Aisha Yesufu has been in the news for the right reason. What got her in the line of partisan fire was her account of the meeting between President MuhammaduBuhari and parents of the abducted girls of Chibok, which she witnessed and reported last week. She wasn’t impressed, and wasn’t also afraid to admit so. For this, a tribe of partisans has risen and formed a counterforce against her activism. Their outrage was a betrayal of what she advocates, as a strong pillar of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign.
Aisha is a private citizen, businesswoman, wife and mother. She’s an advocate of good governance, not a political establishment. I know her well enough to express that she’s no political affiliation, nor even an ambition. Yet. Born and bred in Kano, she’s of Edo State descent.
A sketch of her biography is all one needs to realise the extent of her sacrifice in a clime of “federal character principles” the cartographers of ethno-religious bigotries will never even let her aspire to a political office. One may see now why she’s misunderstood by the fire-spitting minions who always lurk around to pounce on any critic of Buhari.
Her account of the meeting is a portrayal of the President as emotionally absent at the meeting, and his Minister of Women Affairs, Mrs. Aisha JummaiAlhassan, contemptuous, insensitive and mischievous. Even Dr. ObyEzekwesili, in challenging reports that the President left the meeting visibly angry, corroborated claims that parents of the missing girls present “didn’t feel him”. Both the President and his Minister, according to various accounts, were uninspiring.
The summary of the meeting was: the group was mounting too much pressure on the government even though the abduction took place in the last administration.
On Twitter, Maureen, another extraordinarily resilient member of BBOG, reported a troubling exchange between Aisha Alhassan and Aisha Yesufu. The Minister, according to Maureen, asked grieving parents to leave everything to God. In their defence, Aisha Yefusu asked why she went to court and not God on losing the Governorship election in Taraba State. Poignant!
If there’s one voice I will always regard as credible in this campaign, it has to be Aisha’s. Unlike the others who’ve had a stint with a government or politicians, she IS neutral to partisan allegiances. She’s only pitched tents with the better alternative, and furiously supported Candidate MuhammaduBuhari in the period running up to the 2015 general elections.
Some of the cyber-thugs who have taken up a challenge to shame her, have never done in their entire life what she does in a single day, committing, for the almost 750 days past, her hard-earned resources to fighting for the rescue of our Chibok girls.At the time many were reluctant to lending their voice to the story of the abduction, she emerged from absolute oblivion and challenged the Jonathan-led government to be honest in admitting its poor response to the condition of citizens abducted in northeast Nigeria.
Of Chibok girls, while some bigoted people attempted to point to them as mostly Christians, this Muslim woman defied the polarizing scheme in championing what has now become symbolic in drawing the attention of the world to the previously overlooked cases of abduction of our innocent citizen in that terrorist-infested region.She was so notorious in her confrontations with Jonathanians that when the veteran journalist, HajiyaBilkisu Yusuf, died in a stampede in Saudi Arabia, some, mistaking Bilkisu for Aisha, put up a picture of of the latter to celebrate the death.
Because she was a bogey to those agents of darkness who promoted the tragedy that was Goodluck Jonathan.
Aisha’s only flaw, which her critics fail or refuse to recognise, is that she’s not politically correct. Unlike Dr. ObyEzekwesili, who’s friends with prominent people of our political establishment, she does not belong in the elite class, and doesn’t give a damn how she’s perceived by them.
A day to ministerial inauguration, Barr. Solomon Dalung, then a ministerial designate, was at the BBOG sit-out, and Aisha, being Aisha, looked him in the eyes and said, “You are one of us. Tomorrow you will be a part of them. We don’t know your portfolio yet, but we want you to represent our interests there. And if you don’t… “ And then she shook her head. Dalung got her message.
This is the Aisha these partisans who have never done anything different to promote justice in this country, seek to shame. It doesn’t matter to them that her account of their meeting with President Buhari is simply her honest perception of the man’s attitude towards them. Because she wasn’t looking at a deity, but a human elected to do better than a failed human before him.
Some of them, in the last bid of their desperation to shame her, resorted to sharing a 5-minute video of Aisha Alhassan to present the events of a meeting that lasted for hours, I hope they see the cruelty of their mischief. And those who are asking the campaigners to “give up and face reality”, such damning absurdity is not a surprise from partisan savages. I just hope they know what it means to imagine their own biological daughter alive, and being abused, among a cult of savages.
If the girls of Chibok were of famous surnames, children of the criminally wealthy somebodies of Maitama, Asokoro and Aso Drive districts of Abuja, and abducted at Loyola Jesuit, Whiteplains British School, El-Amin International School, International Community School or Nigerian Turkish International College, there would never have been a loss or lack of intelligence on their whereabouts, and no government would ever risk not making them its priority. That we have a hopeless woman, who’s neither a politician nor political, losing her resources and health to amplify the voice and publicise the agonies of the nobodies whose children were abducted, is one heroism we ought tosupport. May God save us from us!
