by Alexander O. Onukwue
“They’re saying I should be sacked as minister. In the first place, I never expected the ministerial position. It is God that gave me, and if today I’m asked to leave, it is God’s time that has come to an end. I have faith and I believe that whatever happens to me is destined by God”
Those are the words of Aisha Alhassan, President Buhari’s Minister of Women Affairs who has sworn to quit her job if the President decides to run for a second term in 2019.
Her unbelievable declaration of loyalty to Atiku Abubakar, the former Vice President who is expected to be in the running come 2019, has drawn much praise on social media. Some comments describe her for being bold to call out Buhari’s incompetence (which she has not done), and as following in the legacy of former Information Minister, Prof Dora Akunyili, in being independent minded while serving on the President’s cabinet.
Mrs Alhassan says Buhari will not fire her because he is not “mad” like those who are calling on him to do so, while also stating that she did not, in any case, ask to be made Minister. It would be God’s time that her time in the role comes to an end, she says, if she does get the sack.
But given her open and repeated remarks favoring a possible rival to the President for the continuity of his agenda, barely a year to campaigns become serious, should the Minister still be on the cabinet?
The video records her referring to the former Vice President as Nigeria’s President come 2019. Without reading too much into that, the Minister does seem already into the future that she may no longer see herself as being of much benefit to the present administration. The claim that she still serves her President and her political party is a bit of medicine after death; caught between maintaining declared loyalty to her godfather and her current benefactor, that was the way to keep the car and the purple jar.
Instructively, Mama Taraba says she does not want to be seen as a hypocrite because she is not one. IF that were to be so, how would she get herself to attend one more FEC meeting without looking like a leak on the cabinet? Will she be able to applaud when the Buhari administration says that its plans are to reverse the ills of the past 16 years of the PDP’s administration, of which Atiku Abubakar played an influential role for 8 years? Would it not be clear hypocrisy to profess that she is ‘committed’ to the vision of the President when she already has set her sights on the future?
She has not been seeing money as she expected not happy abt dt . off course better money will flow if Atiku becomes the president.
If you were asked to leave a post, then i assumed you must ave gone againt the ethical value of that position which d consequence is immediate sanction to evac dat sit for integrity body.