Buhari, Just Come Back Home!

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Whether President Muhammadu Buhari has been irrevocably hobbled by ill-health or is sound in bound and mind and prancing around in the Abuja House in London is a puzzle that would not be unravelled until he returns home.

*Buhari 

Even if all the state governors, the officials of the presidency and political parties travel to London and return with the verdict that Buhari exudes great health and a stellar sense of humour that belies the stern stuff he is made of, this would make no difference to Nigerians. Let Buhari write again to his Guinean counterpart that he is well and that he would soon return to Nigeria to assume the responsibilities he has abandoned for months, this would not still douse Nigerians’ doubts. They would maintain the skepticism that Buhari is yet to recover from his debilitating sickness that has kept him away from Aso Rock.

This cynicism is well founded. The officials of government have so much lost the citizens’ good will that they cannot be trusted. Remember? It was the same way that politicians and even clerics visited the late President Musa Yar’Adua but when they returned they did not tell Nigerians that he was incapacitated. It was only the then Minister of Information, the late Dora Akunyili who had the courage to shed off the carapace of propaganda for Nigerians to be confronted with the reality: the truth that the health of their president was beyond recovery. Yes, we take cognisance of the fact that a glaring misalignment of the creeds and deeds of politicians, especially the ones in these climes, oftentimes makes trusting them as amounting to self-immolation. 

Nigeria: President Buhari’s Last Duty

By Paul Onomuakpokpo 

Despite the official veil on the auguries, that the nation is on the cusp of a crisis that threatens its survival owing to the secrecy surrounding the ill health of President Muhammadu Buhari is a troubling fact that is clear to the discerning among us. Of course, we take cognisance of the fact that like a phoenix, the nation has often risen from the ashes of seemingly mortal calamities to grow stronger. From the civil war through the June 12 crisis to egregious cases of corruption, the nation has developed a certain immunity to the perils that would have made it suffer a self-inflicted dissolution. But we have taken this resilience for granted. This is why we are at it again, stretching this resilience by refusing to do what is necessary to preserve the unity of the nation.

*Buhari 

We must be alert to the tragic character of the current crisis if we must survive it and learn any lessons from it. It is because of the absence of a correct appreciation of the spectre of tragedy that hangs over the nation that there is official levity as a response to the sickness of the president. Such levity is often expressed in the remonstrance that the president is not as sick as portrayed in the public and the alleged purveyors of the canard of his incapacity to wade through the complexities of governance are threatened with dire consequences.

But it is now difficult to deceive the citizens about the health of the president once again. The citizens once fell for the deception when the president was in London for medical vacation. Then the official obscuration was prevalent – he was not sick; he was only on vacation having worked so hard to solve the nation’s problems. But when Buhari came from London, he himself declared he had never been so sick as he was. Thus the citizens can no longer be deceived by the officials of the Buhari government. It is clear now that Buhari is not well and this is why he has not been attending the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meetings and other public functions. There has not been a clear position from the presidency, thereby leaving room for myriad speculations. Officials are saying that the president is healthy and that he is even fit for the contest for the 2019 election and that he is working from home while most of the citizens are saying that Buhari is medically challenged.