PRAYER AS A WEAPON OF DISTRACTION

Azubuike Ishiekwene                   

Even at normal times, Nigerians wear religion on their sleeves, paste it on their car bumpers and post it on their windscreens. In the last three weeks, however, the country has become one huge cathedral, with politician after politician and cleric after cleric, mounting the stage to request special prayers for President Umaru Yar’Adua, who is now spending his third week at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

That the President needs our prayers and kind thoughts at this difficult time cannot be gainsaid. But just as neglect, greed and hypocrisy often combine to increase many of common miseries (from road accidents to violent crimes and domestic quarrels) towards the end of the year, we must beware of politicians who are exploiting the President’s health crisis for their own gain. They need our prayers just as much, if not more, than the President does. A man like the deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, for example, who can say, without blinking, that the President can be away for one year and still be in charge, is in serious need of prayers. He is either a liar or a dangerous man, or both.

The same spirit of perversion, now rampant among politicians and the clergy, is also afflicting Muhammed Abba-Aji, the President’s adviser on National Assembly matters. He kicked a storm the other day over reports that he refused to hand over a letter transmitting the President’s handover notice to the Senate, as required by law. I don’t understand his grouse, because that is precisely what he should have done, rather than calling for prayers or looking for scapegoats. If, indeed, he neither withheld a letter to the Senate requesting Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to act, nor advised the President not to transmit such a letter in writing, then what exactly is his duty as adviser? I’m not a great fan of the Vice President’s, but it must be obvious even to his most passionate loathers that a government that claims to believe in the rule of law is once again extremely reluctant to live up to its own creed.

The consequence, of course, is that not only is the executive branch threatened with paralysis, this virus which had left the economy comatose following the banking crisis, now threatens to spread to the judiciary. Vacancies to the offices of the president of the Court of Appeal and the chief judge of the Supreme Court cannot be filled without a sitting or acting president. Right now, we have neither. And all this at a time when the country needs a shot in the arm badly.

Looking to God for answers to our present predicament is a waste of heaven’s time because the answers are already abundantly provided in history. In an article titled, “Critical observations on the state of the nation,” published last Tuesday, Femi Falana mentioned a number of examples of how other presidents who suffered health crises handled their situations. On June 29, 2002 before he was admitted for a surgery on colonoscopy, President George Bush wrote the Senate and handed over to his deputy, Dick Cheney. He did the same again on July 21, 2007 when he underwent operation that required sedation. Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who suffered from cerebral haemorrhage, handed over to Ehud Olmert to complete his term; and Fidel Castro resigned and handed over to his deputy, Raul Castro, when he had to undergo surgery.

 “Those who have said it is ‘un-African,’ for presidents to transfer power to their deputies” Falana wrote, “should be reminded that the Zambian President once did so, on health grounds. On June 19, 2008, President Levy Mwanawasa had a mild stroke while attending a meeting of the African Union in Cairo, Egypt. He handed over power to his deputy, Rupiah Buezain Banda… Our ‘prayer warriors’ may also want to learn a lesson from President Nelson Mandela who once transferred power to his arch rival, Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthulezi.”

Giving up power, however temporarily, has its risks. It could produce a Frankenstein, just like Abacha. But for a country, which, to borrow the phrase of Plateau State Governor Jonah Jang, is now directionless, the alternative is to continue to leave things in the hands of a concentric circle of cults, each solely concerned about looking out for its own narrow advantage, while the country burns. Many of the people who have declared days of fasting and prayers for the President, urging him to set aside the constitutional provision in Section 145 and cling onto power, are thinking of themselves first and last.

Unfortunately, from Guinea (Conakry) to Togo and Ivory Coast, neither the hosts of heaven nor the sundry deities to which the citizens lifted up their voices proved effective in stemming the monsters unleashed by political leaders who would rather die first than arrange an orderly transfer of power. Guinea has been a shadow of itself after Sekou Toure and Lansana Conte (the man, who, suffering a bout of diabetes and leukaemia, famously told AFP after his party put him forward for re-election, ‘I am ill. My leg hurts. You have chosen me as your candidate. So, you get on with it’); Togo has barely survived the late Gnassingbe Eyadema’s tenacious hold on power; and Ivory Coast is yet to recover from the ruins of a chaotic transition after the death of Felix Houphet-Boigny.

An insider told me over the weekend that Nigeria is stranded because those who ought to advise the President to comply with the provisions of the constitution and hand over to his deputy don’t trust him enough. Or, perhaps, they are too busy sorting themselves out, just in case. These people are the real demons against whom we not only need to pray but who we must stand up to openly defy. We must insist that enough is enough. The President should not only hand over, he should, to borrow Castro’s words, deem it a betrayal of his conscience to continue to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than he is physically and emotionally able to offer.

God will not increase heaven’s bandwidth to accommodate the overflow of supplications from here when we can confront our own demons and take responsibility for our own lives.

The pressure by the G53 must be sustained.

(azubuikeishiekwe@yahoo.com)