Former First Lady, Aisha Buhari, has delivered her most pointed critique yet of a key shortcoming of the Muhammadu Buhari administration, warning President Bola Tinubu not to repeat what she described as the costly mistake of retaining underperforming officials.
Gatekeepers News reports that her remarks are contained in From Soldier to Statesman: The Legacy of Muhammadu Buhari, a new book by Dr. Charles Omole, launched at the Presidential Villa.
In the book, Aisha Buhari attributes the former president’s reluctance to remove non-performing appointees to a combination of ageing, fear of public backlash and emotional manipulation by close associates. She said Buhari often hesitated out of sympathy for struggling officials.
“As you age, performance changes,” she noted, adding that Buhari frequently felt sorry for appointees who were failing in their duties.
According to her, a deeper factor was Buhari’s fear of being labelled a dictator again. “If I remove him, they will say I am this and that,” she quoted him as saying.
That fear, she argued, gradually became a shield for mediocrity, with the saying “the devil you know” turning into an excuse for keeping failing officials in office even as policy implementation stalled.
Aisha Buhari said her own benchmark was straightforward: if an official “eats” but delivers at least 50 per cent, he could be tolerated; but if he “eats” and delivers nothing, “remove him.”
She disclosed that the family quietly agreed that Buhari’s refusal to sack non-performers became a structural weakness of his administration, compounded by advisers and relatives who used flattery, emotional pressure and deliberate delays to protect allies from accountability.
She also recounted an incident in which security officials advised her to temporarily leave Abuja for Daura to allow investigations into some close associates to proceed unhindered. She refused. Shortly after, she said Buhari became emotionally withdrawn, “speaking less” and “eating less.”
Even after leaving office, she claimed Buhari privately asked President Tinubu not to probe some of his kinsmen because he still depended on them for personal needs. For her, the episode illustrated “the danger of emotional dependence at the top of power.”
Aisha Buhari revisited Buhari’s controversial Berlin remark — “She belongs to my kitchen… and the other room” — describing it as barracks humour that misfired on a global stage. The problem, she said, was not the joke itself but making it beside former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, where gender stereotypes are interpreted as policy positions. She added that the comment never limited her influence. “Power doesn’t seek permission,” she said.
Away from politics, she dismissed speculation about remarriage, saying one husband was enough. She said her current focus is philanthropy, particularly the cardiac and metabolic centre in Kano, which she noted has carried out more than 200 procedures, helping to reduce dependence on medical tourism.
She framed her reflections as lessons for President Tinubu and future leaders: set boundaries early, separate family from state, confront incompetence immediately and do not govern by fear of public opinion.
To underscore the cost of hesitation, she recalled that within a week of Buhari’s 2015 election victory, security officials informed her that half of her convoy had been reassigned to a powerful relative. Her response, she said, was firm: reverse it within five minutes or return to headquarters. “It was reversed.”
“That intervention was not about vehicles,” she said, “it was about preventing capture before it becomes culture.”
Aisha Buhari stressed that her comments were not driven by spite or revenge but by a desire for honest lessons. She said both Buhari’s legacy and Tinubu’s presidency would benefit from confronting the dangers of weak boundaries and excessive loyalty.
“In the end,” she reflected, “discipline became a vulnerability, loyalty became a commodity, and silence became a policy.”
