.
It will probably take Nigerians a little more time to realise and understand the essence, grace, dignity and ‘soft power’ that Mrs. Buhari brought into the Presidential Villa in order to complement her husband’s office. The virtues inherent in Mrs. Buhari are not what Nigerians are used to. For decades, we have been familiar with the president’s wife being more powerful than her husband that cabinet members would rather see the First Lady first on their way to the office of the President. They are used to seeing the First Lady leading the country’s First Citizen into the presidential aircraft on their way to a foreign land. On getting there, she would also be the first to emerge from the aircraft. The welcoming officials would be momentarily confused as to who the real president was.
For a little over a year that Mrs. Buhari has become a public figure, she has positively impacted the lives of those Nigerians who may have already given up hope on the improvement of their conditions. Her several humanitarian interventions have been timely and specifically-targeted at the critical needs of the vulnerable people in society who had encountered heart-wrenching and life-threatening challenges through no fault of theirs. These include wives of soldiers fighting the Boko Haram insurgency, pregnant women, Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), and orphanage children among others. In cases where the benefits of these interventions must extend to thousands of people, the First Lady had partnered with other professional bodies. Perhaps, the “Future Assured Medical Outreach” programme under the auspices of her “Future Assured Initiative, will probably go down as the most important undertaking of her many humanitarian intervention programmes.
The Future Assured Medical Outreach is a country-wide medical intervention that caters for women and their dependants. First launched in Nasarawa State, this life-saving and life-enhancing medical outreach has taken its benefits to several states of the federation including Adamawa, Cross River, Enugu, Oyo, Katsina, Ogun, and Kebbi where hundreds of thousands of women and children were beneficiaries.
On January 2016, Mrs. Buhari was at the 44 Army Reference Hospital in Kaduna to see soldiers on admission who sustained various degrees of injuries in the fight against the Boko Haram insurgency. She used the occasion to appeal to the Nigerian Army authorities to ensure prompt payment of entitlements to families of deceased soldiers who lost their lives in the warfront in order to alleviate the suffering of the loved ones they left behind.
Several gifts were given to wounded soldiers, pregnant and nursing women in the Accident /Emergency and Obstetrics/Gynaecology wards. On December 2015, Mrs. Buhari was at the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) at the Dalori Camp in Maiduguri where more than 21,000 victims of the insurgency live.
She donated food items such as rice, semovita, cooking oil, seasonings, plastics, milk and fruit juice. She said she would continue to assist IDPs by donating essential items to reduce their suffering. On September 2015, the wife of the president was in Calabar in Cross River State where she donated nutritional supplement—the Frisomum Gold brand— to more than 250,000 expectant and nursing mothers who were randomly drawn to avoid any misinterpretation of political undertone of favouritism.
The Frisomum supplement is an alternative to breast milk. Several thousands of the Islamic faith had reasons to offer special thanks to their Creator in the just concluded Eid-El-Fitri celebration for sending a kind-hearted Mrs. Buhari their way with foodstuff and other non-edible gift items that were distributed in sixteen states of the federation.
Musa is a 20-month old toddler who was badly mutilated by his two stepmothers who broke his legs, hands as well as caused injuries to his private part and tongue. On hearing about the barbaric acts meted out to this sinless baby, Mrs. Buhari had him brought to Abuja where she had him taken to Crest Hospital in the Federal Capital Territory for treatment. Injuries that could have caused permanent and irreversible damage to his health and wellbeing, if not death, were treated.
*Odere writes from Lagos.