Former First Lady Aisha Buhari has said she viewed the infamous “other room” remark by her late husband, former President Muhammadu Buhari, as a joke, but one made in an inappropriate setting.
“We joked about it,” Aisha recalled, but conceded it was “the wrong place” to make such a comment, according to a new biography titled From Soldier to Statesman: The Legacy of Muhammadu Buhari, authored by Dr Charles Omole.
The 600-page, 22-chapter book was unveiled on Monday at the State House, Abuja, and chronicles Buhari’s life, from his early days in Daura, Katsina State, to his final moments in a London hospital in July 2025.
In October 2016, Buhari sparked international outrage during a press conference in Berlin, Germany, while standing next to then German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, when he responded to his wife’s public criticisms by 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 remark was in response to Aisha’s BBC Hausa interview, where she had publicly criticised her husband’s administration and questioned some of his political appointments.
The comment drew widespread backlash, sparking debates on gender roles, leadership, and respect in both domestic and international media.
Omole, in the biography, writes that Aisha Buhari viewed the remark with the understanding of someone familiar with her husband’s “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,” he wrote.
Omole noted that, “In the global square, irony travels badly.”
He added that Aisha Buhari had to explain the comment repeatedly to international colleagues, many of whom interpreted it as reflective of Nigeria’s domestic policies on women.
Her response, however, was direct. According to the book, “She knows where she stands, and so does he.”
“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.”
