The Presidency, on Tuesday, June 21, dismissed as “laughable”, the “desperate” attempt by the Ekiti State Governor, Ayodele Fayose, to link the wife of President Muhammadu Buhari, Aisha, to the Williams Jefferson bribery scandal in the US. Speaking in a statement in response to Fayose’s allegations, the Senior Special Assistant to President Buhari on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said the Ekiti Governor is “childishly” obsessed with being in the news.Fayose had claimed that the wife of President Muhammadu Buhari was the one indicted in the Halliburton scandal involving a certain Aisha Buhari and Jefferson, a US congressman.
“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,” Shehu said in a statement.
He said the presidency decided to respond only so “innocent Nigerians…might not be misled by Mr. Fayose’s shameless and blatant distortion of facts”, adding that silence might cause the allegations to gain “traction and credibility”. Shehu denied that the president’s wife, Aisha, has links with the Jefferson corruption scandal in the United States.
He said the pictures of the said Aisha looked nothing close to the president’s wife or any of his blood relatives. Shehu asked Fayose “to produce evidence from the records of investigation and subsequent trial of Jefferson to prove that Mr. Buhari’s wife Aisha was in anyway linked to that scandal”.
Shehu said “political opposition was not a license to attack people’s reputation brazenly without legal consequences.”
He added that the president’s wife is “entitled to protect her reputation from being recklessly maligned”.
A former Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, Chairman, Ibrahim Lamorde, had already said that there exists no links between Aisha and the Jefferson case as he personally oversaw the investigation when in came up back then.
No comments:
Post a Comment