President Muhammadu Buhari took off from Nigeria to the United Kingdom on a 10-day holiday during which he was to make a very routine trip to the doctors for his check-up. The holiday itself started on the 23rd putting his date of resumption as the 6th of February. If we go by how he travelled, then his return to Nigeria should have been on the 3rd of February but this is Nigeria and so we harboured no such hopes of proper planning and timeliness. After all, he left the day he revealed his travel plans; Coming back on his resumption day was all we could look forward to.

Even that hope has now been dashed as we are now 2 days into an extended vacation for which no resumption date has been offered. Through it all, it appears that those in the Presidency who maybe really believed that the President was not ill and were ready to punish Nigerians for even daring to entertain the thought of it have now implicitly given us the go ahead to make our peace with the President’s illness; albeit, nothing major, just something he needs test results for minor one.

Everyone on the President’s team from the Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina who released the statement to let us know that the President’s holiday has been extended to his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu who has been on the phone with the President’s doctor. Even the Vice-President has spoken with the President but says he cannot disclose the details of his health status to us.The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed has now become silent on the issue but we all know that has not always been the case.

But one person who has remained silent through all of this, whose ostensible passiveness is, perhaps, most eerie of all, is the wife of the President, Mrs Aisha Buhari.

Sure, she travelled to the United Kingdom to see him there are photos to prove – or maybe not – but that’s as far as she’s linked with the situation. In fact, just days after the President travelled and Nigerians started to talk about the irony of a President who promised to end medical tourism insisting on foreign attention for just check-ups, the wife of the President, through her Future Assured Programme carried out a medical outreach in Kogi State.

Mrs Buhari never established herself to be much of a talker – except of course when she has been extremely angered or when she decides to – but this is crucial and her silence is killing us. Unlike another first lady from whom we cannot help but draw influence at this point, Aisha, for all her silent strength is not the first lady that chooses to either be seen not heard or vice versa. She’s maintained a visible presence since May 2015 and she’s made herself heard when it mattered the most and most importantly, she cannot be said to have maintained her distance from the politics of things despite having asked the nation not to address her as the First Lady. She has been the First Lady.

For all of these reasons, even when we do not want to, we find it hard to understand why she has chosen to be silent about this so far. The fact that we have not seen nor heard anything announcing her return to the country since she visited her husband in the UK in the middle of his vacation is not helpful either. Except a media aide will then tell us it’s a couples vacation. Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, after all.

Roqeebah

Creative mind. Enthusiast. Learner. Multipotentialite. And here, an assistant editor.