The President's health and Gani's admonition

I am suffering from cancer of the lungs. I did not put it there. Let me use this opportunity to call on President Yar'Adua to disclose the nature of his ailment to the people... We are entitled to know. Why should he be afraid?..." - Gani Fawehinmi, May 2007.

GANI Fawehinmi is back, and in spite of his battle with cancer, it is obvious that adversity has not robbed him of his fiery and forthright edge. He made the statement above while receiving the former labour leader and Action Congress Gubernatorial candidate in Edo state, Adams Oshiomhole. We thank Gani for bringing up the matter of the President's health. It is an issue that has been treated in official circles with so much secrecy. Government officials have been behaving as if they are sworn to an oath not to disclose any information about the health of the President. And yet since 2007, when President Yar'Adua was presented to Nigerians as a Presidential candidate, the state of his health has been of great concern.

In March last year, before the elections, the then Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had to be rushed to Germany for treatment. There were rumours that he had died. President Olusegun Obasanjo as he then was, who was pushing Yar'Adua as his successor, had phoned the then candidate on his sick bed in Germany and asked him: "Umoru are you dead?" This was on national television. And the man in Germany had told the public that he was being treated for a severe bout of catarrh. The candidate not only insisted that he was alive and well, but that he was willing to have a game of squash with anyone who doubted that he was hale and hearty. Nobody took up that challenge. It is perhaps about time someone did.

However, leading Nigeria is not about the game of squash. It is not about two men chasing a ball around a small room and burning energy. The Presidency requires far more rigour and concentration. It is not a game in that sense. It is serious business requiring more than physical ability, but a sharp and healthy mind. President Olusegun Obasanjo, who plays squash by the way, had promptly dismissed anyone raising questions about the PDP's Presidential candidate's health as "a wicked child of Satan".

In due course, after the fact, there was some form of official admission that President Umaru Yar Adua was nursing an ailing kidney. But the rider to this is that it is not a big problem and that this will not affect his work as President. When in April, President Yar'Adua suddenly cancelled a scheduled trip to Dakar and Katsina and headed instead for Weisbaden, Germany to see his doctors, public anxiety was again raised. But again, the public was told, by his spokesman Olusegun Adeniyi, that the President was "hale and hearty," and that he was only receiving treatment for an "allergic reaction".

For ten days, the President was away. At this point, the Nigerian public became truly apprehensive. What allergic reaction? Was it the ailing kidney again or something else? Or the catarrh of old? This fuelled speculations, with the media offering reports about which hospital or doctor was treating the President. There were also references to some dreadful ailments. One newspaper wrote that the President was suffering from a massive and corrosive inflammation of blood vessels to his internal organs, something called "Chung Strauss syndrome". State officials will not offer any information. They are perhaps being protective of their own positions.

Due to doctor-patient privileges, the President's doctors at home and abroad are not likely to divulge any information, and they have not done so. But today no other subject is generating greater anxiety about the country's future. There are so many political permutations already being circulated about what may happen to Nigeria and the Presidency, should the President become incapable of continuing in office.

The uncertainty that has developed is at a great cost to the nation, even to the President himself. If the Federal Government had been active on all fronts, perhaps no one will bother this much. But the Nigerian state at the centre is in the grips of a creeping paralysis. The tentative conclusion, wrong or right, is that the Federal Executive is not moving in terms of service delivery because the President is not strong enough to pay attention to matters of state. In its first year in office, the Yar'Adua administration is already bogged down by desperate questions about the President's state of health. Gani is right. President Yar'Adua has a responsibility to put an end to the speculations. Gani has set a good example by telling everyone that he has cancer of the lungs. He is not even obliged to do so. But the President of Nigeria is.

It is true that leaders are human beings and like all living things, they are prone to illnesses too. President Yar'Adua would not be the first leader in power to be ill. US President J. F. Kennedy suffered from adrenal insufficiency. French President Francois Mitterrand battled illness for months. Ronald Reagan was also ill while in office as US President. General Ibrahim Babangida as Nigerian President, underwent surgery for radiculopathy. In the mid-90s, former Greek Prime Minister Andrea Papandreou was on life-support for about two months (due to heart disease and kidney failure) before he finally decided to resign. Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill also battled with illnesses while in office as British Prime Ministers. Cuba's Fidel Castro had to step aside recently for health reasons.

