Five years after he was reported dead and his clone named Jibrin from Sudan stepped into his position, President Muhammadu Buhari has said that he did not find the rumour funny.
In 2017, President was so ill that he spent considerable time abroad to take care of his health. For a long time, his traducers insisted that President Buhari was no more, while Jibrin stepped in as Nigerian leader.
A documentary shown on Friday night at a private dinner in Abuja, which was organised by the President’s family and associates to celebrate his 80th birthday, brought back the memory of “Jibrin”.
The event was tagged “Celebrating a patriot, a leader, an elder statesman”.
President Buhari was on his way back from an official visit to the United States when he clocked 80 Saturday.
“Yes! People said I am somebody from Sudan. I didn’t bother with the name. Nigerians have mischievous ways of explaining themselves”, the President said.
When asked if he found the rumour funny, he responded: “No. It’s not funny. Because those who made those statements, they just want to be cheeky. They want to distract attention from the main issue”.
The rumour gained notoriety during President Buhari’s first term in office when he spent months in a London hospital due to illness.
The rumour was made popular by the leader of the banned Indigenous Peoples of Biafra, Mazi Nnamdi Kanu, who was then based outside the country.
In June 2021, former President Olusegun Obasanjo described the rumour as ridiculous. At a youth mentorship session in Ogun State, Obasanjo cited the rumour as one of the instances in which social media is being abused.
Obasanjo recalled how someone once approached him, asking if he bbelieved he rumour.
He said: “Somebody came to me, in very high hope, and said, ‘this talk about Buhari not being Buhari…’. I said, ‘do you believe this?’ He said, ‘well, it is in the social media’. I said ‘Buhari died and we will not know that Buhari has died? And they will bring us somebody from Sudan to be Buhari?
“It’s ridiculous to the extreme. But you have it in social media and you see people believing it. Social media have done good but it can be abused and misused”.
