Garba Shehu, a former spokesperson for erstwhile President Muhammadu Buhari, has admitted to circulating fake news about rats damaging the office of his principal.

Mr Shehu said in his recently launched book that the aim was to divert attention from serious questions about Mr Buhari’s health at the time.

The book is titled “According to the President: Lessons from a Presidential Spokesperson’s Experience,” and was published two years after leaving office.

In chapter 10 of the book, titled “Rats, Spin and All That,” Mr Shehu said, “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.”

Mr Shehu, who was caught spreading fake news on different occasions, further said that when the then Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, asked him why he pushed the false narrative, he told them it was deliberate ploy to take attention away from Mr Buhari’s poor health and questions of whether he is fit to continue in office.

“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,” Mr Shehu said.

He added, “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.”

The revelation comes years after Mr Shehu lied to Nigerians, blaming Mr Buhari’s inability to resume work in office on rats in 2017.

Mr Shehu’s confession further exposes how government officials spread fake news to control the narrative.