BEHOLD, AN INVISIBLE PRESIDENT

We saw a lot of denials last week, a lot of lies, a lot of fear and trembling. Our democracy, with all its suicidal dramas, was never so exciting. The leader of the democracy was the fountainhead of a most undemocratic affair.

One, he was on the way to the country after three months of ominous silence. But the silence was deepened when no one was expected to know he was coming. The handlers did not want the world to know of his return. The media, ever nosy and intrusive, caught the subterfuge.

Two, they deployed soldiers. What did we need soldiers for when Umaru Yar’Adua was under no threat? What were the men in Khaki doing under the cover of night in Abuja, with their furious boots and guns glittering? If you were on the streets in the capital city, and you saw the men in their gloom of looks and augury of armoury, you would think a coup was in the offing. The only logical thought would have been that they had come to pick Yar’Adua as part of an elaborate plot to subvert democracy and announce a takeover. But what happened was that they came to fill the city with fear and trembling.

If the excuse was that they came to give the shadow president a cover of protection, I would ask, protection against what and whom? Was he not the leader, if a shadow leader? Or were they expecting Acting President Jonathan or the National Assembly to prevent Yar’Adua from landing and being carted in as the sole passenger in an ambulance?

The story still baffles me. What I thought happened was an auto-coup, a coup within itself. Yar’Adua still is the substantive president. So, why would he carry out a subversion against himself? That is the farce of the narrative, a man unleashing a military operation against himself? The government is still his. The nation, according to the records, voted for him. The man is sick, bedridden, but no impeachment proceedings has begun or executed. So, why would he need soldiers on the streets?

Three, the airport was shut down electrically. No light, no workings of the electronic gadgets. This calls to mind what Jesus said about men who love darkness rather than light because “their deeds are evil.” At about 1. 47am, he sneaked or was sneaked into the country, and the reason was that the handlers did not want us to see the light. The light here stood for the sequence of Yar’Adua being moved on a stretcher or bed from the air ambulance into a terrestrial ambulance. They did not want us to see the frailty of the man, in his quasi- lifelessness. They did not want the media, with its subversive cameras and the inquisitiveness of the cat, around the place.

They loathed facts. They loathed reality, which was harsh. This brings to mind the famous line in the poem of Dylan Thomas when he urged his dying father to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” The Yar’Adua group loves darkness. They did not want us to see a president with skin sallow and wrinkled and ashen. They did not want us to see the life-support gadgets, props of life for a powerful man who was grasping at existence. They did not want us to see a vanishing.

The man said he was human. We all are. What is wrong is not that he is sick and in bad shape, but that the whole theatrics is wrapped up in a lie. His so-called kitchen cabinet, with all its shadowy schemes and unflinching greed for power, has conflated the personal interests of its partisans with that of the nation. The egos of such people are often extravagant.

They are raging against the light of what the state of the president is. Why did the man come to Nigeria when he was not in good enough shape? Could it not be that the Americans asked their allies in Saudi Arabia to discharge the man and return him to his home country? After all, the people of that country would be wondering why a country could not get enough medical facilities to treat a president at home.

They probably did not want to attract attention to their country because of a nation that could not keep its chicken brood in the pen. Yet, we are not so sure, as some commentators have said, that the president actually came. Was this a sort of movie then? Was it a stunt of superlative artistry by the kitchen cabinet to stall impeachment moves on the president?

Clearly, no one is answering us. They are all, in government, raging against the dying of the light. They are afraid of the truth. They are afraid of the media. They are afraid of the nascent discomfort in the civil society. They are afraid of the moves in the Federal Executive Council to invoke Section 144. They are afraid of the shadows. They are afraid of losing the big pies of government, the contracts, the luxury, the hubris, the fat armpit of authority. They are not brave, or wise. They are cowards. Let us not call them the kitchen cabinet anymore. They actually are the chicken cabinet.

They have installed government by stealth. Theirs is not the glory of democracy, but what I would designate as secret-o-cracy. A government by secrets. Not long ago, they made headlines when they swore government insiders to secret oaths. It seems to me this Yar’Adua stealth saga is merely an extension of that desperate strategy.

What is most poignant in this evolving drama is that we still cannot see the man. When he was in Saudi Arabia, we did not see him. We could explain that away on the grounds that he was far away, in the majestic desert of that opulent kingdom. He enjoyed the privilege of guards, and hospital confidentiality.

But how do we explain when he arrived here? He, a so-called democrat, contrasts heavily with that of a military dictator, IBB, who dramatised his triumphal tale over radiculopathy by taking many martial steps from plane to lounge. Onukaba Adinoyi Ojo counted his steps for effect for his memorable story in The Guardian. If there were any steps on the night of Yar’Adua’s arrival, it was those of soldiers who had no business in the ambience.

What we have now is an invisible president. No one can see him. He is almost like the deity, whose sighting can lead to devastation: like the Biblical “Thou shalt not see me and live.” Like the Agbasa juju in Delta State that women were forbidden to see, and other such masquerades all over this country. FEC members cannot see Yar’Adua. Even Jonathan has to see Turai the shrew and termagant.

This inaccessible president makes us sad. It bears resemblance with the story of the novel, The Castle, written by Franz Kafka. It is about a surveyor who goes into a town and wants to see the authorities. He is there for a long time, month after month, but he is assured he will see them in the castle. The castle is within sight. It takes a long time to get in. Even when he gets in he moves from room to room, and he is directed from place to place, from official to official. Yet, he makes no headway. The surveyor eventually falls sick. On his death bed, he gets a message from the authorities that he now has a work permit and can live in the town.

This is the kind of surreal script we are reading. We are told the president is alive and here. We get notes from him and hear his voice on BBC, but we cannot see him. He must be the most invisible president in history.

By Sam Omatseye