“You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally, twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come out of it” –Benjamin  Mee

By CHIDI OBINECHE

Related News

In a loud and resounding blast last week, Aisha, delectable wife of President Muammadu Buhari went on the flaming path and began ‘counting the rats in the hidden shrub’. It was like a leafy dance in the spine of stakes. She pointedly accused her husband of running his government sans the men and women who had endured the grime and sweat of the jungle.
The stirrings in her heart rolled in a twanging sensation the grounding and digging of the toughening hide of issues that have dogged the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC since assuming power on May 29, 2015. Her outburst, on the Hausa Service of British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, left a gaping emptiness in one’s belly.
It was a sane hate of a running and vicious cabal “of two or three men” that have allegedly seized the government by the jugular with throttled callousness and sloppiness that made the government a barren reaper. It was nothing fresh. Indeed it has festered with a disdain, which many balk at and scorn as scum.  But the unlikelihood of the mouthpiece of the vituperation in the president’s wife shook many heads in the fashion of an irritated horse whisking off flies from its impatient mane. She spanned many fanged- disaster on the rain of life of this regime.
Aisha is an unusual combatant; a stranger in an impotent rage. Her husband opened more vista on the slab with his chilling, dry-as-dust response that “my wife belongs in the kitchen, the living room and other room”. It dripped in misogyny. Pronto, the exchanges opened a floodgate of perfumed responses and stirred bones in the graveyards. Wet fear, trepidation and anger rolled in the land like a fiesta. You cannot kill an only child and put the mother in a madding house.
Some dismissed the episode as a chicken story, an old wives tale of a storm less ocean in a starlit night. But it served to moisten the hive of the political space; the baobab of the market place. Her words climbed the tree of wisdom, fed multitudes with fruits of thought and planted the polity with potent seeds in the soft sands of the streamside. Like a priestess before the grove, supplicating, Aisha sought help for her husband. It was the carcass of truth buried in subtle threat, and ferried by the velvet feathers of the dove. Her husband’s retort choked the global nose with putrid fart, putting the penis below the scrotum. This is the clarion of the gong; the spinner and the spindle.
Aisha was born on February 17, 1971 in Adamawa State. He grandfather, Muhammadu Ribadu was Nigeria’s first minister of defence, while her dad was a civil engineer. She attended primary and secondary schools in Adamawa State, before leaving for the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, ABU where she graduated with a degree in Public Administration, and later a Master’s in International Affairs and Strategic Studies from the Nigeria Defence Academy, NDA, Kaduna.
She also has a diploma in Beauty Therapy from the Calton Institute of Beauty Therapy, Windsor, UK . She holds a Post-graduate Diploma in Cosmetology and Beauty from Academy Esthetique Beauty Institute of France. She was the founder and managing director of  Hanzy Spa and principal of Hanzy  Beauty Institute situated in Kaduna and Abuja. She was a resource person to the National Basic Technical Education (NBTE) on Beauty Therapy and Cosmetology and participated on curriculum development of small and medium enterprises for NBTE.  The president’s wife is the author of “Essentials of Beauty Therapy: A complete guide for beauty specialists. On December 2, 1989 she married Buhari and they have five children.