The Concourse – 22.07.2025
By Soney Antai
Garba’s garbage rat story
One of the toughest jobs around is being a spokesman for an individual, corporate entity, or government. The job becomes tougher when the spokesman’s principal is avowedly low-flying pleonectic, defective, or kakistocratic. Sadly, many spokesmen are working for such principals.
Now, here’s the point. Each time the principal goofs, as they often do, the spokesperson is either blamed for not preventing a bad press, or they are required to embark on a damage control of an untoward situation, which often times backfires. The implicature is that defending the principal becomes a beholden stressful task.
By now, many have read former Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to late President Muhammadu Buhari, Garba Shehu, saying that the yarn he spun that rats had invaded Buhari’s office in the Villa was falsehood he created deliberately. Shehu revealed this during the launch of his book, According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience, on Tuesday, 8th July 2025, in Abuja.
Before the beatified Buhari returned to Nigeria, 19 August, 2017, after nearly three months of medical treatment in London, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, had alleged that Buhari had died and had been, in a high wired conspiracy, replaced with a Jibril from Sudan. The claim had gone viral, prompting some Nigerians to question whether the man who returned to the country as their president was indeed Buhari or his clone, as Kanu claimed.
In Chapter 10 of his book, “Rats, Spin and All That,” Garba Shehu revealed that he was so worried when Buhari’s social media aide, Bashir Ahmad, announced on Twitter that his principal had returned, but would be working from home. “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. 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.”
Incredulous reporters, according to Garba, asked to know the kind of rats that would invade the president’s office and drive him away from there. To keep them off his back, Garba went to the garbage dump and grabbed a phantom story. “I referred them to the strange rats that invaded the country in the 1980s during the rice armada that came here aboard ships.” Then, thankfully, he narrated, “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.”
But why did Garba cook up this cock and bull yackety-yak? “… 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.”
In his view, “that spin succeeded.” Really? He just said that many critics disagreed with him and that only “an insignificant few believed” him! Such is the confusion that often attends a spokesman’s night soil man’s role trying to protect, promote, and preserve the image of their principals. Garba showed no remorse for lying to the nation, and who knows how many other lies he had he told, just to protect a self-absorbed, sectional, and sectarian ruler?
However, Shehu should not be crucified for this crooked joke he played on the country; after all, politics in Nigeria has become a word nearest in meaning to dishonesty. The lesson here is that whenever you hear a government spokesman defend a position, begin to look in the opposite direction. In some other climes, it is not a crime for a president to disclose his ailment and the cost of treatment thereof. Our power elite brag about their investment in health, but when they fall ill, they run to foreign lands. Why don’t they seek treatment in their top-notch hospitals in the country? Do they ever ask themselves why other national leaders don’t come to Nigeria for medical treatment? Well, my buddy from Spain tells me, “que será, será” (what will be will be). Even in London and Paris, the Grim Reaper remains on duty 24/7/366.