President Muhammadu Buhari has refuted claims by Ekiti governor, Mr. Ayo Fayose that his wife, and first lady of Nigeria, Aisha Buhari was named in the bribery scandal involving former US lawmaker, William Jefferson who was convicted of corruption in 2009.
In a statement by presidential spokesman on Tuesday, June 21, 2016, Mr. Garbu Shehu, Buhari dismissed the allegation by Mr. Ayo Fayose as “laughable” and called it a “desperate attempt” by Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State to link his wife, to the scandal which involved Nigeria’s former vice president, Atiku Abubakar.
The Ekiti state governor on Monday, June 20, 2016 distributed a link to the US Department of Justice’s website where court documents mentioning Aisha Buhari as one who aided the transfer of bribers to Jefferson, an American lawmaker who was convicted of corruption in 2009 and is currently serving his sentence in a US prison.
The president arrogantly dismissed the allegation saying that “ordinarily, the presidency would have ignored Fayose because he is a man “childishly obsessed with the desire to grab the headlines and insulting people at will because of his incurably boorish instincts”.
The statement said that the presidency choose to respond on this occasion for the sake of innocent Nigerians who might be misled by Fayose’s “shameless and blatant distortion of facts”.
According to the statement from the Nigerian presidency, Aisha Buhari had no direct, indirect or the remotest connection with William Jefferson’s corruption scandal in the United States.
Buhari challenged Fayose to tell Nigerians if the so-called Aisha Buhari’s whose pictures “he proudly, but ignorantly shared”, was the same Aisha Buhari married to him, or if the Aisha Buhari of his idle imagination had any relationship by blood or any relationship in whatever form, with his wife.
The statement also asked Governor Fayose to “produce evidence from the records of investigation and subsequent trial of Jefferson to prove that Buhari’s wife Aisha was in anyway linked to that scandal”.
Buhari also challenged Fayose to show proof when and where Aisha Buhari was invited for interrogation in connection with Congressman William Jefferson’s bribery scandal, let alone indicted for a crime locally or abroad.
According to the presidential spokesperson, “free speech does not entitle Governor Fayose to falsely accuse innocent people of crimes they knew nothing about”.
The statement concluded with a threat to Governor Fayose, a vocal critic of the president, saying that the president’s wife, Aisha Buhari is entitled to “protect her reputation from being recklessly maligned, adding that political opposition is not a licence to attack people’s reputation brazenly without legal consequences”.
Culled from the Trent.
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