The Punch Writes

There were palpable anxieties across the country on Saturday over the health of President Umaru Yar‘Adua who is currently receiving treatment at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for what his doctors named as acute pericarditis.

This was as fresh facts emerged that President Yar‘Adua abandoned the Horst Schmidt Klinik, Wiesbaden, Germany for the Saudi Hospital because the German hospital had asked him to resign from office in order to attend to his fragile health.

The president was said to have been prepared to heed the German hospital’s advice but that he later changed his mind when members of his kitchen cabinet asked him not to do so.

Those who persuaded the president was said to have prevailed on him to seek medical help from elsewhere, thus his change to the Jeddah hospital.

Meanwhile, throughout Saturday, the news desk of SUNDAY PUNCH received many frantic calls as anxious citizens sought to clarify speculations over the state of health of their president.

The anxiety by Nigerians persisted even as an online publication, Earth Times.org said a doctor at the Saudi hospital said on condition of anonymity that President Yar’Adua would be released “as early as next week.

“He was no longer in the intensive care wing of a Jeddah hospital and was undergoing routine medical tests,” the publication quoted the anonymous doctor to have said.

Checks by our correspondent, however, confirmed that Yar‘Adua was responding to treatment, though he was said to be in critical condition.

Efforts to receive assurances from the President‘s spokesman, Olusegun Adeniyi, did not succeed as calls to his mobile phone did not go through. Also, text message to his phone received no response.

Sources close to the President told our correspondent that visitors were barred from the private ward where he was receiving treatment under tight security.

”The man‘s health is stable but he is continuously placed on drip by doctors who are doing everything to rescue his life,” a source said.

Another source told our correspondent that the president would have taken a definite position on how to respond to advice to resign but for those whose continued relevance depends on the president‘s continued stay in power.

“The President is not power drunk as some people are thinking but those close to him who think they may lose their position if he resigns will not allow him,” the source added.

Before he became a patient of the Saudi hospital, President Yar‘Adua was said to have visited the HSK, based in the city of Wiesbaden, regularly since he was the governor of Katsina State.

As a president, Yar‘Adua‘s first visit to the German hospital was said to be in August 2008 when he was kept under observation for 11 days.

He, however, was said to have stopped patronising the HSK where he was being treated for Churg-Strauss syndrome because he was not willing to accept the advice by his doctors to relinquish power on health