The admission of Nigeria’s two former heads of state to the same hospital in London is a sad commentary on the country. It simply shows a failure of leadership and questions the quality of thinking that goes on in government circles. A few days ago, Abdullahi Ganduje moved from his “infirmity” to a palatial bed at FAAN. But the question remains, has lying become a statecraft? Only in Nigeria.
“The late Muhammadu Buhari went in and out of hospitals in London countless times, which negatively impacted his job as president and also drained the nation’s coffers.”
Expensive Nigerian leaders—in life and in death!
The need for a world-class hospital in Nigeria, and also the need for leaders to patronise health facilities in-country, are two issues that stuck out following the report that two former Nigerian leaders were admitted at the same time and to the same clinic in London.
Former head of state Abdulsalami Abubakar announced that he was in the same clinic with Muhammadu Buhari.
“Unfortunately, we were in the hospital together, but I have been discharged,” he said.
For a country that has been in a democracy since 1999 and has been making budgets since then, it is a shame that two of her former heads of state were admitted to the same hospital at the same time in a foreign land.
Nigeria is today battling with a foreign exchange crisis but has continued to fritter away huge foreign currencies through medical tourism. This cannot be defined as patriotism.
The late Muhammadu Buhari went in and out of hospitals in London countless times, which negatively impacted his job as president and also drained the nation’s coffers.
The nature of his illness remained unknown to the Nigerian people that picked the bills. Even outside government, Buhari continued to visit London clinics without openly declaring the nature of his infirmity.
Before Buhari died in the hospital, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had sent Vice President Kashim Shettima to London to visit him on the bill of Nigeria.
Following his death, a delegation was again dispatched by the president to go ferry the corpse back home. These came at a huge cost to Nigeria.
It is not debatable that leaders deserve proper medical care in order to be healthy enough and alive to carry out their duties. But there is everything wrong with leaders refusing to patronise hospitals in-country even for routine medical checks.
The reason for this, perhaps, is lack of confidence in the medics in the country and the substandard hospitals, which is also a huge indictment on the quality of leadership. Can anybody imagine, for a split second, a Donald Trump of America seeking medical treatment outside his country on a consistent basis?
Or can anybody, for a moment, think of the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, being treated in a hospital in Africa?
Nigerian leaders just talk about patriotism, but they do not exhibit it. They are afraid they would be killed if they were treated in-country. They are afraid of their own shadows because of their bad leadership. A good leader will always be protected by his people.
Again, in Nigeria, leaders never see themselves as part of the system they create. They never plan to be part of the suffering they oversee and so don’t see healthcare as a public right but as a personal privilege.
This explains why they escape to London, to clean hospitals, advanced machines, and competent doctors, all built by nations that respect their people enough to invest in life.
For these leaders, Nigeria is simply a cemetery where the masses die in underfunded hospitals without power, located on roads riddled with potholes.
For them, the country has become a cemetery for the common man while London remains the hospital for the elite.
That is the pathetic situation in Africa’s largest economy, where leaders lead but never live with the people. They choose to die elsewhere in comfort and on the people’s stolen wealth.
In June 2013, a crowd of South Africans gathered outside the home (in Soweto) of their former president, Nelson Mandela, for many days, singing and earnestly praying for his recovery from a lung infection.
Many other emotional crowds gathered outside the hospital where he was admitted, also praying fervently for his recovery.
Reports had it that children released 94 balloons—one for every year of the former president’s life—into the air in his honour.
But in Nigeria, because leaders are not pro-people, they hardly receive good wishes or prayers in times of difficulty. Those who ought to mourn them, bizarrely, go into wild jubilation instead.
In the estimation of many Nigerians, the return of Buhari as a civilian president was a re-enactment of Charles Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations.’ The effervescent goodwill lavished on Buhari in 2015 was to evaporate almost immediately after he mounted the saddle, as he proved he had no idea of what to do in office.
The Buhari in democracy unmasked his naivety and made a nonsense of whatever values he represented as a military leader.
Femi Adesina, former aide of Buhari, said that his principal had always had his medicals in London even before he became president, which is a straight indictment on the lack of quality thinking that prevented them from not being able to build a befitting health institution they could attend.
Upon assumption of office in 2015, Buhari had sternly warned politicians not to seek medical help abroad, but he was to show a bad example when he began to visit Britain frequently for medical attention.
The Nigerian Medical Association had earlier in the administration of Buhari questioned his penchant for foreign medical trips, asking, “What is the illness that the President has that we don’t have the personnel or manpower in Nigeria to treat such that he has to travel out of the country?”
