IN the coming weeks, the All Progressives Congress (APC) will continue to give the impression that its main headache as a political party is President Muhammadu Buhari’s health crisis. It will try to blame that personal crisis for its own partisan woes. Who knows, it may even attempt to put the country’s inability to forge ahead as a strong and united country down to the president’s continuing inattentiveness occasioned by poor health. After all, the interagency conflicts in the federal government and the bureaucratic and policy discords in the presidency itself have been conveniently and expediently but erroneously blamed on the president’s health challenges.
The president’s health crisis is a major challenge to everyone, country and party alike, and it undoubtedly affects everything. No matter what presidential aides and cabinet members say, and regardless of the optimism of his wife, Aisha, and the colourful tales of presidential spokesmen concerning his daily itinerary, the president cannot attend to state matters with the energy he would like, nor even with the kind of presence of mind the constitution takes for granted. After some weeks away from public glare, the president again emerged on Friday to participate in the Juma’at prayers in Aso Villa. It was meant to douse widespread public anxiety and social media frenzy about his health. But nothing will douse anything until the president comes to terms with the bad hand nature has dealt him, until he looks the country in the face and tells them what his problems really are, and until he convinces a majority that in one form or the other he is able to shoulder on with the admirable stoicism he has become famous for.
There is little chance he will do any of these, however. President Buhari has minders who are even more insular than he himself has professed, aides whose worldviews hark back to Nigeria of the 1950s, self-confessed powermongers who take delight in moving pawns wildly across cracked chessboards. The public will continue to second-guess their president. The online media, that irreverent assortment of feral reputation bashers, ascribe to him a cocktail of maladies which modern and even futuristic medicine would find befuddling. The traditional media, especially the print brethren, long wary of being accused of acting someone else’s script, have censured themselves into a near soporific state.
What was incontrovertible last Friday, however, was that the president, as he walked scores of metres to the State House mosque, was anything but agile, let alone witty as an aide incredulously said. The long walk to prayer was staged to deflect rumours and lessen anxiety. But the walk became a solemn, almost elegiac procession in company with edgy, anxious and, at the end, relieved aides. It was unnecessary to put a spin on a procession that unambiguously told its own story. Even if it is true that he is recovering, the president was on Friday still gaunt and a little listless. He gave the impression of someone making effort to satisfy a pesky and ‘needlessly’ curious public. No doubt, the outing was staged to take the sting out of recent criticisms and commentaries suggesting that the president should return to England for a follow-up treatment and perhaps extended rest.
Unfortunately, for a country in the throes of virulent ethnic competition, a competition accentuated by the president’s own disinterest — some say connivance — in the struggles between farmers and herdsmen, the very public health battles of the president have been flooded with silly and misplaced sentiments. To ask the president to step aside, if he is unable to summon the strength to govern with the passion required of him, is not being wicked. It is realism. The problems of Nigeria are gargantuan, and they require the serious, undivided attention of a man of wit and depth, a man in fine fettle. President Buhari has not given that attention because of his health, not because he does not wish to. He will therefore be criticised; and when he falls short, as indeed he has continued to do, he will be condemned, regardless of his health. A country of about 180 million people with the kind of aggravated challenges facing them cannot be held to ransom by a president whose health problems have become both a challenge to development and a distraction.
Hale or unhealthy, the president will not be handled with kid gloves. His minders should know that the destiny of 180 million people demands this kind of sometimes detached and even seemingly cruel treatment. There is no sentiment about a leader’s health in the face of a challenged country battling with serious existential crises. If a president is strong, his family and country admire his sprightliness and pluckiness flowing from the grace of God upon his life. But if he is constantly unwell, everyone, no matter how wicked, feels the pain with him, but craves to continue life’s arduous journey. Fortunately, the president and his minders do not execrate religion. They believe that life and death are in the hands of God, not in the hands of those who wish the president bad. Therefore, since everything is in the hands of God, the president and his aides must de-emphasise the motives of critics who demand that the presidency come clean on the matter. There is a limit to the hide and seek, for the general impression of a sceptical public is that the president is evidently unable to give the country the undivided attention the constitution expects of him.
President Buhari’s health crisis is receiving undue attention for many reasons, not simply because there are probably many critics in the North and South who wish him evil. His inability to put both the ruling party and the country on a sound footing after assuming office in 2015 meant that his weaknesses and failures would reverberate in places and corners he would find personally unsettling and distasteful. His failure in the APC is clear enough. As president, it should matter to him what happens in the legislature. But his party was for many months after his stupendous victory unable to reach a consensus on power sharing. That lack of consensus in turn mirrored in a nuanced way the absolute lack of philosophical grounding in the party. It was a party that lacked a history, as it were, and had no corresponding sense of a future, any future. It could therefore not define its goals coherently in a manner that binds time and space together in a seamless continuum, nor find the men to implement them. There was in short no grand theory of how to deploy legislative powers to achieve a grand (national) design.
The anarchy in the legislature and the yawning gap between the National Assembly and the people both suggest the absence of leadership at the highest levels of government. It was right for the president to decline to subvert the National Assembly as ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo ingloriously did for eight years; but it was wrong to distance himself from the politics of principal officers’ elections, especially because the APC had some rudimentary ideas of what it wanted. The ensuing vacuum encouraged ambitious lawmakers without a grand, national and overarching purpose to seize the initiative and stitch their will and way into the national tapestry. As a result, though the legislature has accidentally found the means and will to defang the executive’s budding autocratic manners, there is no synergy between the two APC-led arms of government. In two years, the president has not found a way around this quandary. Worse, the APC is virtually unable to function as a party needing to renew itself through internal elections, nor to fund its activities and visualise great goals and great ambitions. The consequence of the president’s health crisis is not unsurprisingly accentuated by the party’s dismal organisational failure.
If the ruling party is in disarray, the country, already buffeted on all sides by a convoluted range of problems, is in even more dire straits. Nigeria is at a juncture where a brilliant and visionary president should roll up his sleeves and work intensely and long hours to settle its structural problems, whether ethnic, politics or economics. The structures of the past five decades have simply become untenable. Even something as mundane as the president’s health crisis has alarmingly elicited a division between ‘his people’ in the North and ‘others’ in the South, and balkanised both regions into many fruitless and irritating fractions. These divisions are indicative of the president’s failure to grasp and immerse himself in the country’s real problems, and to propound ideas and concepts about how the disarticulation should be repaired. So far, unfortunately, only jaded views have come from the presidency. Indeed, even before threats and strong-arm tactics began to stream from Aso Villa, the president had all but indicated how he wished to proceed in governance by surrounding himself with only his ‘kindred’ who spoke one language and embraced one view.
With the country in confusion and the party in disarray and paralysis, it is not surprising that everyone sees the president’s health issues as the main impediment to stability and growth. Because of the qualified successes that have attended the anti-graft war and counterinsurgency operations, it is sometimes suggested that the president would have been able to tackle all other challenges had his health held up well. This supposition is not true at all. If the APC is in disarray and the country is wobbling, it is not simply because the president lacks the stamina to dwell on the problems. It is simply because the ideas and vision required for the task are inexistent. The country and APC could indeed run well despite the president’s health had he come to office with the right nationalistic and developmental visions and emplaced them urgently and early enough. The president’s poor health is merely a convenient tool for critics — a lightning rod, even — to show their dissatisfaction with the country’s sad state of affairs and how the president failed to prepare for the onerous task ahead despite his decades out of power.
