PRESIDENT UMARU YAR'ADUA, EVICTED FROM SAUDI HOSPITAL?

It would appear that all indicators now point, affirm and collaborate our earlier sidebar 'Latest F.Y.I.' posting that the suddenly-returned, incapacitated Nigeria President Umaru Yar'Adua was evicted from his hospital bed in Saudi Arabia? The authorities there in the Kingdom of Saud, on the prompting and instigation of the United States of America, unilaterally revoked their earlier 'open-ended' grant of hospital-stay to President Yar'Adua and shipped him back, still wired to his life-lines? If in doubt, ask yourself what is the urgency in bringing back to Nigeria an intubated and comatose president, in an air ambulance, fully sedated and unconscious and in the middle of the night, when his Aso Rock Intensive Care Unit (ICU) is still under construction, not fully up and running, or ready and operational to receive his greatly shrivelled skeletal body?

What suddenly so changed as to require such his hurried and secretive immediate return back to Nigeria; and which informed the sudden decision to rush back to Nigeria, a formerly missing president, who had been away from his duty post at Aso Rock for over 80 days, without any prior or required formal notification to necessary parties, before he absconded from Nigeria? To further buttress the story of his impromptu and sudden expulsion from Saudi Arabia, 72 hours after his alleged return, President Umaru Yar'Adua is still holed up in a mobile intensive care unit ambulance, where he will remain quarantined pending the completion of a permanent ICU on the grounds of Aso Rock; which Icheoku learnt from viable sources, is being unseasonably rushed through to completion. The pointer therefore is, if incapacitated President Umaru Yar'Adua freely came back on his own volition, Icheoku asks, why wasn't the arrangement for his return made in such a way as to conveniently coincide with the completion of his own private Aso Rock Intensive care Unit; so that he wouldn't have to remain isolated in a trailer-park of a mobile ambulance? We are talking about a president of a country and not just any other Joe Blow or Joe Six-Pack or Joe Plumber or Joe Terrorist out there in Nigeria! Why couldn't President Umaru Yar'Adua plead with the Saudi authorities to let him stay a little longer while work is completed on his own ICU? The reason was that the president had no choice or any input in the decision to deport him from Saudi Arabia and is not influential or important enough in ranking to influence anything or change any mind. The world powers, tired of the stone-walling of Nigerian high ups by his wife Turai, wanted him removed out of Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom saluted and complied.

What a shame that Nigeria, the clay-foot giant of Africa, had its president treated so shabbily, just because the said president and his predecessors negligently failed and refused to develop health-care facilities in Nigeria and have instead become objects of laughing stock in so many foreign hospital wards, corridors and consulting rooms. Now, is there any sympathy from us for such a monumental disgrace of Nigeria's sick President Yar'Adua being kicked out of his hospital bed in a foreign land, not yet recovered and still too sick to either walk or even feed himself? None, Nope, Nada as Nigerian leaders deserve such a disgraceful wake-up call, to force them to do some introspection and enable them become more patriotic and nationalistic to start looking inwards! Saudi Arabia as a country does not and did not manufacture any of the equipment or infrastructure in their Jeddah King Faisal hospital; but their leadership was patriotic and reasonable enough to expense their oil wealth in a good way, developing vital and needed infrastructures; rather than squirreling them away in unmarked band vaults in Switzerland and Cayman Islands like their Nigerian counterparts! Icheoku prays that this disgraceful and forcible eviction of Nigeria's President Umaru Yar'Adua from Saudi Arabia's hospital will be a positive lesson for all those charlatans, parading themselves as leaders of Nigeria, to look inward and start developing much needed medical facilities as well as other infrastructures in Nigeria, and henceforth put an end to their being unwanted but merely tolerated medical tourists in foreign hospitals, the world over.

Now pivoting to the issue of the madman, Commander of Brigade of Guards, Brigadier General Abdul Mustapha, who unlawfully and illegally deployed 300 Nigerian soldiers in and around the airport and Presidential villa, on the night Yar’Adua was smuggled into Abuja; Icheoku says, he should be fired immediately or retired forthwith for not only breaching protocol but for also unnecessarily escalating tension in the land? General Mustapha abused his command by parochially and arbitrarily engaging in acts considered very threatening to the Nigeria state structure, he pitched Nigerian soldiers against their commander-in-chief, the duly constituted Acting President of Nigeria. His order deploying these 300 Nigerian soldiers constituted attempted mayhem and anarchical disobedience, capable of causing a total breakdown of law and order in Nigeria. Simply put, such an anarchist is not stable and patriotic enough to dispassionately lead any military formation or command same without the discoloration of religious and tribal sentiments, unbecoming of a since commissioned officer and general of the Nigerian army. What if Acting President Jonathan Goodluck's loyalists have engaged them in a shoot-out thinking that a coup was in the offing, afterall the time and manner of their deployment have similar semblance with a military coup? What if Nigeria have become insufferably and completely enmeshed in a hellish conflagration as a resulting consequence of his brash action? To make matters worse, he took matters into his own hand and acted without any authorisation from any of his superiors and he did not have the military decency to inform them prior; and did not even consider seeking and obtaining the consent of the Acting commander in chief himself. The last time we checked, the Chief of Army Staff and the Chief of Service staff are still his military superiors and military operational procedures demands that such orders to deploy troops drips from top down. This unstable general even attempted to sabotage the 'chief' in commander-in-chief by arrogating that title to himself, thereby committed a treasonable felony against the Nigerian state when he implicitly challenged the authority of the lawful holder of that title? He should be tried for attempted coup or insurrection against the Nigeria government, period!

