Buhari’s Ill Health and Matters Arising

SATURDAY POLSCOPE STORIES

By Eddy Odivwri

It was 100 days as at last Wednesday since President Muhammadu Buhari travelled to London for medical treatment. Ever since then, he had been the butt of many jokes and ill comments.

But for just a handful of political jobbers, the general wish of the Nigerian people is for President Buhari to quickly recover and return to his post.
However, the handlers of the president had elevated the normal issue of a president’s health to a coded state secret. The President’s health status has simply been mystified, making it appear like the President is a traditional monarch whose health status is sacrilegious and thus cannot be discussed or enquired into by mere mortals. If that is true of ancient monarchs, it cannot subsist for a democratically-elected president.

Till date, Nigerians do not know for sure what our president is suffering from. The secrecy around and about his health has understandably, generated conspiratorial conclusions and inaccurate conjectures. The handlers had so treated the health status like classified information so much that even the official media team/spokesmen of the president do not or did not have reliable first-hand information about their principal.
Until last week, when the media team was graciously allowed to visit Mr President in London, they hardly knew better than a man on the street, as they had relied hugely on secondary sources of information. Bad!
The experience of the media team betrays the scant regard the president’s handlers have for the Nigerian public.

In fact, it was rumoured (we had to rely on rumours, in the absence of valid reports) that Mrs Aisha Buhari’s first visit to London to see her ailing husband was a fiasco as she was not even allowed to see her husband, and soon returned to merely say her husband would soon be back. This is over 50 days that she said so and we are still waiting for the soonness of the “soon”.
Even though everybody agrees that it is natural to fall ill, get treated and recover or die, those around Mr President have, by their modus operandi, seemed to present the President as a Dues ex machina. Even then, machines do break down, let alone a 73-year-old man.
Why should Nigerians not know what is wrong with their president? Those who have merely called for prayers for the president without full disclosure of the ailment troubling him, forget that prayers are better answered when the prayer points are clear and unambiguous. Why is it such a big deal disclosing the nature of Mr President’s sickness?

In the sad instance of the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua’s case, that was the same way Nigerians were kept in the dark on what was actually wrong with their president. It was not until “quarter to” before Nigerians were told of the ‘jaw-breaking sickness… “pericarditis” while some other medics say the then Mr President was manifesting symptoms of Churg Strauss syndrome (whatever that means). It was later simply interpreted to be lung cancer.
I am often reluctant to compare our brand of governance with those of America or other developed economies. But was the world not told, just less than a month ago, of how the 80-year-old Republican Senator, John McCain, was diagnosed of “glioblastoma, an aggressive cancer” and how he had to undergo surgery to remove the blood clot on his left eye? Such lucid details of an ailment (as Nigerians would say) for an “ordinary” senator. So imagine if it is their president.
It is doubly sad in this instance given the fact that not only is Buhari a Nigerian property, the Nigerian state is indeed picking his medical bill and all the other concomitant expenses of both the feeding, allowances, welfare of all those around the President in London, as well as the trending practice of trips by Nigerian government officials to visit the president in London. Nigeria is paying and so perfectly deserving to have full details.

It is both rude and wrong for one of Buhari’s aides, Lauretta Onochie, an emerging puppet presidential bouncer, to claim that it was bad manners for any Nigerian to demand to know the health status of Mr President simply because Buhari properly handed over power to his deputy, Professor Yemi Osinbajo.
For crying out loud, does Onochie need to be told that Mr President is an employee of the Nigerian electorate? If an employee is going on sick leave, the employer reserves the right to grant a sick leave with pay or a sick leave without pay, especially in a circumstance that seems to be an ad infinitum. If Onochie was a chief executive of a going concern would she continue to pay a sick employee without knowing exactly what is wrong with the staff?

