Society should understand First Ladies do not belong to the kitchen

In a BBC interview aired last week, Ms Aisha Buhari, wife of Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, told the world she is unhappy with her husband’s performance.

He has lost his grip to power brokers who have influenced the appointment of people who do not share the vision of the ruling All Progressives Congress.

“The president does not know 45 out of 50 of the people he appointed and I don’t know them either, despite being his wife of 27 years,” she said.

Mrs Buhari is anxious to leave a positive legacy and would rather bail out of a second term than support her husband’s path to ignominy. “… if things continue like this up to 2019, I will not go out and campaign again and ask any woman to vote like I did before. I will never do it again.”

President Buhari was in Berlin, Germany, when a reporter confronted him with this news. His response provoked a withering glare followed by a burst of ironic laughter from German Chancellor Angela Merkel who was standing beside him at the press conference.

Head bowed and right hand fiddling with an earphone, President Buhari started his response with a self-conscious chuckle, like a man who knows that he is about to say something naughty.

“I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room”.

English is a difficult language. But even without dissecting words like “belong” and “other room”, we can infer from President Buhari’s chuckle that he didn’t take the matter of his wife’s publicly aired opposition too seriously.

Why? Was it sexism or was it the dread of divorce driving him to, metaphorically, hug his beloved tightly?

Context changes meaning. Had President Buhari been speaking to his clan in the comfort of his sitting room, no-one would have questioned his attitude.

But because he uttered these words as he shared the podium with one of the most respected women leaders of this century, the understanding was that President Buhari has little regard for women.

SUPERIOR KNOWLEDGE

To make it worse, President Buhari marshalled his experience as a candidate in four presidential elections. “I claim superior knowledge over her and the rest of the opposition because, in the end, I have succeeded”.

Mrs Buhari carries some political pedigree of her own. Her grandfather was Alhaji Muhammadu Ribadu, independent Nigeria’s first Minister for Defence.

During the campaigns last year, she held her own in the political arena, staging numerous rallies with youth organisations and women’s groups.

Her support for the families of the 250 girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014 is well known.

Since he is aware of all this, can we conclude that President Buhari was trying to separate two worlds? Maybe this 73-year old man who is three decades older than Aisha, his second wife, was merely trying to say: My contract with my wife is domestic; I don’t impose my ideas on my her, she is free to choose political parties, to vote as she will and to draw her own conclusions about national politics.

Her views of my politics cannot be taken as the correct or the national position just because she is my wife.

Speaking of First Ladies: On Tuesday, Kenyans were hungering for Mrs Margaret Kenyatta with careless whispers that she has been AWOL for a month.

Social media chatter about her skipping President Jacob Zuma’s visit grew so frenzied that one newspaper felt compelled to carry the “news”.

The thing that will kill Africa long before malaria, marasmus and mismanaged budgets consume the continent is the shameless hypocrisy of her citizens!

We are angry with President Buhari because we imagine that he said his wife has no business holding a political opinion, but we want to see Mrs Margaret Kenyatta as an appendage of her husband, making small talk with state guests and smiling endlessly at national events.

How is this imprisonment in a wallflower job an improvement on President Buhari’s alleged sexism?

Let Mrs Kenyatta go off on her own and be an achiever. Her Beyond Zero maternal health plan is doing what successive governments since 1963 – including her husband’s – should long have done anyway!

Dr Nyairo is a Cultural Analyst – [email protected]