President Buhari says he’s not shy around women, disowns ‘aide’

THE Presidency has disowned one Gideon Samani who claimed to be Senior Special Assistant (Political Matters) to the President and consequently granted a media interview where he said President Muhammadu Buhari was being shy around women. Samani, who spoke at a public lecture in Abuja on Thursday, had tried to rationalise the “low number” of women on the president’s ministerial list, saying that rather than being a deliberate attempt to marginalise women, Buhari was only shy with women.

But in a reaction made available to the media in Abuja on Friday, the Special Adviser (Media and Publicity) to the President, Femi Adesina, said the claim was totally fallacious.

According to him, the subsequent attribution of the supposedly “low number” of female ministerial nominees to President Buhari’s alleged shyness around women “is baseless and a figment of the imagination of the said Mr. Samani, who was falsely described as the “Senior Special Assistant (Political Matters) to the President.”

He said the assertion by the alleged presidential aide that President Buhari is “very shy dealing with the opposite sex” because “he has been interacting mostly with men,” was received by the president with shock and consternation.

The presidential spokesman added: “For one thing, there is no Senior Special Assistant, Political Matters in the office of the President for now and Mr. Samani who was said to have spoken as the representative of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation at a public function, is not an aide of the president. Mr Samani is certainly not an official spokesman for the president. Therefore, he could not have spoken on behalf of President Buhari, who is the president of all Nigerians, men and women alike. President Buhari has a wife, many daughters and female relatives whom he loves dearly. He also had a mother that he adored. How then could he be shy in the company of women, to the point of allegedly not appointing them into public offices, on account of not being comfortable in their company? Nigerian women can be assured that the President holds them in the highest esteem and will always give them due consideration in the discharge of his official responsibilities. The statements attributed to Mr Samani are untrue and unauthorized. They should therefore be disregarded.”