Chief of army staff Lt-Gen Tukur Buratai has a thing with snakes—long before he began farming the reptiles.
He recalls at least seven incidents with snakes in his lifetime—they didn’t begin today.
They are all around him—probably thousands crawling around on his famous farm, and the statue of an Egyptian cobra on his table.
“I don’t know where it came from,” Buratai said to Daily Trust team interviewing him.
“I have had strange encounters with snakes all my life. A snake once entered my room and I once found a snake in my staff car. I was a Major then.
“Then sometime when I was in Angola, on the last day I was to leave and come back, I almost stepped on a snake while jogging along the road and had to jump over it. In addition to those ones, there were three or four other incidents with snakes.
“And when I went to Zimbabwe on a holiday in 1993, I went to one of the tourist attractions, a very popular snake park in Zimbabwe and I saw the way they kept them and how people were interested in coming to see them.
“It was very interesting. They had different species of snakes. So, I said, ‘It is a good idea and why can’t I gather all those ones I have been encountering and keep them?
Source: Daily Trust
