YNaija Analysis: Buhari’s comments are not a domestic squabble. They are a national embarrassment

Over the past two or three weeks, the world has looked on in horror as a man who had a realistic chance of becoming the most powerful man in the world – up until a few weeks ago at least – began to reveal himself as a chronic abuser of women. As the details came out, even in his attempts to defend himself, Donald Trump has continued to display the most disgusting behaviors.

The American people have all but decided that he will not be their president, but Nigerians are now dismayed that someone who views women in similar terms is already in Aso Rock.

There is no way to spin Buhari’s comments today in Germany about his wife. Rightly or wrongly, she challenged his running of the country, and he put her in her ‘place’, in front of a global audience.

To visit a country led by a woman for over a decade, one of the most powerful women in the world in Angela Merkel, and to say that his own wife belongs ‘in the kitchen, the living room and the other room’, in a year when women are breaking even more barriers than ever, is to display a deep misogyny that has no place in the Presidency.

It is as if we are back in the 1970s, when this is in fact 2016. Women lead two of the world’s six largest economies, with a third soon to join them next January. Women are breaking new glass ceilings in every area of human endeavour, but this president does not appear to be aware.

Make no mistake, there are many men in Nigeria who do not respect women. There are many who denigrate them on a daily basis, in ways big and small. Now, the men who think like this have been given validation by none other than their President. They have seen someone who thinks like them at the highest level of governance. Rather than a man who challenges those mindsets, we have one who confirms them.

The attempt to pass it off as ‘banter’ the way Garba Shehu tried to do, is just as reprehensible as Trump’s attempts to minimise his language as ‘locker room talk’. There is no way out of this one. There are several ways the President could have handled the question. He could have simply said he hadn’t listened to the interview, and as such, could not form an opinion. He chose to answer the way he did and in so doing, opened a box he cannot close.

A country’s president is supposed to represent all that is best about that country, all that the country can be, an aspirational and relatable figure at the same time. Sadly, it appears Nigerians ‘have entered one chance’.

President Buhari’s comments today are an example of all the things Nigeria must leave behind if it must progress. If the First Lady of a country like ours cannot get the benefit of restraint from her husband in public, then, as Nigerians say, the road is still very far.

No, this is not, like some might say, a ‘domestic squabble’. It stopped being domestic the moment the First Lady gave that interview to the BBC and it aired. It then became everyone’s business, and it became the responsibility of the President and his aides to handle it properly.

They have failed to do so – they have failed to explain away this abundant misogyny – and have exposed themselves to intense scrutiny, and beyond that, along with their principal the country to ridicule.

Sadly, for all those people who do not think like their President, it will be their ridicule to bear.

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