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The Presidency has described as totally fallacious a report in a national newspaper yesterday where one of presidency officials, one Gideon Samani, reportedly said President Muhammadu Buhari is shy any time he is around women. In a statement yesterday, the Presidency also said Samani was not known as a staff of the Presidency, noting that the position of Senior Special Assistant on Political Matters to the President does not exist in the organisational hierarchy of the Presidency.

Samani was reported to have made the comment at a forum that was organised by ‘The Change We Need In Nigeria’, a non-governmental organisation in Abuja on Wednesday where he was reportedly quoted to have said that the President had all along been surrounded by men in the course of dispensing his duties. Samani, who was reacting to the low number of female appointments by Buhari since he assumed office was quoted to have said: “If you are close to Mr. President, you will know that he has the interest of the nation as his uppermost priority.  He did not intentionally marginalise women.
“It is just that Mr. President is shy with women. He has been interacting mostly with men. I can assure you that in the shortest time, this issue of gender inequality will be dealt with.”
In his reaction to the said report, the Special Adviser to the President on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina in a statement said: “President Buhari’s alleged shyness around women is baseless and a figment of the imagination of the said Mr. Samani. The claim that President Muhammadu Buhari is shy around women, purportedly made by one Gideon Samani yesterday and published by a national newspaper today, is totally fallacious.

“The subsequent attribution of the supposedly ‘low number’ of female ministerial nominees to President Buhari’s alleged shyness around women is therefore baseless and a figment of the imagination of the said Mr. Samani, who was falsely described as the ‘Senior Special Assistant on Political Matters to the President’. The assertion by the alleged Presidential Aide that President Buhari is ‘very shy dealing with the opposite sex’ because ‘he has been interacting mostly with men’, was received by the President with shock and consternation.
“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.
“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?