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| Former Nigeria President |
FOR at least six months before he finally passed on, President Yar’Adua was no longer in charge of himself to say nothing of the country. This made the three people who surrounded him at this time the actual leaders of the country.
They apparently did what they thought was right in the circumstance and put Yar’Adua’s name to it. His health condition had deteriorated to the point he could no longer be said to be in control of most, if not all, of what was attributed to him.
The account in Adeniyi’s book confirms this as much as reports filtering in then from unofficial sources about how the President’s life hanged in the balance. Of course, so-called members of the President’s inner cabinet were quick to deny anything that seemed to suggest President Yar’Adua’s health might have been so compromised he could never return to office again as president. To these people, the President had become a meal ticket.
Yar’Adua not only had to be alive but he must also be president for them to live. Which means the President must be kept on his feet and made to continue with the punishing schedule imposed on him if his hangers-on must remain on the gravy train.
And so it was the man travelled to Togo for an ECOWAS meeting after a visit to Bayelsa that had all but drained life out of him. This visit had been cancelled a couple of times on account of Yar’Adu’s fragile health. But in order to maintain a semblance of good health, he followed the trip to Bayelsa with another one to Lome that almost proved fatal.
It fell on his ADC to carry him off the tarmac, practically pulling him by his babanriga into a nearby room where he was revived. The spectacle created by occurrences such as this was to say the least pathetic.
That the leader of the largest Black country on our planet was reduced to the puppet he had become on account of his health was not a good sight. How this escaped the media at this time is evidence of the great cover of secrecy that had been thrown around the President.
Worse had been written about President Yar’Adua’s health but given the vehemence with which his immediate aides denied these claims then much of what filtered to the public sounded too tragically comical to be true.
One of the very issues that could have determined the continued existence of Yar’Adua’s presidency even before he contemplated standing for the flawed election that produced him as president was made a cultic affair known only to a few who stood to take the worst advantage of the situation.
And nobody seemed most guilty of this than Turai Yar’Adua who was apparently more besotted to her husband’s high office even if it was only his corpse that occupied it than insist on his return home to take better care of his health.
But equally intriguing and mysterious was what could make a man choose to remain in office when it was clear even to him that he was by that doing irreparable damage to himself. Why did Yar’Adua not read the writing on the wall and realise he was better off a living being than a vegetable in a presidential refrigerator?
Which leads one back to the point that the President was under the manipulative influences of a few individuals, not least of whom was his own wife. And how terribly they deceived a nation while Michael Aondoakaa (where is he now?) continued to foul the airwaves with his peculiar interpretation of the law while pretending to be in close touch with a dying man nobody had seen in public for months.
As far as his wife, Turai, his CSO, Tilde and ADC, Mustapha were concerned, Yar’Adua could remain in Saudi Arabia and continue to rule in his sick bed for as long Nigerians could tolerate it.
These three were not so much interested in the President’s good health as they were in keeping their own positions. Returning Yar’Adua in the dead of night was also to ensure nobody, especially his then Vice President, Goodluck Jonathan, functioned in any capacity that could suggest a change in who was Nigeria’s president- so they could keep their positions.
And so it was that a man who could no longer go to work for several weeks at a time or spend more than a couple of hours when he did- so was he pushed through the body-destroying regime of appearing to run a country whose wellbeing had to be sacrificed to satisfy a few mongers of power. Some of the most harrowing episodes in Adeniyi’s account concerned those tear-jerking moments when a man who could no longer walk down from his bed room was propped up like a stuffed teddy bear each time he had to make a public appearance.
At a time, they could no longer be bothered about this. They kept him holed up inside. He was quarantined and kept away like a damaged museum piece at a time he was required to but could not perform the simplest of state functions.
Surely, the three people who had charge of Yar’Adua at this time not only wronged him but wronged a nation too. They took a nation for a ride by lying to and deceiving it. They were prepared to run a country aground for as long as their own position was guaranteed and their meal ticket was not allowed to go in peace.
These are among the most presumptuous people one has ever seen. But they had a Hamza Al-Mustapha model to follow. Unfortunately, however, the likes of Goodluck Jonathan who witnessed and suffered personal humiliation during this period have continued in the same way- nothing learned. It’s a shame that nobody outside the three people that held him hostage for months knows what actually happened to President Umar Yar’adua in his last days.
They ought to be made to tell what they know if we are to get anywhere in our fight against the culture of impunity that has been our undoing. Three years after Yar’Adua’s passing, we ought to remind ourselves how close we came to the brink as a country. No thanks to a power-obsessed three that held an ailing president hostage before our very eyes. May Umar Yar’Adua rest on in peace.
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