UMORU, JOKES APART, ARE YOU DEAD?

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” – Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881),

When he left this country exactly three months ago with only an after-the-fact statement of his indefinite medical expedition to Saudi Arabia, President Umaru Yar’Adua might have thought Nigeria was one big fiefdom, and the citizens docile serfs given to taking whatever they were dished supinely. Well, he was wrong. Everyone knows for sure now that this is one country with an extremely complex web of intelligent interests that must be delicately managed to preserve social truce. Yar’Adua’s handlers and allies particularly didn’t catch this much understanding, and they apparently underrated the odds when they instituted a reign of guile that is now in its last, agonising gasps of breath before irremediable expiration.

The ailing president is out of action – and it is becoming inevitably clear: perhaps decisively. Once he was made out to have signed the 2009 supplementary appropriation bill from his sick bed, implying that he was conscious enough to know and understand the substance and content of what he was up to. At another time he was reported to have been busy on the lines: placing one-directional calls through to now Acting President Goodluck Jonathan, Senate President David Mark and House of Representatives Speaker Dimeji Bankole, among others (I have since learnt that one of these principal officials had occasion to wonder aloud to another whether it was truly Yar’Adua’s voice he heard over the phone). Then the ailing president famously played the hood on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) with his purported ‘tremendous recovery’ voice-over, without matching visuals; which ironically – but dubiously – was seized upon by the Senate as his fulfillment of a requirement in Section 145 of the Constitution paving the way for Jonathan to be proclaimed acting president. In all these, the impression being created was that Yar’Adua was effectively in circulation. Former Federal Attorney-General and Minister of Justice Michael Aondoakaa stretched the logic too thin by arguing that Yar’Adua remained in control of government and could actually rule Nigeria from anywhere in the universe.

But curiously, no one has set eyes on the president or gained personal audience with him since he was rushed off on medical emergency on November 23, last year. A good number of high-powered delegations have already visited the Arabian kingdom where Yar’Adua’s health is being tended, but they all drew blank, failing to get within a distant sight of the ailing president. The Governors’ Forum despatched a formidable team in which they threw Yar’Adua’s close allies like Kwara State Governor Bukola Saraki and Son-in-Law Isa Yuguda of Bauchi State, for good effect. But they were reportedly turned back at the door by First Lady Turai Yar’Adua, who merely gave them assurances on the president’s health. The ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) deployed a team that couldn’t be any less impressively constituted – being led by party chair Vincent Ogbulafor. But the party men left Saudi Arabia in frustration after waiting six days without success to catch a distant glimpse of Yar’Adua. The House of Representatives defied public cynicism in despatching a ‘goodwill’ team to visit with the president. Now the honourables are back, the farthest they got being a waving distance of Hajia Turai who reportedly turned them back like busybodies. In all these while, not even the Nigerian ambassador to Saudi Arabia has been able to penetrate the cordon of secrecy thrown around his president in a country where he (the envoy) has diplomatic accreditation.

Last week the Federal Executive Council (FEC) raised its own delegation of six ministers to go in hunt for the ‘missing’ Yar’Adua. This was the council’s last-ditch attempt, apparently, to assess his continuing capacity for office before invoking Section 144 to declare him incapacitated, and thereby clear the way for Jonathan’s substantive presidency. Significantly, if the ailing president’s handlers had spinned the BBC voice-over to counter the blitz of an American media report that he was dead, and take the steam out of a civil society-led protest against his long absence staged same day, they seem to have found no answer to the conclusively tightening noose on the Yar’Adua presidency. You could almost legitimately wonder if the president is currently in any position to answer at all. And if he is, it is downright queer and utterly inexplicable that he has mortgaged Nigeria’s sovereignty – which he embodies – to secret and inaccessible tenancy in another country where he is getting medical help only because the Nigerian medical system, over which he had presided for some three years, is on its knees.

Since the FEC says it is interested in getting conclusive information about the ailing president’s condition before considering the option of Section 144, it might as well tinker now with its delegation, as constituted, to avoid a fruitless jamboree to Saudi Arabia like those that had gone before. Specifically, I would suggest that whoever took the 2009 supplementary appropriation to the Saudi kingdom and purportedly got it signed by Yar’Adua should be drafted onto the FEC team to reenact the feat of accessing the ailing president. So also, a deal should be worked out with the BBC under whatever agreeable terms to lend its correspondents who got the ‘tremendous recovery’ voice-over to the FEC team. The point is: besides facilitating FEC’s crucial mission, such collaboration would prove the veracity of the earlier touted feats. Otherwise, those feats must be a grand hoax that not a few Nigerian had always suspected them to be.

By Kayode Idowu