Hostage President, Hostage Nation

By Sanya Oni

Between the ailing President Umaru Yar’Adua, and the Nigerian state left to flounder following the evacuation of the President to a Saudi hospital, it has become increasingly harder to determine which of the two is the more pricey hostage in the hand of the nation’s club of power profiteers.

If the lacuna created by the absence of the ailing President has spawned some of the wildest permutations that seems beyond the contemplation of legal cum rational minds, it is simply to underscore the sad truth that nothing is considered settled in our polity, where perpetual disorder, reigns.

Blame the development on the power mongers who see in every development, a fortune to be made and their unearned privileges to be serviced at all costs. Blame also the spineless Federal Executive Council, whose timidity caused treasonable thoughts to fester – and who in turn, acted supremely reactionary in dousing the fires they unwittingly fanned. Shall we spare the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a party renowned for its lack of abiding standards in leadership and service?

It seems the case that between the ailing President and a sick nation on a fast regression lane, there is always something for the club of power merchants for whom our collective misery is gain. Heads or tail, we lose, they win.

Lately, we have been hearing strange songs which invites us to be “patriotic” when matters comes to discussing the President’s health. We are also expected to be “humane” since anyone can fall sick. Being “humane” and “patriotic” of course means we all act deaf and dumb while our President lies strapped to some gadgets in the intensive care unit of a Saudi medical facility. We are not supposed to ask question – suffice to say that we can pray.

It was perhaps inevitable that the nation would be sharply divided on the meaning of “patriotism” and “humanity”. Between the club of super citizens who insist that they alone love their country and the ordinary folks who simply wonder in awe at their brand of patriotism, there was never going to be a meeting point anyway. Forget that the only distinguishing thing about the so-called patriots is that they are in government while the rest of us – their subjects – are outside.

Left to the phantom patriots, nothing can be wrong with driving an ailing man to his death since the next best thing to the most powerful job in the land is martyrdom in office.

Imagine the roll call of the club of our super patriots: David Mark, Yayale Ahmed, Tony Anenih, Michael Aondoakaa, not forgetting our adorable Dora Akunyili.

One of them, David Mark has since decreed a nine-day prayer for the ailing President. The demand might yet come that those calling on the President to take time off to attend to his health, should be tied to the stakes and executed for treason.

If ever anyone needed lessons in patriotism, those quarters should be of great help.

Did our super patriots deny that our President is gravely ill? Never. It is precisely the question of the extent of the President’s increasingly complex medical condition that has remained a subject of conjecture. Dr Ore Falomo, one of the leading lights in the medical profession in the country today actually supplied great illumination when he said that pericarditis is only the latest medical condition that took our president to Saudi Arabia. Before pericarditis, the President has been to known to seek help in Germany and Saudi Arabia – and none of these previous visits was for pericarditis.

Does the above take anything from the fact that we wish our President well? Only a mind twisted by mischief would dare suggest that anyone would gloat at the misfortune of a fellow mortal – not to talk of our President.

Many have said that the President is a good man who, in spite of challenges has given his best. I agree, absolutely. His style may sometimes be too slow for our liking, but there can be no question that his temperament seems well suited to handle some of the fissiparous tendencies in the polity at this point in time.

On occasions, he has been admirably methodical in his approach to managing tensions whenever they surface.

It is as much as for his own sake as it is for the country perched precariously on the edge that he gets well soon to help put paid to the scheming of those who do not wish the country well with their strange permutations.

But then, that is only if his health permits. Of course, when matters get to a life and death situation, the individual has a choice to make, and here, the choice is not always an easy one. This is probably the high point of the division between those who would rather have the President remain in office even as an absentee President – as against those who insist that the cause of the nation and his family would be better served by opting to throw in the towel to enable him devote enough time to tend to his fragile health.

Both positions of course claim to derive from the same “humanist” premise of the imponderableness of human life. One says the President owes it himself to live for God, family and country, the other insists on cheap martyrdom. Between the reality of failing health, the pressures from a medical team sworn to treat life as sacred, and the desires of the political jobbers who insist on their man hanging in there to guarantee their meal ticket, the choice equates to the treatise on “patriotism” and its cousin “humanism”.

Since prayer has been decreed, we might as well add to our prayer list that God will grant our president, whom we love, the courage to break free from those who insist on holding him hostage for their selfish reasons. We can extend the prayers to our luckless country that it does not suffer costly distractions of some self-serving contraption which may spell the end of everything. Of course, we can add that God grant those hostage takers repentant heart.

Like the President himself had noted, the matter of life and death are in the hands of the Almighty. Even then, there are things the individual could do to hasten the process. Iam yet to see a job in the universe whose wage is worth the cost of a precious life. None.

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December 8, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Sanya Oni

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