Just as not having electricity embarrasses the average citizen, equally embarrassing is the fact that the president has to go abroad to take care of his health.
Nigeria must have fully joined the club of plural democracies when it successfully transferred power from one regime to another via an acceptable election result in 2015. For this feat, it has been praised locally and internationally as a rising democracy. The country’s diversity is not just ethnic or religious; it is also ideological and cultural, carrying as many worldviews as can be imagined. The result of such diversity shows in the way people in the country react to any stimuli, including a president becoming sick and needing diagnosis and treatment.
When a few weeks back, President Buhari felt sick, he wrote the National Assembly to announce his intention to go on 10-day vacation abroad, during which he would visit his physicians. Such letter should have been enough to calm the nerves of citizens of all ideological persuasions. By indicating that he would use his vacation to see his doctors ought to have been clear to all that the 74-year old man was not sure of what ailment he had and had no way of being sure before consulting with his doctors. Nine days into his vacation, he wrote another letter informing the NASS that he had to spend extra time to wait for his medical test results, an indication that there was nothing more specific about his health to disclose to his citizens via NASS or special news conference. In most countries, this development would not stimulate production of an encyclopaedia on the health of a man waiting for results of medical tests.
But not in Nigeria would people have adequate patience to wait for post-test announcements from Buhari or his media aides. The social media came in handy for peddlers of falsehood, rumour mongers, and mischief makers. Before anyone could say Jack, unaccredited reporters in the social media in particular threw up reports of medical diagnosis, prognosis, suggested treatments including mass praying and fasting by friends and foes of Buhari. The president’s aides were, for the first time in the newish administration, put on their toes. They went into a frenzy to offer unsolicited and unnecessary information about the president’s state of health: How he received his guests from Nigeria; how many of them he saw off to the door to his residence; what type of tea he drank; how much nostalgia he has experienced for being out of the country for less than two weeks; etc.
Despite these assurances from presidential media aides, social media imps continue to sponsor manufactured stories about negative developments in Buhari’s state of health, putting such stories in the mouths of announcers that sound like ‘mercenary broadcasters.’ Inside the country, habitual polity heaters have also been at work to decode medical test results that have not been made available by the president’s physicians in London. All these efforts have created noise and confusion in the minds of citizens who do not feel that they have anything special to gain from exaggerations about the president’s health. Such people include citizens who believe sincerely that President Buhari is, despite his political status, someone’s father and spouse whose privacy rights should not be violated frivolously and those who believe that, like all human beings, the president needs to get his state of health properly verified by professionals with the expertise to do so, before giving progress reports to citizens.
Even political and tribal organisations have refused to be left out of the rumour factories growing around Mr. President’s health. Such associations have started to heat the polity by accusing groups from other regions of wishing Buhari dead, even though there has been nothing from Buhari’s doctors to suggest that the man is in any such danger. For example, an APC Solidarity Alliance spokesperson has observed that “the health of the president has been grossly exploited to further undermine the stability of the country.” By attributing the president’s health challenges to other nationalities, such organisations are only illustrating the superstitious attitude that has underdeveloped most of Africa. Nobody, apart from the doctors studying President Buhari’s test results can say for certain what Buhari’s problems are. Yet, some tribal or partisan groups already feel competent to identify tribal groups working against the president’s recovery, even without release of medical test results.
In addition, members of friendly political parties, particularly APC ministers and party chiefs, have been going in and out of London to see their party leader and have used the occasion of such visits to assure Nigerians that the man is alive and not in any hospital to wait for death, as many of Buhari’s opponents and self-appointed kinsmen in the social media would want citizens to believe. Even the two leaders in the National Assembly have rushed to Abuja House in London to be counted among well-wishers who would not allow the pressure of work prevent them from doing the needful. The effect of avalanche of meetings to Buhari in London has increased the level of consternation at home, especially among regular human beings.
Yet, there are people who would want President Buhari to have all the peace he needs to soar above the current cloud over his health. They are not only praying and fasting for full recovery from an ailment that is still to be identified by experts, they also believe that regardless of the political office that the president holds, details of his health should not become the topic of every breakfast or dinner table. Such insistence on privacy acts contrasts with the view of strict constructionists of the principle of the citizen’s right to know everything about their president’s health. Rights watchers disregard the fact that the 1999 Constitution, as flawed as it is, is silent on how much detail of anyone’s health must be given to citizens. Despite increasing conflicting ‘news’ in the social media, it is reassuring that President Buhari has chosen to thank Nigerians for their support.
More than anything else since President Buhari assumed power, social-media news about his health has created as much tension and distraction for the federal government. This situation has not resulted from anything that the president has done or failed to do; it derives largely from conflicting worldviews of multicultural Nigeria. For example, most Yoruba who still believe that no bad news about the monarch should be propagated before the community is ritually prepared to receive it must wonder why anyone in his right senses would talk ill of the president, regardless of his politics and ethical war against corruption.
On the other hand, partisans from cultures that take political power to be more important than any other human action are likely to relish creating narratives of political succession for a man who is demonstrably alive and mentally alert. This is the only way to explain why any political organisation would readily allege that other groups are plotting against the government of a man who went to London on his own volition to take care of his health. Similarly, there are cultures that do not believe that any person can get sick or even die without being charmed by his or her enemies while there are other cultures that produce power mongers who have no qualms deriving power struggles from any hint that anyone believed to be holding power on behalf of any nationality is indisposed or sick. Equally, those who believe that a warrior against corruption is their enemy must have contributed to conflicting news about the president’s health, especially in the social media.
However, some matters are already arising from the conflicting reports about the president’s health. Just as not having electricity embarrasses the average citizen, equally embarrassing is the fact that the president has to go abroad to take care of his health. Admittedly, President Buhari has not been in power long enough to have made radical changes to health care in the country. However, Buhari’s sickness should increase demand for provision of world-class healthcare centers in the country. Recession or no recession, there is no reason for a country of almost 200 million people not to have at least six regional state-of-the-art hospitals, to treat all types of disease that any citizen may have.
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