However, Icheoku is not easily buying the story that this General acted alone and on his own accord, and we therefore call for a full investigation into this wilful disobedience and snub of constituted authority, to unravel all those northern 'almajiris-in-uniforms' who do not mean well for the continued corporate existence of Nigeria. What these bunch of people do not however know and which Icheoku takes the pleasure to remind them and once again reiterate to them and their fellow desert-dwellers, is that "nothing must happen to Jonathan Goodluck!" Nigerians, especially southern Nigerians, are so tired and fed up to the neck with these mallams, that some of them who stayed out during Biafra-Nigeria civil war are now regretting and questioning why the northern Nigeria problem was not solved and finished then when that golden opportunity presented itself? This section of the country, should another opportunity come, will not hesitate one moment to show these selfish northern usurpers how much their arrogance is hated and loathed by other more meaningful and much civilized Nigerians. The arrogant idiocy of these mallams in uniform, robs Icheoku on the wrong side and these people forgot that the world at large has finally come to understand who they really are, and that any hostilities today will have a different outcome from the 1967-1970 Biafran war. Should anything ever break out, Nigeria as presently yoked together, will become history as bottled-up tension and simmering resentful animosity will surely boil over. So, Acting President Jonathan Goodluck should walk with swagger and act with audacity, knowing fully well that he is the bait which the northern mallams must not bite! Simply put, Acting President Jonathan Goodluck is a poisoned pill, filled with cyanide; and anybody planning or plotting to swallow it must be prepared to meet his makers. Enough!

Lastly Icheoku asks, does the Yar'Adua people have the president's best interest at heart in insisting and forcing him to continue in office? Is the Yar'Adua's presidency also his family's trophy to keep or did Nigerians 'vote' for Umaru alone and not jointly with his family? Why would anyone in that family then ever contemplate making one of his inlaws, the vice president? Available information filtering out of the presidential quarters in Aso Rock has it that the Yar'Aduas have given up on their patriarch's making it back to office, and are already scheming and making arrangement to nominate one of their inlaws as Jonathan's vice president when he is finally confirmed the substantive president? Icheoku questions whether this maddening power-grab by the president's family is not so inhuman and inconsiderate; coming so soon after the arrival of a president in life-support, suffering from Chrug-struass syndrome, failed kidney, skin-cancer, lung-emphysema, cirrhosis of the liver, a heart condition and likely, a broken heart? Why is he being so rushed out of this world by his greatest beneficiaries, his family, including his wife, Turai? Where is the love or is it simply a love for power!

Finally, that no one in Nigeria has seen the president since his purported arrival in Nigeria is a good omen as it speaks volume as to the president's finished state. Not the vice president and acting president Jonathan have been allowed to see him? Not the ruling party PDP chieftain and chairman Ogbulafor? Not the Governors Forum's chairman Saraki? Not other leaders of thought and well meaning Nigerians? Something does not sure smell right here, except if the whole story of his arrival back in Nigeria was just a ruse, a bone thrown to the dogs to divert attention from Acting President Jonathan Goodluck rising profile? You never know with these northerners, whose 'almajiri-culture' make them into a one-way thinking and herded fanatical zombies, who believe that their allah ordains destinies and must always fall in toe with their perceived leaders? A people incapable of thinking for themselves and have also proved incapable of providing the required leadership which Nigeria so much needed. In summation, President Umaru Yar'Adua left his body in Saudi Arabia and no one can see an invisible man except you are specially gifted with the vision of Turai Yar'Adua and co. So it is not even beyond doubt that he is back in the country; but good enough, Nigerians did not 'vote' for an invisible president and hence must demand of her national assembly to show courage and give them a president they can see and believe in! If Turai likes, and for all Icheoku cares, let her continue to shield the vegetative president away from Nigerians, including the governors and the governed; the result can only go one way - it will be to her detriment and to the benefit of 'a president-deprived' Nigerians. What a fast-track it would be to the relevant sections 144 and 145 of the constitution on incapacity of the president!