SIR: For some time now, Nigeria and Guinea share one thing in common, that is, both countries' leaders are hospitalized in foreign countries. Not only are both leaders hospitalized in foreign countries, the citizens of both countries have no proper information as to the health conditions of their leaders.
It is pertinent to mention here that while I use the word "leader" for both heads of state and government, the word can only be appropriate for one of them who was seemingly democratically elected. President Yar'adua was (s)elected with vice president Jonathan by (un)Nigerians for a term of four years while Captain Moussa Camara, a.k.a Dadis took power by means of a coup d'etat for an indefinite tenure so to speak.
Since president Yar'adua traveled to Saudi Arabia, he has not been able to communicate with Nigerians, fueling speculations that he is either on life support or simply bedridden hence, the protracted silence. The question remains: when is he coming back? If he is not coming back any time soon, why is it difficult to swear in the vice president? If the president's kitchen cabinet believes that he can discharge the functions of his office from the diaspora as they tried to prove by flying the supplementary budget to Saudi Arabia for the president's assent, then, one would also think that they would have flown the newly appointed Chief Justice of Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to be sworn in by the president.
Allowing the out-going CJN to swear in the in-coming CJN and Nigerians not getting any "new year state broadcast" from the president as has been the tradition, is the height of omen we need, to conclude that the president is incapacitated. Having seen that the president is physically unfit to discharge the functions of his office, why hasn't both the National Assembly and the Federal Executive Council stood on the side of the constitution which provides for the swearing in of the vice president as acting president until the president is fit again? What Nigeria and Guinea consequently have in common now is that both economies are on a downward slant due to uncertainty.
All this hullabaloo about the whereabouts and health condition of the present would have been avoided had the president written to the National Assembly, notifying it of his medical trip, thereby paving the way for his vice to be sworn in. He can spend two years in Saudi Arabia without this level of outrageous outcry if his vice was sworn in without the people demanding for it by way of protest and litigations. One would think that the president's Minister of Justice (yes, Yar'adua's Minister of in-Justice) would have advised him in favor of propriety before he undertook this medical trip but alas! everyone of them came to Aso Rock with his own personal agenda, and that is to rape our democracy and cast us as uncivilized in the eyes of the watching world. Nigeria is too big for this kind of higgledy-piggledy leadership. I hope we do something in 2011 to avoid this kind of embarrassment in the future.
Kingsley Ogbuji
Texas, U.S.A
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