Prior to August 1, 2021, the Aso Villa clinic, meant to be the presidential clinic that should take care of the medical needs of the president, vice president, their families, and members of staff of the Presidential Villa in Aso Rock, gulped N6.2bn in six years, yet it was not able to treat ear infections in the reckoning of the late president.
In 2020, Buhari was in Borno State, where he commissioned hospital projects. In March 2022, he commissioned other healthcare centres in Makurdi, Benue State. Even though the hospitals and clinics were named after him, Buhari did not receive treatment from any of them.
Buhari’s days in Aso Rock Villa were marked by an unbridled medical voyage to London. Within six years and a few months in power as of 2021, Buhari had cumulatively spent over 201 days on foreign medical trips, even with N2.3 trillion in health budgets since 2015. His medical globe-trotting was roundly flayed by many Nigerians, including the late Edwin Clark, who said, “Buhari can’t run Nigeria from the UK.”
This has been the pattern. Nigerian leaders have always patronised foreign medical facilities.
Before the death of former president Umaru Musa Yar’Adua in 2010, he was moving from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia on a regular basis to treat himself for an unknown sickness.
Yar’Adua and his handlers kept secret the nature of his illness that gulped so much money from Nigerian taxpayers.
The same scenario is currently playing out in the Aso Rock Villa. The health of President Bola Tinubu has continued to be a matter of controversy. Each time it is announced that he was billed to attend a foreign engagement, the thinking by many citizens is that it is a decoy for a visit to his doctors in France.
The irony of life is that the same hospital that took delivery of Nigerians’ millions of pounds sterling in the name of bills for eight years was the same place where the former president died, just two years after exiting office. Had he been in office till now, perhaps he would still be alive!
Read also: Buhari is gone, but his leadership vacuum still haunts Nigeria
The nature of his illness is still unknown, but rumour mills say leukaemia.
Would it not be less costly and confidence-boosting to Nigerians for the government to build, at least, one world-class hospital and employ first-class ‘Oyibo’ personnel to man it, to reduce the junketing abroad in the name of check-ups and other medical attention?
The saddest part of it all is that after preying on the nation’s resources while alive, at death, they also receive rousing and overly expensive burials. What an unfair world!
Has lying become a statecraft?
A few weeks ago, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje tendered his resignation as the national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), claiming he was no longer enjoying the good health that could enable him to carry out the job of overseeing the broom association.
A lot of permutations were given as to the real reason for the hasty resignation. The official statement released by the party to authenticate Ganduje’s resignation was also silent on the state of his health.
It was rumoured then that President Bola Tinubu was going to offload him offshore as an ambassador. Many observers had wondered why, given that Ganduje and the president have been getting along well.
The permutation that seemed to hold water was the one that suggested that Ganduje’s removal was one of the preconditions given by Rabiu Kwankwaso to decamp to the APC. It was rumoured that the president may have tipped Kwankwaso, who enjoys a cult-like following in Kano, as his running mate in 2027.
Ganduje’s stand-down from the APC chair may not have been elicited by any other factor than the fact that the president wanted to send him elsewhere to be his eyes as a trusted ally.
While Nigerians were trying to make sense of the convoluted scenarios, the president announced Ganduje as chairman of the Board of the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN).
With the management position of the agency already held by a Southwesterner and the Aviation Ministry occupied by a South-Southerner, the president may have deemed it fit to send a Northerner as the board chairman of an important agency as a balancing act.
Many Nigerians have wondered how a man who publicly declared, or whose letter of resignation had indicated, he was suffering from an undisclosed infirmity could be saddled with the onerous responsibility of overseeing the proper running of FAAN.
Since the announcement of Ganduje as the chair of FAAN, the question on the lips of many has been, why the lies?
The culture of lies being institutionalised in Nigeria is already taking a toll on the attitude of many citizens, especially the youth, who now easily cite instances of institutionalised malfeasance to justify their bad behaviours in society.
If a person of Ganduje’s standing, leader of a ruling party in the largest Black nation in the world, could easily and offhandedly say he was indisposed, just to explain away his hasty exit, then something is dreadfully wrong with leadership in Nigeria.
What would have happened if he had just tendered his resignation and said it was in the best interest of his party? Would his name have changed, or would he have lost anything?
The penchant to tell lies at every turn, with the aim to deceive fellow countrymen, which has become a norm in government circles in Nigeria, may have ingrained in political office holders a nature that has made them be perceived as serial covenant breakers by the Nigerian people.
This culture of telling lies has been the reason they, during electioneering campaigns, dish out all sorts of promises, which they knew ab initio were dead on arrival.
What the development around Ganduje may have succeeded in doing is simply to strengthen the age-long notion that politicians are not to be trusted. Leaders must say things as they are—no more, no less!
