Former President Muhammadu Buhari’s spokesman, Garba Shehu, has explained why he alleged that rats invaded the Presidential Villa in 2017.
Shehu said he planted the story to distract the public from Buhari’s ill-health and inability to resume his duties following his resumption after a period of absence due to sickness.
The former Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to Buhari disclosed this in his just launched book, ‘According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience’.
In Chapter 10 of the book, titled, ‘Rats, Spin and All That’, Shehu said an issue broke out after a fellow media aide, Bashir Ahmad, announced that Buhari has returned to Nigeria and would be working from home.
Shehu said: “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.
“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.”;
