Garba Shehu, media aide to President Buhari has spoken on the alleged existence of a cabal running Buhari’s administration. He affirmed the president has a kitchen cabinet of close confidants.
Shehu made this known while speaking in Abuja at the dinner of the Peace corps organized by the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
According to the presidential aide, every leader must have a team of close confidants who will offer him advice from time to time.
He said other countries refer to these people as ‘Kitchen cabinet’ but Nigerians have intentionally chosen to adopt the derogatory term ‘cabal’ in order to tarnish the good standing of the president’s close confidants.
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.”
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“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.”