“I made up rat invasion story to hide Buhari’s illness from Nigerians” – Garba Shehu confesses
Garba Shehu, former Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to ex-President Muhammadu Buhari, has confessed that the viral 2017 story about rats invading the Presidential Villa was fabricated to divert public attention from Buhari’s health issues.
In his newly released book, According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience, launched on Tuesday in Abuja, Shehu detailed the events that led to what he described as a calculated media strategy to manage growing public concern over the president’s prolonged absence for medical treatment.
The incident occurred shortly after President Buhari returned to Nigeria on August 19, 2017, after spending nearly three months in the United Kingdom receiving medical treatment.
At the time, the presidency announced that Buhari would be working from home due to “damage to his office caused by rats.”
Public tension was already high then, especially after controversial claims by Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), who alleged that Buhari had died and had been replaced by a Sudanese clone.
In Chapter 10 of the book, titled “Rats, Spin and All That,” Shehu explained how the rat story was created.
According to him, the idea emerged during a casual lunch conversation among top government officials.
“So in the few hours of the president’s return, I picked up a conversation in the office of the CoS (Chief of Staff), 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,” Shehu wrote.
“Someone speculated that rats may have caused that damage, given that the office was unused for a long time.”
As pressure from the media mounted, with journalists questioning why Buhari wasn’t using his office if he was truly healthy, Shehu acted quickly.
“When the surge in calls for explanation of why the president would be working from home, if truly he had recovered his health and was fit for 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.”
The statement instantly went viral, drawing both ridicule and global media attention. Shehu recalled that the story made it into BBC World News’ top five stories.
“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,” he wrote.
“As was known of them, in their destructiveness, those rats ate just anything anyone could imagine. 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.”
However, not everyone within the administration bought the excuse. Shehu revealed that he was confronted by then-Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.
“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,” Shehu recalled.
“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.”
