By Obi Nwakama
I SHOULD first register my best wishes to the president, Umar Yar’Adua, in his search for more robust health. I wish him well in his struggles with ill-health and extend my sympathies for his private pains.

I do not wish to underestimate the colossal burden he bears on this matter of personal debility; a fact which should allow us a little more regard, even some admiration for him, as he carries on with some dignity, in the light of what must be excruciating pain, the added burden of the Nigerian state.

But I personally think that Yar’Adua has given Nigeria his best shot given the circumstance, and as it stands currently, his frail and battered body cannot take any more. He should consider a quiet exit and allow more vigorous and steadier hands to come and steer the ship of the Nigerian state which is threatening to run into an iceberg.

The impression all over the world is that Nigeria is saddled with a sick president. It is a ticking bomb given the toxic geo-political arrangements that undergirds the internal agreements of the party in government. But a sick president, although well-meaning, can be of no use in the long run for a country seeking the transformative genius of select men and women who should be drawn by great purposes to public service.

The impression outside Nigeria is that Yar’Adua’s is a “trap mandate” set to create and perpetuate the uncertainty of public government in Nigeria. It is a mandate that continues to weaken the potentials for political and economic recovery in Nigeria.

This image hurts Nigeria’s economic interests as it drives fear into potential international investors. A weak president has scant authority, and even more scant ability to move against the internal and external forces that seek to undermine Nigeria’s national security interests.

There are those who profit off Nigeria by keeping it permanently schizophrenic and unstable. Yar’Adua is an extremely weak president, not for lack of ability but for his distracting ill health which makes him unstable; which forces him to focus more on the demands and government of his own body than the government of the republic and the demands of its public.

Yet, of course, the senate of the federal republic of Nigeria, made up mostly of PDPites, has declared that it does not see that Yar’Adua’s health constitutes any needs to worry regarding his capacity to continue to carry out his official functions as president and commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces.

But the consequence of the president’s ill-health is writ large on Nigerian affairs: in the terrible state of insecurity, in the riotous state of public finance; in the economic gridlock, and in the general lack of purpose or direction that characterizes this administration. The impression generally is so clearly woven to the reality: since Yar’Adua assumed office, Nigeria has not recorded any important steps or milestones.

There is nothing to which we can fully associate the Yar’Adua administration in terms of actual accomplishment. This is not even a slow government, it is a comatose government stymied and in search of directions.

The impression everywhere in the world is that Yar’Adua is merely a “transitional president” allowing for a little, meaningless interregnum, until something snaps in the backbone of Nigeria, that might trigger a full breakdown of the country or massive revolutionary anger, the extent of which no one is in a position to measure.

Besides this matter of impressions, there is also the matter of reality: the added cost to a poor and impoverished country like Nigeria, of servicing the health bills of an incontinent president, especially one who seeks routine medical attention or help from foreign hospitals and foreign doctors. And there, indeed, is the crux of my personal agro in this matter.

My beef is that the president has spent too much time administering his own health rather than the health of Nigeria. Secondly, Nigerians have been forced to pick the expensive health bills of a president at a cost no Nigerian knows. Perhaps it is time to publish the true cost to Nigerian tax papers of treating the president in expensive Hospitals in Germany and Saudi Arabia. The president has gone yet again to Saudi Arabia.

The office of the president as a result was forced to release  information on the state of the president’s health. He is currently admitted to a hospital in Saudi Arabia. The president, his media aide says, has a heart condition. Do we have Nigerian specialists capable of treating the president?

If we do not, why not? Why do we not have requisite medical facilities to which any Nigerian, including the president of Nigeria, could seek adequate palliation?

These presidential pilgrimages to hospitals in Saudi Arabia ought to give us all pause, particularly because we must ask, is it ethically prudent for the president of a country to seek expensive treatment in hospitals elsewhere while the citizens of the country he administers make do with the worst medical services in the world as Nigeria currently provides?

The president must refrain from these expensive medical trips and be treated like his fellow Nigerians in hospitals in Nigeria. What we have is what he gets.

The privileges of the president must not be abused.
No president should be better than the country he swears to serve.

Nigerians should not pay for the president’s medical bills abroad in better built hospital systems of countries, which like Nigeria have earned money from oil, but who have unlike Nigeria used their oil revenue judiciously to build up infrastructure rather than steal and squirrel looted revenue abroad.

Thirdly, the health of the president has to be seen as a national security issue. No self-respecting country leaves the health of its political, intellectual, and economic leaders to the care of other nations. It is not only dangerous, it is insulting.

It goes to the roots of the question of sovereignty. Sovereignty should not be in name only. Finally, the Nigerian senate must now rise up to its duties and retire President Umar Yar Adua: the president’s frequent medical miles indicate rapidly declining ability.