“Every president must have people who advise him. It is not a sin, it is not an offence to have people that you take into confidence. Elsewhere, they call it ‘Kitchen Cabinet’, but in our own country we are being derogatory and we term them the cabal so that it will tarnish their own good standing.”
Nigeria’s Presidency says it is only those who are antagonists and seeing nothing good in the sitting government in the country that see and claim that the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has been hijacked by a nonexistent cabal.
It will be recalled that those making such claims not only say the government has been hijacked but also that the administration is now at the mercy of a power-hungry cabal.
More painful to members of the public who are diehard supporters of the administration has been the involvement of the First Lady of the country, Mrs Aisha Muhammadu Buhari, who moved a step further recently to attack one of the major speaking pillars of his husband-led presidency, when she accused him of now shifting his loyalty from the president to the cabal.
Senior Special Assistant to the President on Media and Publicity, who spoke on behalf of the Presidency, Mallam Garba Shehu, however said at the weekend, during a dinner organised by the Press Corps of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in Abuja, that no president can operate alone without having a team of close confidants.
According to him, in other climes, every president usually has a “Kitchen Cabinet”, but that in Nigeria, government antagonists would prefer to refer to such collection of self-sacrificing individuals as cabals.
Shehu said: “What is the meaning of cabal? I just googled Thesaurus and among many other definitions, what they are saying is that cabal means ‘conspire, intrigues, mystique, occult, secret’. There is no government in this country that we have had that some people were not accused of being a cabal in that government and it is because every administration, every president must have a secretariat.
“Every president must have people who advise him. It is not a sin, it is not an offence to have people that you take into confidence. Elsewhere, they call it ‘Kitchen Cabinet’, but in our own country we are being derogatory and we term them the cabal so that it will tarnish their own good standing. A lot of them are successful people who are making extreme sacrifices to even be coming to serve the government.
“Some of them have no need around government but because this is a country of people, some of them much in a hurry, in fact, for some of our elites.
“Buhari is a bad man because you cannot go to him and say give me oil well and he will sign papers and give you. So, we understand the game that is playing out and there is always a price, in any case, to pay for that kind of exposure.
“Even the president himself, the kind of things that are being said of him, if he did not offer himself to serve, some of those things, people would not even have the chance to say them against him. So, we will live with it, we will accept it because it goes with the territory.”
