ABUJA — Dr. Aisha Buhari, the former first lady, claims that her late husband, President Muhammadu Buhari, had a lengthy history of malnutrition, which had an impact on his health during his presidency.
She added that the former president began closing the door to his room to keep her out after some influential people who worked for him poisoned his mind against her.
These and other things were included in Dr. Charles Omole’s book “From Soldier to Statesman: The Legacy of Muhammadu Buhari,” which was released on Monday at the State House Conference Center in Abuja.
The former president’s wife was quoted in the book as saying that her husband’s health crisis in 2017 was not the result of a secret conspiracy or an unexplained illness.
According to her, it started with the loss of a routine; ‘my nutrition,’ which she described as a pattern of meals and suppliments she had long overseen in Kaduna before they moved into Aso Villa.
The book further said: “When the presidency’s machinery took over their private lives, she says, she sat with his close personal staff (the physician, the CSO, the housekeeper) and even the Director-General of the DSS in a final meeting. She explained the plan: daily, at specific hours, cups and bowls with tailored vitamin powders and oils, a touch of protein here, a change to cereals there. Elderly bodies require gentle, consistent support.”
It added: ‘We are sitting for the first and the last,’ she remembers saying. ‘He doesn’t have a chronic illness. At this age, you care for them like a child, immune systems are not the same. Add this, remove that. Keep him on schedule. She explained to them her husband’s long battle with malnutrition symptoms and how she hasd been using suppliments to balance his dietary intake for many years.
Then, in her account, came the gossip and the fear mongering. These same personal staff began planting ideas and suspicions into her husband’s mind. ‘They said I wanted to kill him.’ She sounds more wounded than angry when she recalls it, but the decisions that followed were not neutral.
“Perhaps these were not ordinary actions, she wondered. “My husband believed them, for a week or so,” she says. ‘He started locking his room, changed small habits.’ And the kitchen, the heart of the routine, went off script. Meals were delayed or missed, the suppliments (used for years, she says) were stopped.”
It was stated that Buhari, who was a slender man and rarely ate much, even in better times, began to lose weight. ‘For a year, he did not have lunch,’ Aisha says.
