Buhari's Health status: Nigeria And The Road Once Travelled

Buhari’s Health status: Nigeria And The Road Once Travelled

By Esimagboko Thomas

Nigerians woke up with annoying news that President Muhammadu Buhari has extended his stay in the United Kingdom indefinitely.

The Nation, Nigeria, is being embroiled avoidably in a constitutional crisis before our very eyes.

The President of the country has undergone a medical evacuation to Great Britain and there is a huge conspiracy of silence on his present condition and the public, paying the charges for his treatment, does not know the nature of his ailment nor his prospects for recovery. Will he be fit after his treatment to continue in the job for which he was elected?

You will ask, why the needless mystery over the health of a man in this age of openness and knowledge? In whose interest is it to maintain an annoying secrecy about the health of the president ? How does public knowledge and information affect the treatment of the man particularly when he is the leader of a curious country and when his treatment is funded from the public coffers?

The handlers of the president are causing the nation more injury than they care to know and wilfully leading the country to a security and constitutional crisis. The paucity of information on the health status of the president serves no other public purpose than to cause speculations among social and political groups, raising the spectre of a possible state of anarchy and helping to engender suspicion about an ethnic agenda… a long, ugly and winding road we have travelled before.

What would it cost the presidency or the APC for the Nigerian public to know what ails their president? What would it take from the president and how would such information affect his recovery one way or another? In whose interest is the health information on the president being hoarded?

Who stands to benefit from the absence of information to the public on the health status of the Nigerian President? It is the person or group exercising the powers of the president in his absence who stand to benefit from withholding information to the public. So, who are these persons or groups ?

Now, if these illegal benefits extend to financial accruals to themselves, this will be a criminality that the nation must prosecute to the full extent of the law. Worse, if in the exercise of such illegal powers, damage is done to the corporate cohesion of the republic or that orders are given which cost the lives of citizens or the division of the the nation, those who exercise illegally the powers bestowed on an elected president must take full responsibility.

There is nothing for us to fear in a land that we farmed before. All the trees, nooks and cranies are already known to us. Let there be a cabal as is being rumoured. They will get done with their diabolical sleight of hand and show us the result afterwards. We will be here as witnesses to their magic. Babies are made in privacy, but must be delivered and shown in public.

Esimagboko Thomas is a Delta State based writer, activist and social media commentator.

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