The President Is Sick Again

For a man whose name had long been associated with ill-health and emergency medical evacuation, the announcement of President Umar Yar’Adua’s sudden trip to Germany on account of failing health astonished few people. Straight from the signing of the 2008 Appropriation Bill last week, the President was flown to Wiesbaden, Germany, for treatment of what Segun Adeniyi, Presidential spokesman, described as a ‘an indisposition believed to be due to an allergic reaction’. Adeniyi envisaged that the President would be back to the Villa in a matter of days.

However, it was gathered from independent sources that the President may have traveled to the central German city situated on the northern bank of the river Rhine, in search of remedy for his kidney ailment. His condition was said to have deteriorated early last Monday, a development which forced the President to scale down his schedule for the day. Consequently, the planned elaborate budget signing ceremony was whittled down to a private session which had few key government functionaries in attendance. The elaboration was designed to celebrate the end of the official conflict between the executive and the legislative arms of government over the budget impasse which had lasted some months.

The President was also impelled to cancel his planned trip to Senegal for the NEPAD meeting in Dakar. Yar’Adua reportedly asked Jonathan Goodluck, the Vice-President, to stay back in the country while Foreign Affairs Minister, Ojo Maduekwe, who was already in Dakar as head of an advance party, was asked to represent him at the meeting.

Expectedly, Yar’Adua’s return to the sick bed has conjured up memories of the run-up to last year’s Presidential election when his health condition was a subject of intense scrutiny and public debate.

The debate came to a hilt when the then flagbearer of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, was dispatched to Germany for medical treatment at the peak of his electioneering campaign, after he was said to have collapsed during campaign tours. Soon, a wicked rumour began circulating that Yar’Adua had passed on at the German hospital.