AISHA BELONGS TO MY KITCHEN - BUHARI

Icheoku says the current firestorm generated by Aisha Buhari is an otherwise avoidable brouhaha except that the Nigerian First Lady overreached herself and must be prepared to reap the whirlwind she sowed. Icheoku says irrespective of any right she may have to freedom of expression and associated speech, she is wrong to have followed the current path she towed. Freedom of speech has necessary limitations, especially regarding matters concerning married spouses; the reason things said or done in the course of the relationship is protected privilege amongst the spouses. Aisha was wrong to have gone public and is guilty of washing the dirty laundry in public. She has just set a world record and/or broken one, if ever one existed, of a spouse of a leader berating the leader publicly. Where has that ever happened including in the United States of America, where even Crooked Hillary Clinton covered for her husband, Bill Clinton's many philandering infra digs. Query, why take the matter public when persistent pillow talks would have resolved it; but Aisha choose wrongly and decided to let the whole wide world into the private affairs of the president. 

Icheoku says there is no justification whatsoever for what Aisha did and it should be condemned in totality. The president also should not have responded to it and by now so doing and in the manner and place he did it, a foreign country Germany, did further damage to the issue by adding fuel to the inferno. A more politically savvy thing to do   would have been to wait and have the journalist raise it, wherein by he would tell them it is a purely party matter and that he will not encourage his wife to dictate or influence party policies and decisions. Further that his family life is distinct, different and distinguished from his political life and that he will not encourage nor entertain a mix up or muddling of both spheres. Then he will punt and leave the matter alone. But a President Muhammadu Buhari, who nobody actually knows who he belongs to or listens to, decided to preempt the journalists, who possibly were not even thinking about what one  Aisha said to BBC, by bringing the matter up in his prepared remarks before German Chancellor Angela Merkel. What an auspicious place to raise and discuss a wife gone rogue's outburst? 

Icheoku is not here to wade into a purely private family business or tell Buhari where his wife should belong, but this particular Aisha does not look like she actually belongs or deserves to belong to anybody's kitchen. Aisha is simply too beautiful to sweat in anybody's kitchen and therefore the president did not capture the mood correctly when he answered so plainly as he did like a commoner, not sophisticated nor steeped in well nuanced spoken words. Instead of his kitchen, President Muhammadu Buhari should consider the purdah, being the religious zealot he is and have Aisha confined and forgotten behind those high Ba-shiga walls.

Now pivoting to the real issues raised here, the rebellion of Aisha, which must be summarily put down and out before it exacerbates. Icheoku is emphatic that taking a purely private family matter public is a no, no; and should not be accommodated by any spouse from the other. For this reason therefore, any such open rebellion is tantamount to and should be treated as coup plotting or its attempt which the president must put down immediately. The president must therefore review and reconsider if indeed Aisha even belongs to his kitchen and not to some place else that is more distant and faraway from the source of his nourishment and nutrition. For the president's safety and well-being, Aisha should actually be banished from his kitchen for crying gout loud, because if she could say what she said publicly, possibly too, she is capable of any other stuff too including giving the president the Abacha apple or some anti-freeze cocktail dinner? All bets should be considered off because she thought out, prepared and planned to say exactly what she said in that interview with BBC Hausa Service. Her public criticism of the president shows that she has taken side with outsiders against the president, her husband; and if Don Michael Corleone of The Godfather's advise is of any guidance, Aisha has crossed the line and need to pay a price. Michael Corleone whacked his brother Fredo because he took sides with outsiders agains their family, which he said is a no, no, an intolerable act of betrayal.

Icheoku says on whose side is Aisha anyway? With her husband or with the newly emerging anti-Buhari forces in the APC led by Asiwaju Ahmed Bola TInubu? When who flew with her in a private helicopter and who bought her the $52,000 Cartier Baignoire Folle 18-Carat White Gold Diamond wrist watch which she wore on her husband's inauguration, then the budding conspiracy begins to take form. Sam Aluko and Wole TInubu, two very close people and confidants of Bola TInubu, allegedly did and you wonder if Aisha is now being used by this people to destabilize her husband. Nigerians watched in awe as Aisha insulted Edo women in Benin during the last election campaign, falsely claiming that Edo women in the Diaspora are prostituting in white man's land. It was a rude shock to many with knowledge to the contrary as there are several thousands of Edo women professionals abroad in practically every field including medicine, engineering, computer science, law and what have you. The fact that she has not even fulfilled her promise to assist in empowering the women of Edo State following her husband election victory is also troubling. It is also a fact that she has not apologized for that insulting remarks, yet here she is parroting her campaign contribution to her husband's victory and threatening not to campaign for her husband again in 2019. Aisha Buhari, Icheoku asks, will your husband run in 2019 after promising to be a one term president and is this a revelation of something you discussed with him? 

