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President Yar’adua resign? No way!

December 3, 2009

President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua has been lying critically ill in a Saudi hospital for some weeks now, leaving the running of the state in the hands of nobody in particular and all my fellow citizens could do is call for prayers for quick recovery. The call for prayers in itself is nothing strange when viewed from the lens of our penchant for resorting to divine intervention even in the slightest of irritations. Dry fasting, endless vigil and Holy Ghost fire; has come to define the attitude of the new Nigeria.


The president’s illness is not new. Verifiable information puts it back somewhere before his days at the campaign trail in 2007. It does not matter that some pundits posit that he spent most of his Governorship reign in hospitals. What we know for sure is that what started as a common cold in 2007 has since degenerated to some high sounding and frightening medical term called ‘acute inflammation of the pericardium’. For sure, you must not have forgotten so soon the famous Abeokuta campaign trail telephone exchange between the dramatic President Obasanjo and the then German based patient Umaru Musa Yar’Adua who was the anointed presidential candidate for the PDP. Remember the infamous “Umoru are you dead” telephone exchange between OBJ and Yar’Adua have since come to erect a rumour industry solely devoted to ‘killing’ president Yar’Adua in the morning and ‘resurrecting’ him in the afternoon. The potency of this industry and its twist is proudly Nigerian.

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These were the early signs that our anointed President-in-waiting will have a love/hate relationship with hospitals. In countries where the electorates are discerning, where the press will probe until they unravel the cause of your running nose and where the civil society will demand and insist that all public officers including aspiring ones must come to equity with clean hands, the unfortunate debate about Yar’Adua’s current health challenges could not have been necessary. However, this is where the comparison ends because Nigeria is not an ordinary country. It is an extra ordinary country where the impossible happens daily without qualms. A Bank PHB kind of country; where very soon cars will start running on water. That explains why at every little hitch we call on God to come and remove the stone that is blocking our way. We call on Him to come and build roads for us, we call on Him to come and touch the heart of our leaders to steal less and use the money meant for the people to provide needed infrastructure.

Are you still wondering why Yar’Adua refused to hand over the running of the country to anybody? He knows his subjects well. He knows we cannot do more than call on God to either makes him recover or give him the Abacha treatment. He also knows that God does not need our permission to do either because He is God. The other thing President Yar’Adua knows, that is quite critical in this debate is the provision of our constitution. He is quite conversant with section 144 of the constitution that empowers two-third majority of State Executive Council members to pass a vote of no confidence in his ability to steer the ship of state in case of ill health or incapacitation. He is at home with the provisions of the constitution with respect to the duties of the National Assembly to constitute a team of five medical experts that must include his chief medical officer to confirm or contrast his physical state to carry-on with the tedious job of President of Nigeria.

The President knows quite well that these constitutional provisions are the only legal means to break his umbilical cord with Aso-Rock. He is aware that the provisions are self-serving and that at the very unlikely event that they be called to test, absolutely nothing will come out of it. These assurances are reinforced by the very nature of those provisions and the attitude of our people. A constitutional provision that allows the president to select carefully the entire members of the Federal Executive Council that are meant to serve as checks and balances on issues like this is a cynical one. He knows that this group of EXCO members will not rock the boat because of assured mutual destruction. He knows that they have a duty to look after the back of each other because to do otherwise will spell doom for them. This is the type of iron-cast assurance Obasanjo calls “I de Kampe”.

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Having established ‘no shaking,’ let us engage for purposes of academic exercise that two-third of the federal Executive council members agree to write to the National Assembly in accordance with the constitution. The same National Assembly that is perceived to have contrived a non-existent superiority squabbles just to give an ailing President what we in Nigeria call ‘soft landing’. Let us also follow through with our hypotheses that the National Assembly in a rare show of forced patriotism goes and appoints the five man medical experts to give an opinion on the health of a sitting Nigerian President with full paraphernalia of office. What type of result will you expect in a team that includes the president’s Chief Medical Officer? The same medical officer whose identity has been shrouded in secrecy like the actual ailment he has been managing for the President. If it is the same Nigeria where corruption have been elevated to a state art, the President will receive a clean Bill of health and that will be the end of the matter. Now, we ask, if you were this President with a high prospect of eating your cake and having it, would you do the silly thing like resigning? Who then picks up the huge medical bills associated with this life-threatening ailment?

