by Sam Omatseye

Death skulked all of us as though we were reptiles wild-eyed in the dark. We wanted to pounce. We craved blood. Some wanted the terminal face of Yar’Adua on newspaper front pages, heralding a mournful nation, or a nation in quiet joy over the passing of quiescent president.

It came as a rumour. The grill sizzled with whispers of analysis and rumbles of scenarios. Some of the analysts hissed with apocalyptic visions of Nigeria.

What was clearly lacking in all this was a collective humanity. Where was our human recoil from the spectre of death? Is it not somebody’s life we are talking about? Someone, ailing like anyone in our families? Someone breathing, with a sense of touch, taste, smell, sight? A living being buffeted by the inevitability of human frailties?

Yet as one contemplates this burst of savagery, we are not unmindful of the bungling of his handlers, their own share of insensitivity to the general public. If they did well at the beginning to tell us he travelled out for medical treatment, they failed by letting it all stop there.

In their silence, they gave birth to a rash of opinions as facts. Rumours fester in the ambience of absences. In this case, the absence of facts.

Goodluck Jonathan, a Vice President with a limp heart calling for a psychological surgery, acted as though not aware of the urgency of things. His handlers allowed all of us to wallow in ignorance.

So, it was a case of official insensitivity meeting with a civil death wish. A fatal collision.

Whatever is clear, Yar’Adua ought to learn something from all that has transpired. One, he should know that his love among Nigerians are not so deep. If he won the 2007 elections, he should have more love than we have seen in these past days. Or maybe, the love has diminished. If it is the latter, it shows that he has not translated that electoral goodwill to food, shelter, education and power to the people.

This is a far cry from the case of the Brazilian President Tancredo Neves who decades ago took seriously ill during a presidential election just like Yar’Adua. He said if he got enough votes to win, not even God would stop him from serving as president of Brazil. He did win, but the illness aggravated.

The whole of Brazil soared into a mammoth prayer session. Everyone invoked heaven. But Neves, in spite of his irreverence, could not survive the depredation of an illness. He died.

We have not seen much of this for Yar’Adua except symbolic calls from a secular and sometimes cynical elite.

What we have seen in this moment of his health travail unveils his presidency so far. There has been a manic lack of information. He is a taciturn leader who does not have actions to speak for him. His information managers too are left with little to work with.

He has a minister of information who is more interested in her photos on the pages of newspapers parroting her official garrulity. This empty cymbal of a woman got away with that as NAFDAC czar. Not now when she is perpetually exposed.

Times of illness betray our friends and enemies. It reminds us who wants us dead and those who care little for us. But the case of a president is not that easy to define. A group of many prominent Nigerians called for the man to resign, and it is easy to conclude that these men want him dead anyway. Some of them may. Some of them may believe that it is the case of one man whose infirmity is standing in the way of the sustenance and progress of millions of human beings. You cannot blame them for their concern. But it was surely candour carried too far to call for a man to resign while still writhing on sick bed.

It all boils down to a lack of communication. President John F. Kennedy took a cocktail of drugs while in office. He had so much charm and brought elan and pride to office as senator and president of the United States that the people did not worry too much about his infirmity as the “leader of the free world.”

Which tells us that Yar’Adua does not have the charm factor. You need it, if not in personal magnetism, but at least in action and communication. JFK had plenty of charisma, perhaps the best in the country’s history. They forgave his illness the same way they forgave his philandering.

No one in Guinea, I believe, will pray for the Guinean butcher, Moussa Dadis Camara, on Moroccan sick bed today. In his bloodlust, he would not apologise for the rapes and killings of innocents.

Josip Broz Tito, the last leader of charisma of old Yugoslavia, fell ill. The people pined for him to live. Even in Nigeria, we followed the progress of this man in hospital. His illness was in his leg. Disease was eating it away. Doctors had to amputate it. The announcement was made in public even before then. He never survived. Our tears followed him to his grave.

Empathy followed him because, in the words of poet G. Pole, he did “bear brash witness and prepared the path for change.” Even though it was not the change we wanted. Bloodbath and division destroyed what he built.

Here at home, IBB had radiculopathy. The military president who suffocated free speech did not hide his ailment. It brought a peculiar softness to a ruthless dictator.

When Reagan was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, the media kept the world updated on his state of health. Reagan turned it into humour when he told his wife, “Honey, I forgot to duck.”

Franklin Roosevelt hid his polio from public face when it was still in fashion to preserve the mysticism of the presidency. But many knew about it. The media saw it, but they would not take his photo from his waist down. If he was a bumbler in office, it is hard to imagine that his political rivals would not have made a capital out of this.

History has abundance of cases, including the four-day anticipation of the death of Stalin after his interior minister poisoned him. Half his body was paralysed just as Herod’s half-body rotted away. He saw worms roil in his flesh as he faded.

What is important is not what afflicts Yar’Adua. It is what he is inflicting on us in the shabby way he handles this matter. He forces everyone to ask an important question. If we can live with this in all of his first term, does it make sense for him to contemplate another? Not in my book.

by Sam Omatseye

From the outset, I must confess loyalties. I owe no passion for any of the football fancies of the day. I am an agnostic in this feverish play of pieties that exalts the foreign to the asphyxiation of local talents.

While many of us, in our post-colonial imbecilities, may throw our weights behind Manchester United or Arsenal or Chelsea or Liverpool, I am light with indifference.

When loyalty mattered, I was a fan of two teams, Bendel Insurance and Ilerika’s Stationary Stores. I glory in my antiquity.

