Obi Nwakanma
7 September 2008
column
UMARU Yar Adua has always taken a resigned and stoical view on the question of his health: he once said, in response to concerns about the state of his health, "my life is in the hands of God."
Well, two weeks ago, he went to Jeddah to look for God. He has not returned since. As a result of his long absence from his duty post at that palace hewn from the Rock, some Nigerians now started speculating. Yes indeed, speculations about the state of Yar Adua's health has inspired a deathwatch and a national vigil. Political undertakers and gravediggers count the hours.
Meanwhile, the nation moves, as one politician puts it, "on auto pilot." May God grant the man more days, but the question now is, what exactly is the state of the president's health?
Better still, where is the president? Government spokes persons, starting with Mr. John Odey, minister for Information - it is not for nothing that people have named that ministry the "ministry of government truth" - passed across the regular fare of disinformation to the Government House Press Corp when the issue arose. Odey said the man is in Saudi Arabia for the lesser hajj.
This, irrespective of the story broken by the Nigerian on-line newspaper, the Sahara Reports, which accurately broke the news that the Nigerian president is fighting for his life in a Saudi hospital in Jeddah, the King Fahd Hospital.
The minister has maintained that fiction nevertheless, about the less hajj. Everybody knows Odey's story to be more or less, a grand hokum. But by the special powers conferred on him of course, Mr. Odey is often not inclined to the truth. And of course we understand, that saying absolute truth and nothing else is bad business for governments.
But there is something absolutely unethical for a high official of the federation, a minister of government no less, to tell the nation a lie. The Nigerian people have a right to know the true state of the president's health. And a proper, more truthful and dignified way should have been found to let Nigerians know that the president is passing through a rough patch, without resorting to the kind of dissembling to which the minister for information and his Foreign Affairs counterpart embarked upon.
As the sitting president, the true state of Umar Yar Ardua's health is public property. It is not classified information. The Nigerian public's right to know is anchored on the inalienable question of the relationship between the donkey and the owner and rider of the donkey: we ought to know what we are paying for. Is the president still in a fit and proper state to steer the onerous wheels of this leaking ship?
The affairs of Nigeria tries the body and soul of fitter men, it certainly would doom an impaired body. The question of the mental and physical health of the president of the federation is of very critical importance for any number of reasons, but chief of which is the preparedness to conduct, without distraction, the issues of state.
Nigeria, thankfully is not engaged in territorial conflicts, but if such an occasion arises, that the Janjaweed penetrates through Chad and raids the city of Maidugri, and occupies part of it, who issues the orders for the defence of Nigeria? Would the president be in a fit and alert state to take strategic action, issue quick orders, rally the nation, or would he be in his bedroom nursing his boil?
Of course the vice-president is there, and from the looks of things, has presided without question or incidence, over a council of state meeting. The laws provide for the president in waiting: that is the role of the vice-president, of course, and there can be no question of a vacuum.
What the foregoing question only seeks to clarify is, does president Yar'Adua have the mental and physical capacity to continue as president and commander-in-chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria?
Should we continue to burden a man fighting for his dear and precious life with the affairs of Nigeria. But more still, can we afford, as a nation to leave the affairs of Nigeria in the hands of a man utterly and perennially distracted by a far too fragile health.
A president who is in and out of the hospital is hardly mentally and physically ready for the call to service pertaining to his current office. My point, therefore is, that Nigerians must take to that long view, which is that President Umar Yar'Adua may have to retire when he returns to Abuja, and a change of guard must inexorably take place.
We must be kind to this good man and let him go and take care of his health. The more we learn of the president's health crisis, the more this reality seems inevitable. Let me put the president's health situation in perspective following his diagnosis released by his German doctors. Yar 'Adua suffers from a very rare form of kidney disease, which was even more complicated for Nigerian doctors originally misdiagnosed it!
The reality now is that Yar'Adua requires, and is apparently preparing for a kidney transplant in Jeddah. From the stream of news reports and speculations, the president is testing and waiting for compatible spares either from living family or from cadavers.
That is the reality. But other questions come to bear on this dire situation for the president. According to Dr. Edward Oparaoji, former professor of pharmacy at Howard University, and senior vice-president of Shire, a medical research corporation in Pennsylvania, Yar Adua's known condition presents a number of very intriguing scenarios particularly for a man in Yar Adua's situation.
For one, in his current state, there is great likelihood for complications. Indeed it is almost a given. Although in general, an early diagnosis of Yar'Adua's condition is not irreversible given certain medical conditions, but the complications which are already present in the president's case makes his medical history, and the prospects and prognosis, call for concern.
The bottom-line, fellow Nigerians, is that the president is a very sick man. It is a sad truth we must live by and deal with. And it presents the Senate of the Republic grounds to do its duty for Nigeria, and for Yar'Adua. But this brings me to a very crucial, but clearly unspoken, even ignored question in this entire debate about the president's health crisis.
It is that the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has to fly to Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, to seek medical attention. To check into a hospital built by another nation in order to find medical help. The implications of this ought to be clear to Nigerians. Let me put it this way: countries that take themselves seriously never leave the health of their public officials or citizens in the hands of other foreign nations.
That is why nations establish universities, and special teaching hospitals, and other medical facilities. Let me draw a particular example: in his tenure as president of Nigeria, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe always used the medical facilities of the Nigerian Railways and the services of his friend and confidante, the now late Dr. Okechukwu Ikejiani or his personal doctor, Professor Louis Ekpechi. Zik lived beyond ninety.
And he maintained the eternal services of his doctors, even when Dr. Ikejiani was in Canada, or he checked in at the University Teaching Hospital, Enugu, always under the care of Dr. Ekpechi. I have given this example, merely to ask the rhetorical question: where did all that go?
That the Nigerian medical services have become so undermined, that the president of Nigeria has to check into the hospitals of Saudi Arabia in order to receive treatment is the indictment on this nation. Besides the security implications of this, the moral one is profoundly gruesome.
If we must leave the lives of our presidents in the hands of foreign doctors and foreign hospitals, perhaps it has come that time to review the meaning of our sovereignty: perhaps we must fully and completely hand the administration of Nigeria - that is, concession Nigeria out - to one of these foreign countries to which we run for basic health care. Let us stop all the pretence about being a nation. But that said, we wish Mr. Yar'Adua well in this hour of his deepest needs.
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