Ibrahim Gambari, former Chief of Staff to the late President Muhammadu Buhari, has revealed that some influential members of Buhari’s inner circle—widely referred to as a “cabal”—frequently bypassed official communication channels to deliver memos directly to the president.
Speaking during a television interview, Prof Gambari said that despite Buhari’s express directive that all official documents pass through the office of the chief of staff, certain individuals close to the president exploited informal access to sidestep protocol.
“They knew his weak moment, they knew when to smuggle [memos] because they knew him as they interacted with him informally,” Gambari explained. “When I came as Chief of Staff, he made a public statement that all memos must go through the Chief of Staff before coming to him.”
Gambari, who served from 2020 to 2023, noted that even though backdoor channels were used, many of the memos still eventually ended up on his desk, giving him some level of oversight.
“Even the Vice-President [Yemi Osinbajo], to his credit, always passed his memos through me—as did several ministers—but our people [the cabal] still got their memos to him from behind because they knew his weak point and who to use,” he said. “He never stopped them, but the advantage I had was that the memos came back to me.”
Buhari died on Sunday at a London clinic in the United Kingdom and was buried on Tuesday in his hometown of Daura, Katsina State.
‘Every Presidency Has a Cabal’
Addressing the often-controversial notion of a cabal, Gambari defended the existence of such inner circles, saying it was not unique to Buhari’s presidency.
“They say there’s a cabal or was a cabal—there was, but every government has a cabal. It is what they call them,” he said.
He likened it to what is elsewhere referred to as a “kitchen cabinet” or “think tank,” citing previous administrations, including that of former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
“Obasanjo had a group of people—the Aboyades of this world and others—and a small group of people. It is the nature of the office of president that they must have some people, in and out of government, that they can lay their hair down and talk to freely,” he said.
Gambari emphasized that while the influence of such groups may vary, every administration inevitably has a select circle of confidants—whether officially acknowledged or not.