•Exposes secrecy, medical missteps
Former First Lady, Aisha Buhari, has given an insider account of life inside Nigeria’s most fortified residence, Aso Rock, alleging exclusion, whispered manipulation and medical missteps during Muhammadu Buhari’s eight-year presidency.
She claimed that individuals close to the President planted recording devices in private rooms, effectively turning living quarters into listening posts.
Confidential conversations, she alleged, were harvested and relayed to a small circle of power-brokers who used the information to heighten suspicion and tighten their control of presidential access.
She insists this was not authorised security work but an informal intelligence system run by people who viewed surveillance as personal leverage.
The result, she said, was the erosion of trust within the First Family and a widening gulf between the President and anyone outside the privileged inner ring.
Her testimony forms a key part of From Soldier to Statesman: The Legacy of Muhammadu Buhari, authored by Dr Charles Omole and recently presented to the public inside the banquet hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
What emerges is a portrait of a presidency shaped as much by unelected courtiers as by constitutional authority. According to Aisha, the moment Buhari transitioned from opposition to power in 2015, the hierarchy around him was reset. Women who campaigned alongside her vanished from the Villa, and access became transactional.
She recalls seeing a ministerial list outside Abuja and realising “the circle had tightened” and that her own partnership with Buhari carried little institutional weight.
She said proximity was commandeered by men who styled themselves as interpreters of the president’s will, and gatekeepers against his wife. She refuses to treat the term cabal as rumour. Instead, she describes a network of elderly relatives and associates who feared her “strong character” might dilute their influence.
Her daughter, she recalls, warned early that she should reach an “arrangement” with the old guard. Aisha rejected the idea, saying she would not negotiate space with “septuagenarians.” She assumed civility and competence would prevail; she now calls that assumption naïve.
She argues that the shift affected her marriage. According to her, before office, Buhari invited criticism, discussed decisions and sometimes deferred to her judgement.
But inside the Villa, she said, he grew more insulated and increasingly dependent on a shrinking advisory circle. She maintained he disliked imposition and refused to groom a successor or commission polling ahead of 2023, believing surveys would inflame factions.
Into that vacuum, she claims, stepped relatives seeking leverage, loyalists seeking contracts and “arbiters” seeking control of his schedule.
Her husband’s health, Aisha insisted, became one of the most misunderstood aspects of Buhari’s presidency. His 154-day medical leave in London in 2017 spawned wild speculation, from organ failure to body doubles.
She dismissed such conjecture and argued instead that his deterioration began with disrupted nutrition and a breakdown in routine after Villa aides sidelined a dietary programme she claimed to have overseen for years.
She recalls convening the President’s physician, Chief Security Officer, housekeeper and the then-DG of the SSS to outline what she believed an elderly body required: scheduled meals, supplements, vitamins and rest. She says the plan was ignored.
Gossip escalated into suspicion, and advisers allegedly told Buhari that her supplements were harmful. For about a week, she claimed, he believed them: doors were locked, habits changed and vitamins stopped.
Aisha acknowledges that age and history carry their own toll. Buhari spent nearly three years in the field during the Civil War, often drenched by rain and exposed to harsh elements. Early-life smoking aggravated sensitivities, and air-conditioned offices irritated his lungs.
When his final hospitalisation came, she says doctors diagnosed pneumonia, an illness that becomes serious when ageing lungs struggle to recover. Public speculation pointed instead to cancer or leukaemia.
That uncertainty, she argues, was fuelled by her husband’s administration’s weakness in strategic communication. Silence created a vacuum, and rumour rushed in. Her account of Buhari’s final year is restrained but vivid.
