Lagos — Sometimes, there is a cruel irony to historical progression. See the inverse relationship between President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua's trademark ineffectuality in office and the sheer volume of ink that we have so far spent debating the implications of his prolonged absence. I told a friend the other day about the towering presence, in fact omnipresence, of the absent man. Suddenly, we are all sounding as if a mere 30 days of presidential "excuse duty" will make all that much difference in our lives. This is an unfair misrepresentation of historical fact.

Those clamouring that the president should quickly return to resume his office may not all mean well after all. Even if they mean well, the insistence that certain matters of state are so urgent that the nation will come to a halt if the man does not discharge himself from the Saudi Arabia hospital is unfaithful to what is emerging as the Yar'Adua heritage or even legacy.

The sad truth? Someone pressed the pause button on the nation which stopped three years ago. If anything, the pause button as the defining trademark of Yar'Adua's Nigeria is very much in place. It may in fact be more entrenched now that the author himself is not at home. His disciples and apparatchiks need to be congratulated for keeping faith with a tradition of governance whose mascot in the best of times is a Nigerian delicacy, the snail. The long queues for gasoline that stretch virtually through the length of the nation is a tragedy foretold and foreshadowed.

The ding dong debate about deregulation in the downstream oil sector was programmed to produce this outcome. The president can be said to have prepared this outcome before leaving for Saudi Arabia. Somebody in government has just disclosed that not a single federal highway project was completed in 2009! Again, that is not likely to change in 2010 even if the president were to return now and sit tight at his desk for another unbroken 12 months. Armed robbers and kidnappers have become more daring.

The end of year economy of the South-east has been effectively shut down as 98 per cent of the elite from that part of the country cannot go home to join their kith and kin for Christmas and New Year celebrations. A home grown tradition of social welfare is in its death throes. Again, those who were foolish enough to believe that our long night of darkness would end by this month after the delivery of some phantom 6,000 megawatts of electricity by this government now have no place to hide their heads.

In the countdown to this week, a friend who overheard me asking my domestic staff to stockpile diesel thought I was a fool. He regaled me with images of paradise in the horizon when electricity would be uninterrupted for days on end. I assured him that I was acting out of habit, not affluence. Since the government began changing its tune on the 6000 megawatts, I have not seen much of my friend. He has bolted to his London home while my generator has remained a faithful ally as in years past. An epidemic of avoidable poverty continues to ravage the land.

The president may not have caused this. Neither did his sporadic presence in office in the last three years address or ameliorate it. In fact, his omissions and commissions have worsened the situation. Job losses that began as an unbroken trickle have become an avalanche. Even on the eve of Christmas, some banks fired thousands in another wave of government induced load shedding. The incoming calls have graduated from occasional pleas for help to unbroken cries of tragic helplessness and terminal desperation.

A relation cannot bury their dead. A friend cannot guarantee that the children will return to school in January. Someone in my village may die before I finish writing this piece because they do not have N5,000 to go to the nearest health centre to get treated for typhoid. Even if they get there, the place may have no drugs or the doctor may have gone into hiding for fear of being kidnapped. A former employee called in to say that bank-hired thugs are at the door to repossess his car because lease repayments have fallen into arrears for 90 days since he lost his new job.

The prolonged absence of the president has produced an unintended dividend. When he was, in Nigerian parlance, "on seat", his relative ineffectuality could be taken for granted. None of his officials could so brazenly misrepresent him. Officials who had nothing to say kept quiet. Those who badly needed to say something sought clarification.

But all that has changed in the last 30 days that the man has been holed up in some Saudi hospital with a cocktail of ailments. Out of the cold cabinets of the disused presidential desk an army of political ants has crawled out and is on the rampage ostensibly doing the biddings of the man who is not at home. The political and bureaucratic space is being filled first by acolytes and apparatchiks of all hues. And they are busy in ways that would make the ailing president revolt on his sick bed.

