Following
the incident at the Presidential Villa, 42 aides to President Muhammadu Buhari
have been removed.
According
to a source, CPSO to the president, chief detail to the president, ADC to First
Lady, escort commander, and 38 others were removed from the villa.
Recall
that the First Lady, Mrs. Aisha Buhari, her children and Aide-de-Camp (ADC),
Usman Shugaba were alleged to have breached security protocol in the Presidential
Villa while attempting to force President Buhari’s nephew and personal assistant,
Sabiu Yusuf, to go into self-isolation for traveling out of Abuja recently.
The
altercation was said to have led to at least two gunshots being fired within
the sacred precincts of the presidential seat of power, a dangerous escalation
of the crisis of confidence between the First Lady and the president’s other
relatives in the struggle for control of access to the president. Yusuf was
said to have managed to flee the scene with bloodstain injuries sustained
during the attack.
Trouble
actually started on Thursday night, penultimate week, when the first lady and
three of her children, Zahra, Halima and Yusuf, accompanied by some of her
security aides, led by Shugaba, stormed the residence of Yusuf, House 8 and
one of the president’s guests houses, by the Pilot Gate of the Presidential
Villa, insisting that Yusuf should proceed on self-isolation for 14 days, to
save the president’s family from the danger of COVID-19.
Yusuf had
four days earlier returned from Lagos after visiting his wife, who was
recently delivered of a baby.
The
situation, however, went out of control, when the First Lady’s ADC, in his
attempt to apprehend Yusuf, popularly known as Tunde (having been named after
Buhari’s former Chief of Staff, Supreme Military Headquarters, Tunde
Idiagbon, when he was head of state in the 1980s), discharged his weapon in
the premises.
The
gunshots, which were described as ‘security breach,’ in the Presidential Villa,
forced Yusuf to scamper to safety and eventually took cover in the nearby
house of his uncle, Mamman Daura, also Buhari’s nephew.
There
were also indications that the matter escalated because of four days of the insistence by Aisha that Yusuf should self-isolate after returning from his
Lagos trip.
The
encounter was said to have degenerated into a heated argument as Sabiu insisted
that he was not the only aide of the president, who had traveled to Lagos,
citing the case of the new Chief of Staff, Prof. Ibrahim Gambari, whom he
claimed has been going to Lagos every weekend, without anybody pressuring him
to self-isolate.
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