YAR’ADUA: WHEN MEN PLAY GOD

YAR’ADUA: WHEN MEN PLAY GOD

This is what you get when men play God. The President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is a sick and tired man who is obviously incapable of steering the ship of this nation. The President will not resign. He will not invoke the provisions of Section 145 of the 1999 Constitution to empower Vice President Jonathan Goodluck as Acting President and the Senate President, David Mark will not invoke the powers conferred on him by Section 144 of the Constitution in order to determine whether or not the President is incapable of discharging the functions of his office for obvious reasons. Vociferous calls for his resignation from a section of the committee has gone unheeded and a formidable section of the committee has counseled otherwise. We have also heard that pressures were mounted on the Vice President from some powerful quarters to resign in the event that the President is incapable of discharging his duties so that some nebulous concept of power rotation can be maintained. Now we are between the hard place and the rock. The country is drifting. Everything is being stultified and stalemated may be because we were foolish enough to allow the election of a sick President who did not seek power in the first place.

We have been asked now to don the garb of piety and pray unceasing for the recovery of the President by the same people who could not care less about the feelings of Nigerian’s when they foisted his candidature and subsequent election on the nation. Yet the foundation for this nonsense was laid a long time ago. The former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo was released from General Sanni Abacha’s gulag and was looking forward to a quiet and probably reclusive life with his tails between his legs praising God that he was alive to tell the story but some Generals and their allies who liked to play god and think they know it all got together and thought their lot was best protected with an Olusegun Obasanjo as President compared to a predictable Bola Ige or an unpredictable Olu Falae for that matter; they promptly recruited and imposed him on hapless Nigerians browbeaten, battered and cowed by decades of military rule. At the end of Eight tortuous years thankfully, not only were their noses bloodied by their supposed stooge, the man that paid the piper did not dictate the tune, he was put in his place such that by 2007 he was out of contention for the presidency and he humbly ate the pie. Olusegun Obasanjo had his own agenda and that he pursued until it culminated in the sham elections that produced the current president after his grand illusion of ruling Nigeria forever was truncated in the National Assembly.

Yar’Adua’s case might not be an isolated case but his has snowballed into a Constitutional matter. Many critically acclaimed world leaders have performed creditably well in difficult personal and health circumstances. Sir Winston Churchill, that iconoclast leader of the World War II effort of the Allies suffered from what may be described nowadays as bipolar disorder or manic depression. We all know that Churchill was a great leader but he indeed suffered from bouts with depression. His personal physician, Lord Moran wrote “Winston has never been at all like other people …. In his early days…he was afflicted by fits of depression that might last for months”. He recorded that Churchill once remarked, “When I was young, for two or three years the light faded out of the picture. I did my work. I sat in the House of Commons, but black depression settled on me. A low point in Churchill’s career occurred in the winter of 1942, at about the time of the fall of Singapore, the greatest disaster in British military history. Churchill came under intense political fire and there were calls for his resignation – calls that often emphasized Churchill’s seeming inability to concentrate and erratic work habits. A high-ranking official who saw him at the time wrote, “He seems quite incapable of listening or taking in the simplest point but goes off at a tangent on a word and then rambles on inconsecutively …. For the first time I realized he is not only unbusinesslike but overtired and really losing his grip altogether.”

Churchill himself remarked in retrospect that it was amazing he had managed to remain in power during that dark period. Dr. Doyin Okupe also made the point that when Evita Peron, the late Argentine president was dying of a terminal illness nobody asked for her resignation. There was no bad press about her health. She was moribund and on a down hill course to her demise, yet night after night, the citizens of Argentina lit their candles, prayed and cried until her final passing over to the world beyond. May be the Doctor wants us to adopt a similar approach though he did not say.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, America’s young and most beloved President of the 20th Century suffered debilitating pains and illness. According to a recent Thisday publication, “Kennedy grappled with serious health problems for the most part of his Presidency. Though, he projected a youthful and vigorous image, he had a history of health problems. Kennedy suffered the Addison’s disease – an incurable disorder of the adrenal glands – which was diagnosed in 1947, but he tried hard to hide the ailment. And when his health condition became an issue of rumour and public suspicion, Kennedy’s personal physician declared, “John F. Kennedy has not, nor has he ever, had…Addison’s disease.” He suffered major back problems for which he underwent major surgery while a U.S senator, took steroid treatments, and wore a back brace. It had been speculated that he also had celiac disease, often linked to Addison’s disease, which may have been the cause of Kennedy’s gastrointestinal upsets. Kennedy suffered from allergies and an overly sensitive stomach, and took a whole host of medications including cortisone shots for his Addison’s disease and lomotil for his diarrhea. He was hospitalized more than three dozen times in his life.”

These instances – the illnesses of Winston Churchill and J.F Kennedy - may have raised a few political issues but it never did boil down to Constitutional ones as the illness of president Yar’Adua has done notably.

This brings us to the point. What do we mean when we say the President “is incapable of discharging the functions of his office”? The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America in 1967 provides for the Vice President to become the acting president in the event that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” This Constitutional amendment in the United States was manifestly necessary because there was equally a manifest lacuna in the US Constitution that needed to be addressed.