Let no one misinterpret me. Mr President is fully deserving to be treated and cared for by the Nigerian state, no matter the cost. Even Local Government chairmen get treated with public funds. After all, the total cost of the treatment, directly and indirectly, is not anything compared to the roguery going on in government, albeit illegally. The point to make therefore is that Nigerians deserve to be told wholly what the problem is with Mr President.
This is even doubly so knowing that on this “second missionary journey”, Nigerians are at the mercy of the whims and caprices of the British doctors on whose instruction alone, President Buhari will return home.
Even the shameful issue that at almost after 57 years of nationhood, Nigeria does not have a reliable and efficient health system that can take care of her president, but has to run back to our colonial overlords, deserves a deeper exegesis. But that will be a matter for another day.

The President had, on his “first missionary journey”, done 49 days of absence for a journey initially programmed to last 10 days. He returned on March 10.
Before he returned then, top government officials kept deceiving Nigerians that Mr President was “in good shape”, “he is in high spirit”, “he is as fit as fiddle”, etc. It took the president himself, on his return, to confess that he had never been as sick, as he even had blood transfusion. So why were the government officials downplaying the reality of the situation?
Is it out of place to be sick? Would telling Nigerians how sick the president is/was, make him to be less loved?

In the 57 days he was in the country, after the March 10 return, he was hardly able to follow through his official routines as he skipped several Federal Executive Council meetings, and stayed away from official ceremonies, indicating that he was not sufficiently recovered before he came back on March 10.
That necessitated his return to London last May 7.
Until we graduated into the photographic phase, wherein we can now see Mr President in photographic posts (with those coming to visit him, including men and their children), it was all silence and banal official rhetoric, broken only by the audio message from Mr President in which he addressed Muslims in Hausa (or was it Arabic) language, during the last Muslim festival.

Although official narratives deny the existence of a cabal, the open fact confirms that indeed there is a clique, otherwise called the cabal, that is manipulating the affairs of and around the President. And it is altogether a job not so well done.
One of the top government officials who was among the first set of visitors to President Buhari, last month, had narrated how he had suggested the snapping of the amateur photo shots, just before they left, that were eventually released by the presidency, as a way of proving (to doubting Thomases) that the visiting team indeed met a “living and recuperating” president. He told me of how the “cabal” had objected to the idea of a photograph, and that but for his insistence, there would have been no proof that the visiting team actually met the president.
Even then, the presidential handlers had also interrupted the meeting when one of them sauntered in to remind the president that he had done more than the agreed thirty minutes with the visitors. It took Mr President’s reprimand to keep away the meddlesomeness of the handlers.
We have since seen more photo pose of Mr President, in different dimensions, including the latest with his media team.
The source had confirmed that Mr President had “fully recovered” adding that his not returning now is because he appears too lean and there is the plan that he should rest a little more, eat more, and put on some weight before he returns; stressing, with glee, that, “the Buhari I met in London was like the pre-2015 Buhari I knew: sharp and witty” That’s about three weeks ago.
And back to the menace of the notorious cabal, it is true that Professor Osinbajo is the acting president, in accordance with section 145 of the 1999 constitution, as amended, but the real fact is that the powers so released are indeed not absolute.
And being a careful, loyal and learned (seemingly) unambitious deputy, Osinbajo has tried to play it very cool and remain under the authority of the far-away and ailing principal, even when the real principal is disposed to him having unfettered powers. But there are other “forces” that determine which light (whether green, red or amber) to press. Osinbajo is in charge, but not in control. The cabal yet dictates, albeit discretely, how the government should run. That explains, why in recent times, the speed and pace of the acting president has slowed down remarkably.
For instance, it took the public outcry for the acting president to assign portfolio to the two ministers, Stephen Ocheni (Kogi) and Suleiman Hassan (Gombe) that had been cleared by the Senate since May. They were just assigned portfolio three days ago, because ‘London’ had not approved all along.
In all, it is the secrecy and dearth of information about the health of the first citizen that triggered the resume-or-resign protest being led by the group called Our Mumu Don Do. Buhari is a public votary. He cannot be treated or cocooned like a private citizen. His issues, while in office, remain vital chips in the public space. Needless to say that how these chips are managed are crucial in sending the right or wrong messages about the number one citizen.