Hitler had a long list of illnesses including syphilis, Parkinson's disease and irregular heartbeat, and was permanently on drugs. Admittedly, it is not always that governments, political parties and families are forthcoming with details of the health conditions of leaders in the public arena. Kennedy's family did not want any disclosures in public. Papandreou's party, the PASOK, pretended that all was well until the man himself threw in the towel. Until Boris Yeltsin, who suffered from alcoholism, and neurological disorder and died of congestive heart failure in April 2007, Russia kept sealed lips about the health of its leaders. In more recent times, however, the standard practice has been that of full disclosure and the protection of the people's right to know. Even in countries where the leader's health is still treated as state secret, the system is in place to ensure a smooth running of the state.

In Nigeria, we do not enjoy that luxury. Our institutions are weak. The President is everything. Although we run a democracy, what exists across the country is a royalist expression of power with the leader behaving like a monarch. Unless President Yar'Adua moves and approves, nothing can actually move. There is a Vice President but in Nigeria the position of a deputy is not considered a position at all: it is as someone put it, the equivalent of a spare tyre. When a Nigerian President is ill, therefore, there is no authority; there is a vacuum of sorts and all kinds of persons are tempted to seize the initiative.

The big damage to the Yar'Adua Presidency at the moment is the growing speculation that other persons are trying to seize the initiative around him. He needs to come clean on the question of his health to dispel such insinuations; if he does not, the opinion would soon crystallise that he is a weak President in the literal sense of that word. President Yar'Adua is drawing a salary for being President. Nigerians want to be sure that he is doing the job for which he has been elected and for which he is being paid.

In all of this, the people are in a difficult situation and if indeed the President is ill, but he is not incapacitated, then there is no way anybody can truly confirm that anything is amiss. There is no mechanism for determining the health of public officials. A compulsory medical test is not one of the requirements in the Constitution. Sections 144, 145 and 146 of the 1999 Constitution deal with the subject of permanent incapacity of the President or Vice President. But the emphasis is on "permanent". The processes for determining "permanent incapacity" as spelled out in Section 144 are unrealisable within the Nigerian context except the state is confronted with a fait accompli. This being the case, there is therefore almost no way in which the Nigerian people can do anything.

Gani's admonition therefore is at best a summon to morality and conscience. Even if President Yar'Adua responds, there can be no guarantee that both the state and the ruling Peoples Democratic Party will not elect to mislead the country with inaccurate information. We have been through this route before with the late General Sani Abacha. His health was similarly a subject of public interest, but the state denied that he was ill, until one morning, he drooped dead, in his case to the relief of everyone who had suffered under his dictatorship.

But perhaps the best way to dispel all speculations about the fragility or otherwise of President Yar'Adua's health is for the Federal Government to suddenly wake up and begin to function. When a government appears to be active and productive, the people will spend less time speculating about the health of their leaders. But when nothing appears to be happening, in a country where the people have been short-changed in eight years of democracy, and another year seems to have slipped away, and there is so much demand for change and progress, questions are bound to be asked. In such circumstance, an allergic reaction is bound to assume the shape of an impeding catastrophe in the people's imagination.

Gani wants the country's health infrastructure to be re-built so Nigerian leaders can begin to patronise Nigerian doctors at home and Nigerian hospitals as well, and be sure of correct diagnosis of their ailments. At the moment, our hospitals have become slaughter slabs where the doctors lack the equipment to diagnose simple ailments and have been killing people, in utter and perhaps innocent violation of the Hippocratic Oath.

There is a similar emergency in virtually every other aspect of our lives, National productivity is low because there is no regular power supply anywhere in the country, even power stations and offices are run on generators, the roads are congested, there is a food supply crisis, poverty, and anomie. Those who have been elected to change this unfortunate situation cannot afford to treat Nigeria like a game of squash. What the country needs is not a game of squash but action and results.