Jay M. Shafritz, the editor of the source book, “Dictionary of American Government and Politics” wrote extensively on the point and I copiously quote him “In outlining the duties and functions of the president, the framers of the Constitution included provisions regarding the continuity of the executive. Article II, Section 1, reads in part: “In case of the removal of the president from office, or of his death, resignation, or inability to discharge the powers and duties of the said office, the same shall devolve on the vice president.” In several respects, this provision of the Constitution is unclear, and eventually it presented a number of questions insufficiently answered by the document. For example when President William Henry Harrison died in 1841, Vice President John Tyler was left unsure whether he should serve as an “acting” or “official” president of the United States. Although Tyler did ultimately take the oath of office as president, the decision to do so by no means met with unanimous approval. The controversy that ensued was, however, finally quieted when both houses of the Congress voted to recognize Tyler as the official president of the United States. The action taken by Tyler established the precedent followed by eight future vice presidents faced with similar circumstances: Millard Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Chester Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford – each of whom became president of the United States through succession.

Another uncertainty arose about presidential succession in cases when a president was unable to “discharge the powers and duties” of his office. Again, the Constitution provided no clear answer to the problem. In three instances in American history the president was considered unable to perform his duties. In all three cases, largely because of uncertainty over correct procedure, the vice president did not assume the incapacitated president’s responsibilities.

The first occasion arose in 1881, when President James Garfield fell victim to an assassin’s bullet. Garfield lingered for nearly eighty days, during which he was able to perform only one official act – the signing of an extradition paper. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a severe stroke, leaving him largely disabled for the rest of his term. Finally, at least three times during his administration, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was considered unable to perform as president because of poor health. He chose to solve the problem by means of an informal working agreement with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, rather than an amendment to the Constitution. The Twenty-fifth Amendment provides a formal process for such situations.

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the succession of Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1963 reminded the nation of yet another gap in the succession clause – the lack of a mechanism for choosing a vice president when the previous vice president succeeds to the presidency. The framers foresaw the need to have a qualified vice president in office should the president die, but they neglected to establish a procedure whereby a vice presidential vacancy could be filled. The Twenty-fifth Amendment provides such a process. This procedure was first used in 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon nominated Gerald Ford to be vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace. It was next (and last) used in 1974, when Ford nominated Nelson Rockefeller to be his vice president. This was the only time when both the offices of president and vice president were held by people who had not been elected to either one.”

A crash course in a political issue that ultimately became constitutional as it often happens in the United States and how it was resolved!! Now the question is what we can learn from these examples from abroad as we navigate the political/constitutional landmine the Yar’Adua succession issue is sure to become in due course.

First and foremost, there does not seem to exist any gap in the 1999 Constitution on succession. Sections 143, 144, 145 and 146 of the Constitution perhaps having already learnt from the U.S example has amply taken care of this copiously providing for succession and leaving no gaps. So anything otherwise will amount to a breach of the Constitution. The question of the Vice President resigning to make way for some nebulous power rotation agreement is nonsensical and should not arise in the face of clear and unambiguous Constitutional provisions. Any further debate of this issue is elevating a political issue over a Constitutional one when it should clearly be otherwise.

In our pathetic shortsightedness, we never reckoned that there could be such a breach between a President and his Vice elected on a joint ticket that the Vice President will leave the ruling party to join another, neither did the Constitution and ancillary rules of any of the numerous political parties provide for this, so we were hopelessly unprepared when the duo of President Olusegun Obasanjo and then Vice President Atiku Abubakar brought unimaginable shame to us and made a spectacle of our beloved nation in the world committee. Remarkably, the Supreme Court saved the day when it ruled that the President cannot unilaterally remove the Vice President from office.

Again we seem unprepared for the moment fate may thrust upon us in the event of the death of the President of Nigeria (not necessarily Yar’Adua) because in our usual greed and power grab the hypocritical political class and the Peoples (Un) democratic Party foisted on us an insincere and so called power rotation that has no relevance to equity for as we have seen the same people continue to hold the reigns of power for as long as anyone can remember now whether they are Northerners or Southerners. As I canvassed elsewhere in the runup to the 1999 elections, if we were serious about power shift, power rotation or by whatever contrived name it was called, the President and his Vice should have been chosen from the same zone bearing in mind that in the event that the President is unable to complete his term, the Constitution provides that the Vice President will succeed him. This would have saved us this entire headache about shortchanging the North in the event that Jonathan Goodluck succeeds Yar’Adua and forever throwing spanners in the works – this contrived power rotation.

An offshoot of this power rotation thing is the methodology and the zones we are talking about. Nothing seems clear. Is it a straightforward dichotomy between the traditional North and South divide as we know it? Shall it be the old regional basis of North, West and East? And whatever happened to the recent contraption known as the six geopolitical zones – South West, South East, South South, North East, North Central and North West? Answers anyone?

Well we now have what you get when men play God. Maybe if General Ibrahim Babangida and his ilk had let Obasanjo be in 1999, may be if Olusegun Obasanjo had let Atiku be or better still allow all the presidential contenders under the platform of the PDP in 2007 a free and fair primaries and allow a Yar’Adua who Six months prior to his election as President was looking forward to a peaceful retirement in his Katsina country home be, we would not have this political/constitutional quagmire on our hands today.


STEPHEN O. OBAJAJA is a Partner at the Lagos Law Firm of Fountain Court Partners.