In all fairness to Yar'Adua, he has never insulted our intelligence even in his trademark sluggish pace. But see what we are getting in his absence. There is first this frequent sickening reduction of Nigeria into a parallel of Katsina State. Some unknown appendage of the presidency regaled us three days ago with the story of how Yar'Adua was able to run his tiny far flung state literally from his hospital bed. Sometimes, according to this fellow, he was away for six months. He not only kept his job but also won a second term of four years, thus qualifying to extend the blessing to the nation as former President Olusegun Obasanjo's best gift to the ungrateful nation that denied him an illegal third term in office.

The man signs off by reassuring us that not only will Yar'Adua get out of hospital, his second term in office is in fact already in the bag! Yet another, I believe he is the Attorney-General, came up with a rather novel model of presidential power. He informed us that the president does not need to be in our midst to wield his power. He can do so from a hospital bed, a cruise ship perpetually circling the globe, from outer space if he can buy a perpetual seat in the International Space Centre.

All that is required is for us to know that there is a president somewhere whose intentions are translated to us by the actions of his minions. We do not need to know whether these minions are acting on behalf of the president or prosecuting their own personal agenda. I believe it is the type of mindset that produces this peculiar reading of the constitution that has given birth to some of the most scandalous perversions and subversions of the laws of the land recent times.

Perhaps in the line of duty, yet another minister who has not ventured within a thousand miles of Saudi Arabia in recent times informed us, gleefully, that the president is responding satisfactorily to treatment. No medical bulletins, no press statement from the hospital, no photos of a recuperating president, no film footages. Just words from government "alcoholics".

In recent history, when major world political figures were hospitalised, there was moment by moment information to the public. When the late Pope John Paul II was in the throes of terminal ill health, the world was kept abreast complete with live footage of ambulance movements and bed side rituals in addition to regular hospital bulletins and press briefings. Same with the late Yassir Arafat before his demise in a Paris hospital. Fidel Castro too has kept us posted on his condition from his Havana health resort. It is in fact such timely information flow that earns the ailing statesman the sympathy of his compatriots. A few days ago, an otherwise respectable political science professor was advocating that Mrs.

Yar'dua should assume presidential powers in the perennial absence of her husband! The danger of madness is aggravated when it afflicts otherwise respectable members of the community like professors and men of God. How else can we make sense of the sickening parade of trivia and the reduction of great national issues into grave diversions and cruel jokes all in the name of sycophancy and a desperate craving for relevance? My fear is that those who want to display unusual love for the president may in fact unsettle us with their brand of patriotism. Consider the possibilities.

Any number of atrocities can now be committed by those who are most eager to protect the president's job. If you ask questions or speculate about the whereabouts of the president, you could be arrested. An editor has already reportedly been arrested on this account. If you try to hold government accountable for even its most fundamental obligations, you may be accused of insensitivity to the president's condition. It is unAfrican to seek to collect debts from a man who is not at home! Worse still when he is unwell.

Even the National Assembly could consider it unpatriotic to begin debate on the national budget since there is no president to sign the thing into law even if they were unusually expeditious as to pass it now. Beneath all these is an active game of political survival and sheer existential manoeuvres by the president's official dependents. One recognises that times are hard.

Money is scarce and jobs are few. Businesses are heading south and most honest people's bank accounts are dripping red. It is quite understandable that those who see their jobs in the Yar'Adua government as a life line will do almost anything to keep these jobs. Public displays of unparalleled loyalty are a standard part of a structural unemployment that keeps some people engaged at the corridors of power. These marionette displays can proceed apace without insulting us.

What we are witnessing here then is a systematic process of entrenchment of political decapitation as a norm. Nigerians are being taught some strange doctrine by the PDP and the apparatchiks of the current state. They are redefining democracy to mean the rule of the majority by the absent leviathan. The prime symbol of this new religion is the vacant presidential chair in the council chambers at Aso Rock before which ministers are now reported to bow religiously before the weekly Federal Executive Council meetings.