Let us now try to interrogate the resignation option. Yar’Adua is quite aware that those championing it are generals without army. Now come to think of it, who will benefit if the President resigns? The Vice-President who the constitution empowers to step-into his shoes will emerge the ultimate beneficiary. The next logical question is, why is it that the President does not hand over to his Vice each time he embarks on this frequent medical pilgrimage? The answers are as simple as partially explained above that “he who is on ground fears no fall”. Secondly, you do not know the true character of a man until you give him power. Those calling on the President to handover power to Dr. ‘Goodluck’ Jonathan are not students of power. We can’t over emphasis the fact that everything going on right now in Aso-Rock powerhouse is cold political calculation devoid of the based sentiments we mere mortals are espousing.

The truth is that the moment power gets into the hands of Vice-President whose name ‘Goodluck’has lived up to its billing so far; there will be automatic power re-alignment at the presidency. All those Federal Executive members will shift loyalty to a more realistic and less risky Jonathan. President Yar’Adua was born and raised in an astute political family. Acute pericardium ailment or not, his mum did not raise a fool. He knows too well that the fragile loyalty and hold he has on his colleagues at the EXCO is to the extent that he is still the Commander-in-Chief. In Nigeria, where loyalty is to the individual rather than the institution, it is too risky to trust even his wife Turai with such powers.

Many Nigerians fail to credit Yar’Adua with the political sagacity he has rightly earned, preferring instead to focus more on his perceived slow pace attitude to governance. His so-called snail speed is his critical strategy to hold on to power. He simply accelerates the ship of state at his own pace. The fact that it is not yielding the desired outcome according to our own pre-conceived measurement standards is entirely our business. After all, we do not set standards for our leaders in Nigeria and any attempt to impose one on him is viewed as the handwork of political enemies who have sworn not to see any thing good in his government.

In case you need further validation of the President’s prompt reaction to issues that matter to him, consider the fate of Ambassador Kingibe, Senator Daggash and co who Yar’Adua took into confidence in the early stages of his romance with Saudi Hospitals. The setting looks the same with the present scenario except that in that particular incident, the Presidency was still in-denial of the true state of health of Yar’Adua. The President practically disappeared from the political radar thereby oiling further the engines and wheels of an existing robust and thriving rumour industry.

Amb. Kingibe who has remained a political predator all his life, read the mood of the nation rightly but this time underrated the latent powers of this President. He quickly engaged in a political horse-trading that he is adept at, forgetting that Yar’Adua though may have a misleading easygoing mien shares the same gene with his more out-going but astutely political strategist late elder brother General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua. The speed with which President Yar’Adua sacked Kingibe and co to reclaim his presidential estate has remained the single most strategic decision he has taken in his more than two and half year presidency. If you call a man with such speed and accuracy a snail, you make one wonder whether snail has multiple meanings.

What we have experienced in the entire Yar’Adua presidency is a deliberate connivance among people who need power for its own sake. I must admit my confusion most time my fellow citizens express frustration over what they term lack of performance on the part of Yar’Adua. It is on record that candidate Yar’Adua in 2007 never promised us anything all through his campaign for the exalted position of President. If any thing, he looked more like a sheep without a Shepherd through out the campaign. An unwilling Horse more like. The same way that President Shagari looked in 1979.

In 2007 presidential campaign, Obasanjo did all the talking and now that it is time to deliver, I think we should hold Obasanjo responsible. The so-called seven point agenda was a hastily contrived contraption put together after he has assumed power in 2007 to create a policy illusion. The contempt, disparagement and disdain with which the president approaches all issues Nigeria is his way of sending a clear message to all Nigerians that “please let me be, you did not put me here and cannot remove me”. The pain to him is that we appear too dense to appreciate this message.
 This is wishing the president a quick recovery o jare.

Chike Orjiako wrote from Lagos.

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