President Yar'Adua's Unspoken Illness

Yar'Adua's health

President Yar'Adua's Unspoken Illness : A Global Concern

It is appropriate at this stage in the orchestrated national anxiety about President Yar' Adua's health and capacity to continue governing the country to unmask the hidden motives of those actively involved in death-wishing and other ploys to get the President prematurely replaced.

In this regard, we must remember that we have had similar bouts of national hysteria in the past; and they have all been whipped up by the same groups of people. The unmistakable common interest of those spinning the yarn of presidential incapacity is just to get President Yar' Adua out of the way so that another opportunity can arise to replace him. There is certainly no dispute about the peculiar circumstances surrounding the emergence of Umaru Musa Yar'Adua as Nigeria's President, especially Obasanjo's sinister choice of who he thought would be a short-lived lame duck Northern candidate and the singular political independence of the candidate from the entrenched cliques of established power brokers. The unspoken and most dreaded "illness" of President Umaru Yar'Adua therefore has little to do with his physical health.

If physical health is indeed so critical to leadership capacity, the governorship of Umaru Musa Yaradua in Katsina State would have provided more than enough evidence. It is rather puzzling to observe that the sheer scale of development witnessed during his tenure in Katsina State in spite of health challenges is a critical reference point that is calculatedly blanked out of assessments of his presidential performance capacity. In the same vein it is telling to recall that those who could not fathom how Umaru Musa Yar'Adua could literally isolate himself from so-called power brokers and cliques in Katsina State and still be so successful in governance persistently wished him dead whenever his health faltered.

This is exactly what is happening today. The only prominent political leaders who have volunteered mature comments to douse the contrived anxiety about the President's health and absence are those who are known to have no vested interests in politics and certainly no ambition to be president. All the others have either lent their voice to the hysteria or by their loud silence betrayed their bias against the survival of the Yar'Adua Presidency.