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Candidate Yar’Adua and his cross

By Azubuike Ishiekwene, Published: Tuesday, 1 Dec 2009

At the height of the spat between the House of Representatives and the Senate last week over which venue President Umaru Yar’Adua should present the 2010 budget to a joint sitting of the National Assembly, I received a text message with a stunning point of view. The sender said he had heard that the President was ill and that the budget face-off was stage-managed by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party to save him from the ordeal of presenting the bill himself.

I laughed off the SMS. Sure, you cannot put any mischief past the PDP, but to play politics with the President’s health seemed to me beyond the pale. In retrospect, I think I was mistaken. I should have known that in sickness or in health, politics is the first and last order of survival; it’s a do-or-die affair. If the President’s health was once thought to be off-limits, the rules now appear to be changing.

For example, the public announce-ment by the President’s doctor on Thursday that Yar’Adua was suffering from inflammation of the heart was a remarkable act of courage and openness. It was a departure from the trademark half-truths, outright lies and incompetent spin about the state of health of the President in the last 18 months or so. Although the doctor’s statement did not suggest any link between the President’s long-standing health problems and the present crisis, this first major attempt to come clean was also a political adventure.

Since Yar’Adua came to office in May 2007, he has travelled abroad at least four times – once to Germany, and thrice to Saudi Arabia – in connection with his health. Rumours about his actual ailment have ranged from the known (kidney disease); to the probable (Chaug Strauss Syndrome); to the ridiculous (mental problems). In all of this, the President and his government had maintained a stony silence, warning the opposition and the press not to “play politics” with the President’s health.

It appears that the days of denial are over. Not only was the announcement of the President’s illness an important political act, it was also designed to take the wind off the opposition’s sail and to enlist the public’s goodwill and sympathy. That is just as well. But the government must be prepared for tougher questions about how the country is run while the President is indisposed and his fitness to continue in office afterwards. In short, the politics of futile denial will inevitably be followed by the politics of calculated disclosure and its aftermath.

It was ridiculous and unnecessary for the government to say on the CNN that the President was not about to share any of his executive powers with Vice President Goodluck Jonathan. By law, he might be a figurehead, but by convention, a vice president does not require any special arrangement to act for the President in a work-a-day life.

The statement on the CNN may have reinforced the vice president’s figurehead image. But the government’s attempt to replace that image with the impression that a sick president is in charge is woefully unconvincing. In the end, the winner is a government on auto-pilot, a festering of cults, each group doing its own thing while the country drifts.

For how long? It’s not a question that the government – or the ruling party – wants to contemplate. The question will be treated as taboo because the inner circle would like us to believe that to do otherwise will (a) undermine confidence in the government and (b) post a premature obituary when the government still has a fighting chance. This argument is as eloquent as it is self-serving. Those who are advancing it are doing so not necessarily for the sick, for flag or for country, but because they fear that their own political end may also be near.

This was the case many years ago when aides of former US President Grover Cleveland told Americans that he was extracting a bad tooth on a yacht, instead of telling them that he had gone for an operation to remove a cancerous lesion from his left upper jaw. A more dramatic example was the case of the 32nd US President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He wanted an unprecedented third term, but first, he and his aides had to deal with the politics of his failing health. While his personal physician diagnosed him with “flu,” a second opinion by a cardiologist revealed that FDR was suffering from hypertension, heart disease, left ventricular cardiac failure, and bronchitis.

This second opinion was, naturally, swept under the carpet and FDR’s doctor later gave him a clean bill of health. He was re-elected for a third term in 1944, but died working at his desk shortly afterwards.

In spite of his health challenges, Yar’Adua has carried himself with remarkable calmness and dignity. But what he needs now are not aides looking for enemies in the vice president’s office, in the opposition and virtually everywhere but in themselves. The President needs help from his deputy to run the country normally; and our kind thoughts and prayers to get well quickly.

Most of all, after years of running battles with his health – with hardly enough energy to lift a drifting country or even time to enjoy the pleasures of his office – he needs to take back his life once again. He must begin to pack his suitcases, shun all pressure to run for office for a second term, and come to terms with the fact that with or without him, the country will go on. Politics need not be a do-or-die affair. I wish him well.

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