President Muhammadu Buhari has debunked a claim that he is shy dealing with the opposite sex.
The president, in a statement on Friday by his spokesman Femi Adesina, was reacting to a media report that quoted one Gideon Samani as claiming that he (Buhari) is shy around women.
Describing the claim as totally fallacious, Adesina stressed that the said Samani was falsely described as Senior Special Assistant to the President on Political Matters.
He said the subsequent attribution of the supposedly low number of female ministerial nominees to Buhari’s alleged shyness around women was baseless and a figment of the imagination of the said Samani.
The presidential spokesman said Buhari received with shock and consternation, the assertion by the alleged presidential aide that he (the president) ‘is very shy dealing with the opposite sex because he has been interacting mostly with men’.
He stated: “For one thing, there is no Senior Special Assistant, Political Matters, in the office of the President for now and Mr. Samani who was said to have spoken as the Representative of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation at a public function yesterday, is not an aide of the president. Mr Samani is certainly not an official spokesman of the President. Therefore, he could not have spoken on behalf of President Buhari who is the president of all Nigerians, men and women alike”.
Adesina said Nigerian women could be assured that the president holds them in the highest esteem and would always give them due consideration in the discharge of his official responsibilities.
According to him, “President Buhari has a wife, many daughters and female relatives whom he loves dearly. He also had a mother that he adored. How then could he be shy in the company of women, to the point of allegedly not appointing them into public offices, on account of not being comfortable in their company?”
The presidential aide restated that the statements attributed to Samani were untrue, unauthorised and should therefore be disregarded.
