Echoes from the Orient

By Dr. Olatunji Dare

The latest medical bulletin from the Orient, to which Nigerians have turned in supplication and in dread this past fortnight, is that President Umaru Yar’Adua could be back home this week.

So, don’t be surprised if you woke up tomorrow and learned that he had jetted into Abuja during the night. But don’t bet on his returning to base and to work so soon.

The bulletin was unsigned. It was attributed to one of the doctors who had been treating Yar’Adua in a specialist hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for a condition identified as acute pericarditis, the symptoms and prognosis of which practically every Nigerian now knows.

So, it could turn out to be just as authentic as the declarations that leading figures in Yar’Adua’s cabinet and in the ruling PDP’s hierarchy have been making since the president’s hasty departure to Saudi Arabia.

None of them – not Attorney-General Michael Aondoakaa who said he had spoken with the president that that the president was fine and would soon return home at the end of his ‘short vacation,’ nor Vice President Goodluck Jonathan who said he was in constant communication with the president – none of them, it has turned out, could have spoken with Yar’Adua.

Nor did the delegation of the Conference of Governors, led by Dr Bukola Saraki of Kwara, fare better. Not even Bauchi Governor Isa Yuguda’s credentials as first son-in-law moved the hospital’s authorities to issue him a pass to see Yar’Adua.

Why is it, by the way, that the Saraki delegation included no governor from the “PDP states” in the Southwest – Segun Oni of Ekiti, for example, who has risked everything and plunged the state into stagnation to keep it firmly in the PDP family? Is it to confirm that there are indeed core PDP states which count for much in the scheme of things, and the periphery “PDP states” that merely make up the numbers?

The officials who claimed to have been in constant communion with Yar’Adua could not have communed with him because, according to Daily Trust, which has done the most solid reporting on Yar’Adua’s latest medical travails, he had slipped into a coma. Only First Lady Hajiya Turai had access to the president. Even so, the newspaper reported, she was limited to two visits a day, each lasting 10 minutes.

But we must not crucify the Vice President and the chief law officer. Raison d’état required that they keep up the appearance of normality even when everything else pointed to the contrary.

Other state functionaries wisely kept mum, mindful of what happened to former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Ambassador Babagana Kingibe, when the president went missing last year for the better part of two weeks, only to surface in a Saudi hospital.

Kingibe, who already enjoyed a reputation for inconstancy, was rumoured, on account of some indiscreet remarks, to be scheming to supplant Yar’Adua in the event Yar’Adua could not return to office. Yar’Adua did return, and in his first act fired Kingibe, his late brother’s political associate and strategist. And he did so without hesitation and without regret.

The PDP hierarchy urged prayer and fasting. In the unctuous tone he has adopted lately, Tony “The Fixer” Anenih, who cannot recognise morality if it kicked him in the groin, sermonised on the “immorality” and the sheer wickedness of compassing the president’s death. The more charitable dismissed those demanding an orderly transfer of power on account of the president‘s illness as unpatriotic elements and idle dreamers.

To drive home the point that there was no room at the top, a ranking functionary warned that nothing in the Constitution prevented the president from staying away for as long as a year.

The business of government would go on, just as it had been going on.

The Federal Executive Council even met, Vice President Goodluck presiding, but without announcing a raft of contract awards at the end of its deliberations. What further evidence did anyone require, then – anyone not too far gone in mischief-making and malevolence to think straight – to rest assured that the business of government was in no way impeded by the president’s absence?

What seemed to have provoked this burst of denunciation and declamation was the editorial advertisement signed by 53 prominent Nigerians – 50 at the last count, at least three of them having declared that their names had been taken in vain — urging Yar’Adua to resign and commence an orderly transfer of power to the Vice President as mandated by the Constitution.

Nothing personal; merely that Nigeria cannot continue to be a hostage to his health.

May their tribes multiply, the Group of 50. Their intervention has certainly lent gravity and piquancy to what had been isolated calls for the president’s resignation, including one made on this page the very day the Group came out with its demand.

It is heartening that the demand for the president’s resignation has a pan-Nigerian resonance.

It would therefore be hard to dismiss it as coming only from a particular section of the country, or to demonise its protagonists as provocateurs bent on politicising the very private matter of the president’s health to further their ethnic agenda.

At the same time, it is inconceivable that, given his fervent belief in his rule of law, Yar’Adua or his proxies would ramp up the security forces and send them to carry out the kind of brutal suppression that Sani Abacha instituted to further his dream of self-perpetuation.

Still, a friend of mine was so alarmed at the report that the secret service regarded the calls for Yar’Adua’s resignation as the product of a sinister conspiracy to force Yar’Adua out of office that he felt he had to call me the other day at an ungodly hour.

“Have you bought your plane ticket?” he asked breathlessly.

“No,” I said half awake and half asleep, wondering what the fuss was about.

“Gooood,” he said, evidently relieved. “This is not the time to visit.”

“You fear that I might be kidnapped for a huge ransom? Or that the EFCC might put me in debtors’ prison?

“Worse,” he said. Then he spoke of how the secret service was investigating the “international dimension” of a conspiracy to drive Yar’Adua out of office, a conspiracy in which they say some misguided Nigerian exiles are deeply enmeshed.

“What has that to do with me?” I asked, more in disbelief than in anger.

Your column calling for Yar’Adua’s resignation appeared the same day as the Group of 50’s editorial advertisement.”

“That was pure coincidence,” I rejoined.

“In the prevailing climate, the secret service may not take that view. Also keep it in mind that your old friend Obasanjo is no longer in charge or in favour and that you cannot look to him for deliverance when they come for you.”

My attention had been fleeting all the while. But at the mention of Obasanjo, the latest bête noire of those who claim to speak for the North, I perked up. The former president, calculating that Yar’Adua could not last the distance, had foisted him on the polity so as to short-circuit the North’s entitlement to the presidency, they have been charging bitterly.

Obasanjo is calculating all right. He could not have been a successful battlefield commander, military head of state, statesman-at-large, elected president, etc, etc, without being calculating, nor could he have survived the booby traps with which Nigeria’s public space is strewn.

But he is not that calculating. He truly believed that Yar’Adua’s modesty, frugality and basic decency qualified him to lead Nigeria. Usually a shrewd judge of character, Obasanjo was wrong about Yar’Adua. This egregious misreading will constitute a lasting blot on his legacy.

I still have not bought my plane ticket to Lagos. But that is not from fear of being caught in the dragnet the secret service is reported to have spread to pull in the home-based or self-exiled conspirators allegedly plotting to humiliate Yar’Adua out of office.

If it ever came to that, I have Nuhu Ribadu’s word that the famous Abacha-era route remains wide open and welcoming.

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December 8, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Dr. Olatunji Dare

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