Icheoku laments that Aisha is an existential threat to President Buhari and his presidency. She in-fact did far more worse thing than the president's former late wife who the president divorced to marry Aisha. The former wife did not criticize nor took sides with outsiders against the president but merely accepted family support from Ibrahim Babaginda when the president was in prison and that was it. But here is Aisha taking sides with outsiders and publicly criticizing the president and also threatening to sabotage the president's second term run and/or not to campaign and vote for him again. Icheoku says this cancerous growth must be cut out now before it metastasizes into a terminal illness for the president's presidency. 

For purposes of full disclosure, Icheoku is absolutely loyal and therefore demands same from people very close within and has zero tolerance for betrayal or its likelihood. Were Icheoku the president or married to Aisha, she will pay a hefty price for that untoward interview she granted to BBC. First, Aisha should be decommissioned; put out of the bedroom and away from the kitchen or any source of president's food or beverages until further notice or until she is reeducated on her manners. Second, Aisha should be put on a timeout, barred from granting further interviews with anyone or media and made to retract her comment and apologize for being misquoted and taken out of context. Something very close to a complete lock-down, some few inches short of jail time and with security agents to keep very close watch on her around the clock. If within 48 hours she does not repent and apologize, then confine her or put her out of Aso Rock, banished to Daura. if after three weeks she still remained obstinate, divorce her and marry a much younger and more loyal wife; possibly she is grown too big and no longer good enough to be held in close confidence to the president as a trusting and loving confidante and wife. Yes, Aisha has rights and freedoms, but with every such freedom and rights, comes some limitations and she certainly violated them. 

Icheoku says regardless of Aisha being hailed as a heroine by the class of wild eyed feminists anarchists and anti functional homes activists, President Muhammadu Buhari should not let them intimidate him into inaction. He should borrow a page from former Enugu State Governor Sullivan Chime's book on wife discipline and mete out to Aisha the Clara treatment. Aisha deserves to be put out in the cold in order for her to learn a bitter lesson that family matters is better discussed during pillow talk hours and not aired public. The president must act in order to reestablish and reassert himself and show a serious frown against such disrespect and challenge to his authority. If he doesn't, he will forever and throughout his presidency compromise himself before everyone; especially now that Aisha's faux pas has put him in such a bad light as not being in charge of his presidency. Even if he acts now by firing some people in his government, Nigerians will think he acted because Aisha went public and if he does not and things continue their downward trend, people will say if only he had acted on Aisha's remarks.  What a position no one wants to be placed in especially not by one's spouse. 

An affront of some sort, which were Aisha a soldier could warrant her being court-marshaled for planning a coup or even an attempted coup, a treason. The president must take a sledge hammer to Aisha and decisively crush her rebellion and send a strong message to her instigators and co-conspirators that such disloyalty would not be tolerated under his watch. Icheoku says President Muhammadu Buhari must bravely put Aisha out of commission for being a renegade and an anti-president wife of a president. What an irony that the enemy is within one's household, the enemy within is the most dangerous enemy for anyone to worry about. Like with any other rebellion, Aisha's rebellion should be met with a crushing blow and crushed speedily in order to avoid further possibly snowballing and/or revolt within the Buhari family and by extension the greater Nigerian society. 

A family divided is bound to fall and by Aisha doing what she did, signaled to the world, especially those that call Nigeria home, that all is not well inside the Buhari family household. Why embarrass the president in this manner and possibly a payback for the president's resistance of the governor who wants to marry their daughter as a fourth wife who Aisha wants so badly to be a mother inlaw to? Aisha has been fuming and foaming in the mouth since the day the president scrapped the office of the First Lady which was a conduit for wastage of public resources and she has been agonizing and plotting on how to get back at the president. Now she is using a ruse of some people hijacking the presidency to drive her Brutus dagger at the back of the president. Such disloyalty is unacceptable to Icheoku and so should it be to the president; who should also have scrapping her office as a wife on the table too, if she fails to repent of her sin of rebellion and become a more trusted wife. Icheoku says to hell with every wild eyed feminists who are running roughshod on men including possibly this now corrupted and converted Aisha Buhari. 

Women have a choice, to marry or not to marry and being single is still legal. Also being a single mother is acceptable too. Even married women reserve the right to divorce and walk away. But when that decision to get married and stay married is freely made, then obligations of marriage sets in, including unalloyed and unquestionable loyalty and respect to one's husband and/or wife or partner. Between married couple nothing else should count nor occupy a preeminent position more than any of them or before each other. This is where the line in the sand is drawn in every functional marriage and any attempt to muddle it up should be fiercely resisted and such rebellion put down decisively. Icheoku is emphatic that any woman who is too big to marry should not marry; and any woman who after being married grows too big to remain a wife, should simply take a walk into her freedom. It is called divorce and it is still a recognized way of putting to an end a dysfunctional marriage. Unlike some banks which are too big to fail or Crooked Hillary Clinton who is too big to jail, there is no marriage that is too big to dissolve. But to continuously pretend to be in a marriage and simultaneously still act as an independent free jiving woman or man for that matter, is unacceptable to Icheoku and should also be unacceptable to President Muhammadu Buhari as well and even Aisha Buhari or any other spousal partner worldwide. Aisha deserves to be reprimanded.