Inside The Villa: Aisha Buhari Reacts To Muhammadu Buhari’s Controversial Joke

Former First Lady Aisha Buhari has described her late husband, former President Muhammadu Buhari’s notorious “other room” comment as a joke, though one made in an inappropriate setting.

We joked about it,” Aisha recalled, while acknowledging it was “the wrong place” for such a remark, according to the new biography From Soldier to Statesman: The Legacy of Muhammadu Buhari by Dr. Charles Omole.

The 600-page, 22-chapter book, launched on Monday at the State House in Abuja, traces Buhari’s life from his early years in Daura, Katsina State, to his final moments in a London hospital in July 2025.

The “other room” remark, made in October 2016 during a Berlin press conference alongside then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel, ignited global criticism. Buhari made the comment in response to Aisha’s public criticism of his administration during a BBC Hausa interview, saying, “I don’t know which party my wife belongs to, but she belongs to my kitchen and my living room and the other room.”

The statement sparked widespread backlash, prompting debates on gender roles, leadership, and respect in both domestic and international media.

Omole writes that Aisha Buhari viewed the remark through the lens of her husband’s trademark “gallows humour.”

“The line, ‘she belongs to my kitchen…and the other room’ lived a thousand lives after it was delivered in Germany, beside Angela Merkel. Aisha Buhari treats it with the shrug of someone who knows the man and the soldier’s habit of gallows humour. ‘We joked about it,’ she says. But she also concedes that it was the wrong place to make the joke,” the biography states.

The book notes that in international settings, irony often misfires. Aisha reportedly had to clarify the comment repeatedly to colleagues abroad, many of whom interpreted it as a reflection of Nigeria’s policies on women.

Her stance, however, was firm: “She knows where she stands, and so does he.”

Omole adds, “They fought, sometimes, about the gap between the country he wanted and the government he supervised. But they did not fight about whether she belonged in rooms where power speaks. She simply walked in.”