Garba Shehu, a former Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity to the former President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, has confessed details about the infamous 2017 story of an Aso Rock rat invasion.
Shehu revealed that the rat invasion story was a fabricated cover-up to mask Buhari’s prolonged illness.
The former spokesperson made this disclosure in his newly launched book, “According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience.”
Narrating in the book, Shehu said the Aso Rock rat invasion story emerged in August 2017, following Buhari’s return to Nigeria after nearly three months of medical treatment in the United Kingdom. He said he had to fabricate the story as a reason for Buhari to work from home.
In his book, launched on July 9, 2025, at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja, Shehu revealed that the tale was a deliberate ploy to divert public attention from Buhari’s health crisis.
In Chapter 10 of the book, titled “Rats, Spin and All That,” Shehu narrated: “So in the few hours of the president’s return, I picked up a conversation in the office of the CoS, where the chief, a few principal officers, and the permanent secretary sat over lunch, a damage to a cable was noticed and it needed fixing.
“Someone speculated that rats may have caused that damage, given that the office was unused for a long time.
“When the surge in calls for explanation of why the president would be working from home, if truly he had recovered his health and fit for the office came, I said to the reporters that the office, which had been in disuse, needed renovation because rats may have eaten and damaged some cables.”
Shehu recalled that the story about rodents invading Nigeria’s Presidential Villa and damaging furniture and the air conditioning system became a major talking point and even ranked among the top five news items on the BBC World News bulletin.
The ex-presidential spokesperson in the book continued: “With reporters wanting to know more, the number of calls increased, with some, including the BBC Hausa, interrogating me on the type of rats we had in the Villa that could eat wire cables.
“To get them (journalists) off my back, I referred them to the strange rats that invaded the country in the 1980s during the rice armada that came here aboard ships bringing the commodity from Southeast Asia.
“As was known of them, in their destructiveness, those rats ate just anything anyone could imagine. Many critics disagreed with me, saying that we were covering up the president’s ill health. Some people had a good laugh over the narrative, and an insignificant few believed me.“
At a later meeting, the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, and Vice President Prof Yemi Osinbajo asked me why I had toed that line of story.
“I said to them that the choice I made was deliberate: I wanted the discussion to shift, to move to any other issue besides the president’s health and his ability to continue in office as the leader of the country. In my view, that spin succeeded. Both of them disagreed, saying that this was well off the mark.”
