Needless fuss about Buhari’s ill health By Vincent Akanmode

WHAT does a country stand to gain from the death of its president? In more specific terms, what would Nigeria profit from the demise of President Muhammadu Buhari? It seems more probable that such an ugly development would disrupt national peace and hinder the nation’s development. Yet some Nigerians have turned the compassing of the President’s death into a past time. Since Ekiti State governor, Ayodele Fayose placed the infamous advert on the front page of a national newspaper in the build-up to the presidential election in 2015, wherein he insinuated the likelihood of Buhari’s death like some former Nigerian leaders of northern extraction if elected president, the rank of Nigerians desirous of Buhari’s death appears to have swollen to a worrisome proportion. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the citizens of a country expressing concern about the health of their president, particularly in a country that had witnessed the messy drama surrounding the death of former President Umaru Yar’Adua after a medical trip he took to Saudi Arabia in 2010.

Once beaten, after all, is twice shy. The hasty manner President Buhari left the country two days before the official date he was scheduled to travel to the UK purportedly for a rest did little to help matters. It has since turned out that the President was actually on a medical trip to the UK; a move that fell short of the expectations of forthright Nigerians that Buhari would not hide from the millions of people who elected his as president the real motive for his trip abroad, even if he was not under obligation to divulge the details.

It would have been in perfect sync with his reputation as a forthright and incorruptible leader to let the nation know that he, like any other mortal, had fallen under the weather and was in need of some medical attention. After all, there had been precedents from other world leaders, including the late former South African President Nelson Mandela, whose critical illness in 2013 was announced by the South African Presidency to the international media. For more than three months between June and September, 2013, the former South African president was on admission at Mediclinic heart hospital in Pretoria, undergoing treatment for recurring lung infection.

There was no secrecy or pretence whatsoever as the international media beamed their searchlight on Mandela. Buhari’s failure to follow the Mandela example culminated in the ugly insinuations from his army of ill-wishers, including the victims of his anti-corruption war, his political opponents, the Niger Delta militants, the advocates of Biafra Republic and others affected in one way or the other by his administration’s policies, to make a show of his ill health to the point of insinuating his death. These are groups of aggrieved Nigerians who would latch on any opportunity to ridicule President Buhari and blame anything on him, including the misfortune of married Nigerians who cannot impregnate their wives.

Unfortunately, a lot of our unsuspecting countrymen are falling for the antics of the foregoing groups of Nigerians. Mercifully, the visits some APC leaders recently paid to Buhari in London and the conversations he had with both the Senate President and the Speaker of the House of Representatives appear to have cleared the air about his true condition. If only they are endowed with good memories or sense of history, the promoters of Buhari’s death rumour would realise the enormous political crisis his death at this time could foist on the nation.

To have the current economic predicament of the country compounded with a political imbroglio of the nature that erupted from the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election is to set the nation inexorably on the path of perdition. By some divine arrangement, the nation appears to have managed to avoid a repeat of the acrimony that accompanied the succession of former President Yar’Adua by his then deputy, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, following the former’s incapacitation by illness. Buhari’s decision to communicate to the National Assembly the decision to have Osinbajo firmly in charge for the period he would be away effectively took care of any vacuum Buhari’s absence could have created. The move also rendered all the noise about Buhari leaving the country for longer period than he had signified uncalled for.

Praying now for a repeat of the Yar’Adua experience is tantamount to pushing our luck too far, considering that it had been insinuated in some quarters that the South West deliberately rooted for Buhari in the build-up to the 2015 presidential election because the people of the region knew that he might not last the distance on account of ill health or old age, paving way for Osinbajo, their son and Vice President, to become the President.

The delight some Nigerians have taken in spreading the rumour of Buhari’s death cannot but be of great concern to any rational Nigerian. While it is in perfect order that the citizens of a country would express concern about the health of their president, such expression of concern becomes a cause for worries when it sheds the toga of empathy to don the cloak of gossip. If the raisers of the false alarm concerning the President’s purported death are not the “screaming creatures” and “nattering nitwits” our ebullient Nobel laureate Prof Wole Soyinka castigated amid the furore generated by his decision to dump his American green card, there is certainly something nattering about these faceless harbingers of death.

Credit: http://thenationonlineng.net/