Yet the prompting for this article is not that sport where a leathery round object plays bride to 22 purposeful wanderers. I am writing in the province of politics.

The other day, I heard a young man, who happens to be a longsuffering Chelsea fan, call out Manchester United as PDP. I asked why that correlation. Was it because the team, which plays a game of lacklustre fruitfulness, often dominates the league?

No, said the young man, in his ungainly stride and rhetorical stumbles like many lowly Chelsea fans. His point was that Manchester United cheats its way to glory like PDP in Nigeria’s elections.

First, I thought that was sour grapes. He should ask his team to win rather than quibble over the pettifogging matters of officiating. The referees, he countered, often ruled for Man U, when justice belonged to the other team. I learned later that this spurious deployment of metaphor was very common among Nigerian football fandom.

I tried to examine some recent developments in the country. If Man U. style of soccer was pitted against the political style of the PDP, the comparison would stand as superlative flattery for the PDP. The PDP guys play such foul games that the fans who make such links manifest a weak command of imagery. I understand fans of Arsenal, which plays with winless elegance, and Liverpool who walk alone in serial stumbles, share in this collective fever of cursing.

There is too much sticking by the rules in Man U. to warrant such flattering fuss. The games, unlike the doings of the PDP, take place before all and we see how rules are followed by players and officials.

The recent acts of the PDP that caught my attention included the farce developing in Anambra State and the Bode George saga.

Let us examine the kidnapping of Pa Soludo, the father of ex-CBN chief who has abandoned the nifty suite for the politician’s native garb. He is running for governor on the platform of the PDP. We know that Man U. could not have won a game the way Soludo won the ticket. But I have dwelled on that matter in the past few weeks.

But the latest episode was a farce. The man, 78, is old enough to be the grandfather of those who carried out this outrageous remaking of the old gbomo gbomo syndrome. But this is no omo or child. This is gbagba gbagba (elder kidnap) syndrome, as some of my internet readers suggested after my recent column on that subject.

The story is the sort you read in a gangster movie, like the Good Fellas. In his quiet village, ostensibly immune from the perversions of politics, the man was whisked away. Who are the kidnappers? The farce began. Soludo’s men said it was an act of political brigandage (my words). Chris Uba, the lean, restless maelstrom of Anambra politics, said it was politically motivated (not my words). The camp of Peter Obi, Anambra governor, said it was politically motivated. So everyone seems to believe that the wayward who demanded N500 million for Pa Soludo’s release were not mere desperados for cash. They carried out a revanchist scheme to make Soludo pay for spiriting away the party ticket. What happened to his father may be called Dadnapping.

But eyes have not left Chris Uba, not necessarily because he masterminded this one. We all remember that the last time a high-profile figure lost his freedom in the giddy night of abduction, Anambra was the theatre. Ngige, then a governor, was the victim. And who was the man in the middle of the story? Chris Uba. He deflowered the state into a romance with human heist for cash. Chris on the one hand is believed to have lost out to the PDP at the centre. The same way he lost out in the regime of Ngige. His brother Andy, juvenile with judicial appeals, is pushing his luck. Both brothers seem to be losing out in a show of a dysfunctional family.

But what is really tragic about this is the lack of respect for a cardinal element of our civilised culture: reverence for elders. It is one thing that makes us African. Remove the respect for elders, and we lose the right to be Africans. Respect for elders does not mean succumbing to the wisdom of age. It does not mean genuflecting before injustice from the old. It means, whatever our position or our ideology, we shall not treat them as though they are not older than we. It means we have no right to kidnap them. Even in Western societies, senior citizens have a special place, in public institutions, in buses, etc. They are treated with respect.

What happened in Anambra amounts to what our foremost novelist Chinua Achebe, also an Anambran, described as a “loss of the sense of the ridiculous”, in his latest book of essays, The Education of a British-Protected Child. What he meant was a sense in which nothing is beneath us anymore. Kidnapping is barbarous enough, but kidnapping an elder is beyond the pale. That is sort of thing Achebe lamented.

We no longer have limit but that defined by the beastly instincts inside us. Some writers like German novelist Erich Maria Remarque say Bushmen were better. In All Quiet on the Western Front, which critics call the greatest war novel ever, he said Bushmen are better because they can improve.

“Bushmen are primitive and naturally so,” he laments. “But we are primitive in an artificial sense, and by virtue of the utmost effort.” Remarque poured into his classic novels his experience in the First Word War.

Our attitude as Nigerians to these events also recalls what Remarque describes as “the indifference of wild creatures.” No matter the absurdity, we take in our strides. Just like animals.

The other incident was the jailing of Boy George or, as his parents named him, Bode George. I do not gloat as many do over his fate. He was convicted, but what many think about is how he had taken part in the initiation of injustices in electoral heists of the PDP in the Southwest. The farce was prepossessing as the man who owned Nigeria with his acolytes was asked to slip on prison uniform, forfeited the right to eat meals from home and is seeking to live a special life in prison, above the law, as he did when he was outside, the very thing that landed him in jail.

What excites me is the brilliance of the judge, Justice Bunmi Oyewole, a man I knew as a student at the University of Ife. I am glad he turned out this way. He was an exceptional student in our union days. He evinced sharp mind, panache and an ideological steadiness. At the Students representative Council, he was always a joy to watch and hear. His scientific mind was already blossoming at school as a clear-headed exponent of ideas. I recall, he started his points by saying, “in the first case…”

He is the sort of angels we need in our courts, men with incorruptible dossiers. Remember the Reverend King saga and the man who sliced him to size? Yes, it was him. We need him in the Court of Appeal. I hear they have recommended him.