Whether President Muhammadu Buhari has been irrevocably hobbled by ill health or he is sound in body and mind and prancing around in the Abuja House in London is a puzzle that would not be unravelled until he returns home.

Even if all the state governors, the officials of the presidency and political parties travel to London and return with the verdict that Buhari exudes great health and a stellar sense of humour that belies the stern stuff he is made of, this would make no difference to Nigerians. Let Buhari write again to his Guinean counterpart that he is well and that he would soon return to Nigeria to assume the responsibilities he has abandoned for months, this would not still douse Nigerians’ doubts. They would maintain the skepticism that Buhari is yet to recover from his debilitating sickness that has kept him away from Aso Rock.

This cynicism is well founded. The officials of government have so much lost the citizens’ good will that they cannot be trusted. Remember? It was the same way that politicians and even clerics visited the late President Musa Yar’Adua but when they returned they did not tell Nigerians that he was incapacitated. It was only the then Minister of Information, the late Dora Akunyili who had the courage to shed off the carapace of propaganda for Nigerians to be confronted with the reality: the truth that the health of their president was beyond recovery. Yes, we take cognisance of the fact that a glaring misalignment of the creeds and deeds of politicians, especially the ones in these climes, oftentimes makes trusting them as amounting to self-immolation.

But the politicians of the All Progressives Congress (APC) have taken this vice of unreliability to an intolerable height. How does one expect the citizens to believe politicians of the APC hue when to the amazement of Nigerians they have disavowed the promises they made during electioneering? It was the same party that promised restructuring that has now dismissed it as unthinkable. It is thus not surprising when we see the Minister of Information Lai Mohammed engages in futile attempts to portray the president as having recovered from his affliction. When he strove on a national television programme to tell Nigerians that Buhari was no longer sick, he only succeeded in confirming the suspicion of the citizens that he is afflicted with a pathology of lying that he has not bothered to cure himself of. Or how do we explain a situation where Mohammed said that he had neither seen nor spoken to the president since he travelled yet he was so sure that he was not as sick as suggested by some Nigerians?


http://guardian.ng/opinion/buhari-just-come-back-home/

Wait oo, who this man epp