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.

Simon Kolawale Live!

My phone rang. I was deep in sleep, but I was rudely woken up Wednesday morning by the call. “Sorry to wake you up, Simon. Have you heard? The president is dead,” the voice said. Half-awake, or half-asleep, I replied: “It’s not true.” Why was I so confident President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was not dead? Well, let’s look at it this way: anytime the man travels, he dies. He dies on a regular basis. There are times that he dies even when he has not travelled. There is hardly any month that the man is not rumoured dead. For that reason, I am very reluctant to flow with the rumour. Also, if Yar’Adua dies, it will be announced officially. Nobody can hide it. As a Muslim, he will be buried same day. You cannot bury him in secret and lie to Nigerians that he is still alive. Even when the almighty Gen. Sani Abacha died, we were informed immediately and his remains were flown to Kano for burial same day. But why are people so eager to write Yar’Adua’s obituary? Well, he is seriously ill. That breeds rumours. Also, there are those who are so uninspired by his leadership that all they wish is that he would leave office – resignation or death is a matter of details. Just go! That is the message. So the rumours keep flying around. We have to realise however that we are not God. In our culture, it is uncharitable to be discussing somebody’s death while he is still alive. Illness, life and death are beyond our powers. I am not Yar’Adua’s fan, but as a fellow human being, I feel nothing but sympathy for him. It could be anybody. Anyone who has lost a loved one to complications arising from an internal organ problem will feel nothing but sympathy for the president. I am so uncomfortable with people ridiculing him on the basis of his ill health. It is in bad taste. But the current spate of rumours and conjectures has set me thinking about possible scenarios in our fragile polity. I’m writing on that today.

For those who say the president should resign, their request will certainly throw up a lot of issues which will again test our feeble nationhood. If Yar’Adua leaves office now, who succeeds him? The natural answer to that is, of course, Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan. Section 146 of the constitution is very clear on that. But if a Southerner becomes president just two years after another Southerner (Olusegun Obasanjo) finished a two-term tenure, what happens to the “power shift” and “power rotation” arrangements? The answer looks quite simple if devoid of political sentiments. But what is politics if not sentiments? Ask a Northerner the question of who succeeds Yar’Adua in the event of resignation and his answer will most likely be different from that of a Southerner. The Northerner – who will “lose” if power returns to the South so soon – will be quick to point out the informal political understanding that power should rotate between North and South. He will probably suggest that Jonathan should resign and allow a fresh presidential election to be held so that the “understanding” can be maintained. Jonathan could be offered a way back as running mate so that he can return to his position. On the other hand, the Southerner – who will “gain” if Jonathan becomes president – will argue that rotation is “unconstitutional” and the constitution should be followed in this instance. The argument will go on and on. These are the sort of debates that test our fragile nationhood. They raise tension, revive old wounds and set us back again.

The Jonathan Scenario is a timely reminder of many “knotty” questions that we never envisaged while we were writing the constitution and putting political arrangements in place. There are so many other questions that we have not had to answer yet, but they may raise their heads one day. For instance, if we say power is shifting to the South after spending eight years in the North and then the president-elect dies, the constitution says the vice-president-elect will assume office. In this case, the VP-elect is going to be a Northerner judging by our “political understanding”. That would mean a Northerner succeeding another Northerner. How would Southerners take that? Another scenario: even though we had a rotation understanding in 1999, but in 2003, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari ran for presidency on the ticket of All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP). If he had defeated Obasanjo of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Buhari would have been sworn in as president, making a mess of the power rotation understanding. Let’s look at another scenario. Let’s say Yar’Adua is strong enough to rule Nigeria for eight years but he is defeated by a Southerner in the 2011 election, what will happen? The Southerner will be sworn. That’s what will happen. That would effectively disrupt whatever power rotation understanding we have on ground. But let me complicate things a bit. If Yar’Adua steps down in 2011 and the rotation agreement throws up another Northerner as president, how many years will he spend? Let’s say the possible eight years. That automatically means the North would hold power for 12 years consecutively, whereas a Southerner (Obasanjo) was there for only eight years. This scenario-painting I’m doing may look frivolous or even silly, but that is exactly the sort of complication we have in our hands now with the Jonathan Scenario: we never knew it could come to this! That was how “12 two-thirds” became a problem in 1979 because we did not do enough scenario-painting while writing the constitution. Essentially, power rotation is a PDP arrangement. It has nothing to do with the constitution. It was employed in 1999 to settle certain problems. With the annulment of the June 12 election, won by a Southerner, Nigeria was thrown into a prolonged political turmoil. The bad blood it generated was such that the political elite had to just reach an agreement that a Southerner, and a Yoruba in particular, must be elected president in 1999. Since then, we seem to have agreed that power should be changing hands between the North and the South on an eight-year basis. Also, the six geo-political zoning arrangement, which has become so popular and widely accepted today, is not constitutional. The idea of picking a candidate from the South and the running mate from the North is also not constitutional. All these are political arrangements that seem to have been accepted and appear to be helping us in our not-so-inspiring nation-building efforts.

All I have tried to do today is to tilt our thinking in the direction of the complexities that still lie ahead of us. The Jonathan Scenario is just one of the dozens that we will have to deal with one day. But you may want to ask: where do I stand? Should Jonathan become president in any eventuality? Or should he resign so that the political understanding that we seem to have established can be maintained? I’ll be honest with you – I can’t be bothered. I have seen enough in Nigeria to know that it is not somebody’s “tribe and tongue” that matters but what they have to offer. If a leader is doing well in office, Nigerians hardly discuss the sectional issues. Inasmuch as I keep talking about political balancing and political accommodation, I know in my heart of heart that what Nigeria needs is a leader that can make things happen – the real issue is not North or South, man or woman, Ijaw or Fulani. We know this very well. We only pretend not to know because of political sentiments. All said and done, I wish the president quick recovery – Jonathan Scenario or no Jonathan Scenario. That is the least I owe Yar’Adua as a fellow mortal being.