Opposition politicians are demanding visual proof that the NIgerian President is still alive and fit to govern, six weeks after he left the country for medical treatment.
President Yar’ Adua left Nigeria on November 23 complaining of chest pains and has not been seen in public since. He is thought to be receiving treatment for a heart condition at a clinic in Saudi Arabia, but his absence has created a dangerous power vacuum at the top of Africa’s most populous nation and one of the continent’s biggest oil producers.
While observers warn of an impending constitutional crisis, the Government insists that business continues as usual. Delivering the annual new year address in the absence of the President, Goodluck Jonathan, the Vice-President, insisted: “The ship of state continues to sail.”
Mr Jonathan said: “Although Mr President has been away from us for some time on account of a medical condition, he has maintained sustained interest and optimism (in state affairs). We are hopeful Mr President would return to us before long to continue his good works, with renewed vigour and vitality.”
Last night Mr Jonathan said that he had received a telephone call from the President on Tuesday, but he did not give details of the conversation.
The vacuum at the top of a centralised bureaucracy, in which much power is vested in the presidency, is already having a serious impact. A delayed £1.5 billion supplementary budget to cover government spending up to March was apparently eventually signed by the President late last month, from his Jeddah clinic.
Last week Idris Kutigi, the outgoing Chief Justice, had to swear in his own successor, Aloysius Katsina-Alu — the first time in Nigeria’s history that the President has not presided over the ceremony. Some lawyers have questioned the appointment of the country’s new top judge, calling the move illegal.
In the Niger Delta, militants regularly disrupt oil production but a shaky amnesty had offered hope in recent months that peace might be reached. In mid-December armed men attacked a pipeline, blaming the President’s absence for delaying peace talks.
Even the arrest of the Nigerian al-Qaeda suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, accused of attempting to blow up an aircraft over Detroit, was met by silence from Nigeria’s President.
Mr Yar’ Adua’s absence has now prompted one civil society group to lobby the National Assembly to have the President declared missing.
“It is a civil-political right to know where our President is and what is the state of his health,” Emmanuel Onwubiko of the Human Rights Writers Association told The Times. Mr Onwubiko called for the National Assembly to convene a search party to find the President and to provide verifiable evidence of his good health.
On Tuesday a federal court in Abuja,the capital, will begin hearing three separate lawsuits aimed at forcing Mr Yar’ Adua to cede power. One calls for his deputy to be appointed leader, another for his sacking and a third for all Cabinet decisions taken in his absence to be annulled.
“We cannot see him, we don’t know where he is and don’t even know what he is doing,” said Rotimi Akeredolu, president of the Nigerian Bar Association, which has filed one of the suits. “All we are asking is that the Vice-President be sworn in as president.”
The Vice-President has been heading weekly Cabinet meetings but there has been no official transfer of power.This is worrying in a restive and divided country of more than 140 million people where militants attack oil installations in the south and sporadic outbursts of Islamist violence in the north are brutally crushed by security forces.
Nigeria’s long history of military coups is also a concern. Only in the past decade has the country begun to develop a civilian multiparty democracy.
Complicating matters is the unwritten agreement underpinning Nigerian politics whereby northerners and southerners alternate every two terms. Mr Yar’ Adua, a northerner, replaced Olusegun Obasanjo, the former military ruler and southener. But his deputy, Mr Jonathan, is another southerner, meaning were he to step in, northerners would feel cheated.
Mr Yar’ Adua, 58, appeared sickly even before he was installed as President. He collapsed during an election campaign rally in 2007 and has taken several unexplained holidays.
Mr Yar’ Adua’s gaunt and pale appearance is attributed to a kidney ailment but he has more recently had acute pericarditis diagnosed — an inflammation of the heart membrane that can be life-threatening.
