Muhammadu Buhari's 'inconclusive' medical vacation

It was Ayodele Fayose, the Governor of Ekiti State, who first saideverything under the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari was becoming inconclusive.

That outburst - and Fayose has quite a litany of complaints against Buhari - came after Nigeria's electoral umpire declared the Bayelsa State governorship election "inconclusive" on the third day of the exercise.

It was a happy ending for Fayose: Seriake Dickson, candidate of his party, won the election a month later. Actually, there was little to worry about in the first place.

One year on, a crisis of monstrous scale and manifold consequences is brewing. Buhari is on medical vacation in the United Kingdom, and it is so far inconclusive, even indefinite.

The announcement of Buhari's latest vacation on January 19 was itself inauspicious - not because it was his third in one year, but because he had asked the National Assembly for 10 days off when he was in fact going to be away for longer.

That a "10-day vacation" began on January 19, and was to end on February 6, offered faint indication of the president's much-guarded state of health. And it was all sudden: Yemi Osinbajo, the man Buhari temporarily handed power to, abruptly ended his participation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Rumours of hsi death have spread on fake news sites, and it is very worrisome that Buhari has refused to personally assure the country of his wellness. On one occasion Garba Shehu, one of his two spokesmen, tweeted a photo of Buhari supposedly watching Channels, Nigeria's leading television station, but it all seemed a cover-up.

The president could have called that same station to address his countrymen for just a minute. In such an ethnically divided country as Nigeria, such a move is crucial for the preservation of democratic sanity. With that assurance still missing, the power grabbers are already at work.
The fears of the north

Until May 2010, it seemed inconceivable that a member of a minority ethnic group would become president.

Were that even to happen, it looked like an outright impossibility that the north - a region that typically sees the number-one seat as its birthright - would be the victim of such power transfer.

But when northerner Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, the former president, left Nigeria for Saudi Arabia in November 2009 to get treatment for pericarditis and hadn't returned by February 2010, Goodluck Jonathan, from the Ijaw ethnic group, was formally declared acting president.

With Yar'Adua's death three months later, Jonathan - a man who was chosen as Yar'Adua's running mate not for his political appeal but for his reputation of "never rocking the boat" - became president.