Thank you, Dora
By Reuben Abati

DORA Akunyili, Nigeria's Minister of Information and Communications, is obviously the only man in the Executive Council of the Federation, the others have lost their spine and submitted to the tightly knit conspiracy spun by that body and its faceless accomplices in deceiving Nigerians 74 days on, that President Umaru Musa Yar'çdua is fit. Akunyili thoroughly fed up with all the fibbing and shilly-shallying reportedly submitted a memo to the Executive Council this week asking that the deception must stop and that President Yar'Adua must hand over to the Vice President so the country can move on in his absence.


Minister of Information and Communications, Prof. Dora Akunyili



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Thank you, Dora. You have just confirmed what we have always known that the members of the Executive Council of the Federation who are required under Section 144 of the Constitution to take a decision as to the incapacitation of the President are not likely to do so, first because they are his appointees (the law givers apparently overlooked this, in the future this section should be amended); second, the lying Ministers are more interested in protecting their seats rather the common good and three, they want to be seen to be loyal to the President. And so before now, they had issued a statement saying that President Yar'Adua is well, some claimed to have spoken with him as if that amounts to a certificate of medical fitness, and shamelessly that body, with the help of the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, chose to misinterpret the law and make short-shrift of a court ruling.

It was a case of Federal Ministers, maintained at public expense, insisting on doing what is wrong. Every week, they pretended to be holding a Cabinet meeting, with a vacant seat and an absent President as Chairman, the emptiness of that space gradually becoming a metaphor for other observed patterns of emptiness, and at each meeting they further pretended to be awarding contracts, under the authority of a Vice President who had left no one in any doubt that he has no powers to sign documents or give directives. Dora Akunyili must have been frustrated by the charade. As an insider, she must have witnessed the drift first hand, the posturing of a few and the helplessness of a Federal Cabinet that is supposed to serve the people, now bogged down by a self-inflicted illness, engaged in nothing else but "little chats".

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