BUHARI'S HEALTH

By Obi Nwakanma
It was always an issue, from the moment Muhammadu Buhari won the nomination of the new coalition of parties, the APC, to run for president of Nigeria in 2015. Reports of the fickle state of his health was a campaign issue. Many on the opposition pointed out that Buhari was ill, and was on medication.

Of course, this was vigorously contested and denied by his handlers. His supporters circulated the view that the then aspirant, now President Buhari was as fit as the proverbial fiddle. But the concerns did not go away. It has certainly now, become the central, and increasingly dominant question of Buhari’s presidency. Is this president physically fit to run the affairs of this country with its myriad of complex problems? The question has gained even greater validity in the backdrop of the President’s failures since assuming office.

Perhaps the President’s frequent health holidays has to do with the disease of all old men. May we all get the chance to be old, but there comes a time in one’s life when the body squeaks in defiance of all our attempts to move it to do thing that it has forgotten to do with time. President Buhari’s health crisis throws up a question about when his generation will finally take a bow and leave the scene for a new generation to pull Nigeria together and save it from the mess that Buhari’s generation has made of it!

Today, Nigerians born on January 1960 are just three years short of 60 years. In 2020, they would be sixty years. That is the exact span of time that the British colonized Nigeria: sixty years! And that would also be the exact span of time that Nigerians would have had political independence from the Imperialists. Those born in 1960 will be at the beginning of their decline having arrived at the height of their physical and mental powers. Yet, the children of Independence have never had the opportunity to imprint anything of their generation in the body politics of Nigeria. They have been sidelined, and politically quarantined by an old guard that, through its prebendal linkages, continued to greedily hold on to power, and recycle itself in a sort of political musical chair in Nigeria. It is this war-drunk generation of men who spilled so much blood in the name of power that has created the tragic bloodtide that is Nigeria, from coup to coup. It is that generation that dismantled every civic institution that was created to civilize Nigeria, and left it bereft of political capacity, national coherence, and the rule of law. It made Nigeria a terrible dystopian jungle from which it has yet to crawl out, in spite of the fiction called “democracy” currently practiced today. It destroyed the public system and created a fickle, ignorant, and extremely incompetent civil service that is today, the most corrupt, and most unprepared to administer a civil government. Because that generation depended on a divide-and-rule ethos to maintain itself in power, it broke down Nigeria, smashed it into smithereens, and has left as legacy a country far more divided along ethnic and religious lines than at any other time in its history.

President Buhari is part of that generation. His first public acts clearly perpetuated the contradictions of his generation, and made it immediately clear that he really had nothing new to offer Nigerians in spite of the ferocious advertisements of his party, the APC, to the contrary. It was political fraud to have retailed Buhari to Nigerians by the APC as the sole solution to Nigeria’s headaches. Now that Buhari has been demystified ,we have a real political tragedy playing out before us. In the last couple of weeks, the presidency, and leaders of the APC have been trying very diligently to shield the exact nature of the president’s debility. This has created a needless fire storm, certainly. But it must be said that no Nigerian should wish the president anything but the best at this stage of his life. Yet Nigerians have a right to know the true state of the president’s health. Nigerians need to assess whether the constant distraction of President Buhari’s physical health constrains his mental ability to carry on with the doubtlessly stupendous task of governing a country like Nigeria going through a difficult economic and political transition.

Should this president compound his physical pains and weakness with the terrible rigor required in dealing with the demands of statecraft? It is unfair on that old body. And it is doubly unfair to Nigerians to continue to endure the limits of a distracted president. I would for the moment leave aside the tragic implication of the fact that the President has to go on what we can only describe as medical exile in London in order, either to hide the full facts of his condition from Nigerians and the National Assembly, or to get treated.

It speaks continuously of the great contradiction that is Nigeria: here was a president who pledged to stop “medical tourism,” by the Nigerian establishment, and who budgeted for the clinic in Aso Rock – which is neither a research hospital nor a public hospital – more money than all the Teaching/Research hospitals in Nigeria put together, and yet must now find his own treatment in London. It is hypocritical, and it is unworthy of this president who has long presented himself as something of the mold of Calpurnia. In this past week, the president postponed his return to Nigeria following the end of his medical leave, presumably on the orders of his doctors in London. It may well be that he is fully recovered from his troubles. It may well be that he has no terminal condition. It may well be that he is suffering from supreme exhaustion from confronting the herculean task that is Nigeria’s mounting problems.

It may well be that, as those who visited him in London and took photos with him, and those who spoke with him in 5-minute phone chats from Nigeria have tried to assure Nigerians, that the president is “hale and hearty,” and it may just as well be that the President deserves his leave, and that he may have wisely chosen to spend it in the silence and quiet of a vacation home in London rather than in his village in Daura where he would have no rest from a constant stream of visitors whom he would be compelled to see. It is equally true that the president does need to take long, sustaining breathers from the affairs of the state. But what is equally true is that Nigerians deserve to know the true nature of President Buhari’s health. The President’s health is public health.

Those asking for privacy in this regard are utterly misinformed: a man who ran for president sacrifices as part of that commitment, every claim to privacy and to a private life. On a different note, as the president arrives home from this medical junket, hopefully rejuvenated, he must begin within the limits that his body can carry, to reorder his priorities; reorganize his government, and reposition the trajectory of the nation. President Buhari has been the most divisive president in the annals of Nigeria, and one thing this president must do is to restore trust and regard to that office, and prepare himself to clear his office for a new occupant in 2019, unless he is able within the next two years to stem the rise of discontent in Nigeria against his presidency.