NIGERIA’S AILING president spoke publicly yesterday for the first time since he was hospitalised in Saudi Arabia seven weeks ago, in a move clearly intended to counter rumours in the giant oil-producing nation that he had either died or was no longer fit to rule.
President Umaru Yar’Adua told the BBC by phone that he was feeling better and hoped to return to Nigeria soon. “At the moment, I am undergoing treatment, and I’m getting better from the treatment,” he said. “I hope that very soon there will be tremendous progress, which will allow me to get back home.”
Mr Yar’Adua (58) is believed to be suffering from acute pericarditis, a heart condition. He was flown to a hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, on November 23rd. He did not say when he might return to Nigeria, but his remarks to the BBC appeared to be an attempt to counter reports circulating on the internet that he had died or slipped into a coma.
Some Nigerian analysts were not convinced that his comments were genuine. Thompson Ayodele, executive director of the Lagos-based Initiative for Public Policy Analysis, said his remarks appeared to have been timed to be released just before Nigerian religious leaders were set to stage a protest in the capital Abuja over his disappearance.
“I still have my doubts,” Mr Ayodele told The Irish Times. “If the president wants to speak, what he ought to have done is speak to Nigerians, or speak to national television. He was elected by Nigerians, not by British or Americans or any foreign country.”
The rally in Abuja saw hundreds of people gather to demand that the government give Nigerians a briefing on his condition.
“We are told nothing has stopped, how can people tell us such a lie?” Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel prize in literature, told the crowd. “Electoral reform, constitutional reform has all ground to a halt.”
Even with the possibility that Mr Yar’Adua was fit enough to speak to the media, his disappearance from public view has sparked intense political jockeying and a grave crisis in Nigeria, a country of 150 million people that is among the world’s biggest oil producers.
In the weeks since he was hospitalised, an effort to impose a truce with rebel groups in the oil-rich Niger Delta seems to be fizzling out. Rebels attacked a pipeline owned by oil giant Chevron, forcing the country to cut production by 20,000 barrels of oil a day. Yesterday, rebels in the Niger Delta kidnapped three Britons and a Colombian.
In the president’s absence, the country has also had to deal with the international fallout stemming from an incident in which a Nigerian citizen, the son of a rich oligarch, tried to blow up a plane as it flew from Amsterdam to Detroit, in the United States.
The Nigerian Bar Association and two members of parliament filed lawsuits that accuse Mr Yar’Adua of violating the constitution by not resigning. It is still not clear who is in charge, though vice- president Goodluck Jonathan has taken on some of the president’s duties.
“There is a power vacuum right now in Nigeria,” Mr Ayodele said. “No official decision has been made since the president left the country for the past 50 days.”