By CHIKA ABANOBI

Aisha Alhassan. Aisha Buhari. Aisha Yesufu. These  women are not born of the same parents, yet, in terms of character traits, they belong to the same stock. They speak their minds not minding whose ox is gored.

While other women were born the same way as all mortals who came into this world, the three Aishas seem to have been specially hewn by the gods, from the granite of candour and courage. They say the things exactly the way they feel it. They know no other way to frame their thoughts and feelings. Not for them, the political doublespeak nor the gobbledygook.

Take for instance, Aisha Jummai Alhassan, Nigeria’s Minister of Women Affairs and Social Development. Her recent comments and pledge of political loyalty during her Sallah visit to Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, and the subsequent BBC Hausa Service interview are causing ripples both in the corridors of powers at Aso Rock and the wider circles of her political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). But she is hardly moved by the gathering and blowing storms raised by her comments.

The first female to be appointed Taraba State Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Secretary, FCT judicial council and later Chief Registrar of the High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, was quoted to have said that Buhari, while campaigning for the office of President in 2014/2015, promised to run for only one term “to clean up the mess the (previous) PDP government did in Nigeria.” And to her, it is an indication that he is not contesting in 2019.

  In an interview with the BBC Hausa Service, Al-Hassan, one-time governorship candidate for Taraba State, said she remained loyal to Buhari, despite the interpretation given by political detractors to her Sallah visit statement, further clarified her position that if the President indicates his interest to contest in 2019, she would have no other choice than to honourably resign.

“Atiku is my godfather even before I joined politics….if (he) said he is going to contest and I remain in the cabinet of Baba while Baba (Atiku) also wants to contest, then I have become a hypocrite, and I am not one,” she said. “If I say I’m not with Atiku, Buhari himself will not trust me at all because he will say I’m a hypocrite.”

Asked if she is not afraid of being sacked over the statement, the woman popularly known in political circles as “Mama Taraba” responded: “I never hoped to be a minister, Allah gave it to me. If I get sacked, it will not bother me because I believe in Allah, that my time has elapsed; I believe only Allah do and undo.”

Like Aisha Al-Alhassan, like Aisha Buhari. Sometime, last year, she cried out in frustration that a cabal that knew neither how or who voted her husband into power had hijacked his government. She was forthright; she was frank. She was fearless as she lamented in a BBC Hausa Service interview that “some people sat down in their homes, folded their arms only for them to be called to head an agency or take a ministerial position. Some of them don’t even have voters card, and those who made sacrifices have been reduced to nothing and certainly not happy with the way things are going.”

And in a Freudian slip that showed that her husband might be planning to run for a second term, sometime in future, the First Lady declared unequivocally that she might not back him at the next election unless he carried out a cabinet shake up.

Asked to name those who had hijacked the government, she smiled and declared “you will know them if you watch television.” She further posited: “The President does not know 45 out of 50, for example, of the people he appointed and I don’t know them either despite being his wife for 27 years.”

Such frankness, such candour you can only find, it seems, nowadays, with women who go by the name Aisha. Consider the case of Aisha Yesufu, the Co-Convener of Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) campaign. Not only has she been in the vanguard of those criticising the APC-led government of Buhari for what she sees as its foot-dragging over the rescue of all the Chibok girls, kidnapped by Boko Haram fighters (“If they were your daughters, would you have gone to sleep and say they are gone?,” she asked. “We can only stop this (campaign) when our girls are back and alive”), she has deplored what she termed the President’s “insistence” on hanging onto power despite the state of his health.

  “For crying out loud, the president is sick; the president is not capable of discharging his duties as president, why can’t he resign?,” she tweeted on May 18, 2017, while the President was still convalescing in a hospital in London. “Sickness can be on anybody, nobody is wishing the president bad. The fact that he is sick doesn’t mean he is going to die today or tomorrow. Somebody that is as healthy as I am now can drop dead. It is life!”

Addressing the president directly, she wrote: “President Muhammadu Buhari, you have gotten the best in this world… You have been president twice, you said it yourself; you have reached the peak of your career as a military man and as a politician. Can you allow each and every one of us as Nigerians be able to reach the peak of our careers? Can you just take some time off, take care of yourself ? May God give you good health.”

With the Aishas, you have this feeling that if anybody dared to ask: “what gave you the guts to say that?” like we usually ask when we are stupefied by one’s forthrightness and fearlessness. They are likely to reply, “it is because we are Aishas. We speak our minds.” I, sha, I will like to toe the path of Aishas.