OPINION: Can We Stop Playing God With Buhari’s Health?

By Kingsley Ahanonu

One of life’s salient realities is that of man’s mortality. He’s controlled by and easily susceptible to the vagaries that tilt life. Though we find it hard to accept, the indispensability of man to life’s uncontrollable situations cannot be denied. Man is limited, man is vulnerable; and that’s as far as nature’s forces are concerned. Yes, indeed he can die, just as more easily he can be indisposed.

It is based on this reality that the scenarios playing around the health challenge of Nigeria’s President Buhari call for interest, a rather disturbing one. It is interesting because of the dimensions it has been taken to, both by those seemingly working for him and those seemingly antagonistic to his leadership. The fact is that the extent and the manner both sides have taken the situation is very much disturbing.

The way in which the two parties have, for reasons spinning around sentiments, handled the ill health of Mr President suggest how disconnected they are to the reality that man is mortal and that, regardless of who or what one is, anybody can fall sick. These sets of rumour-weavers are those I call ‘the God-players’.

Here, the God-players are people who fake either by antagonistic spewing or by smoothing overzealousness the health issue of the president, thereby overheating, albeit unnecessarily, the polity. They are the ones who see themselves as God, deciding by their mouths what state they wish for the man, and feeding Nigerians with same.

The many narratives that they have, at will, conjectured since the health challenge of Mr President became public are sulkily demeaning and so mendaciously patronising, going by the perception of sympathy.

What Nigerians, most times, are fed with is either a cheap patronizing story that is too sweet to be seen as openly decorated lies of how the president is hale and hearty, in high spirit, with lively humour, and yet demanding of our prayers because he is ill as to be allowed by his doctors to come home and continue the demands of office, or the pathetic dismissal of the human nature of the man by antagonistic forces whose words suggest how they wish the man incapacitated and death.

Both, once again, are very much overblown disturbing, and nauseating. The former revealing a repugnant overzealousness that is against conscience and the desire to take the sensitivity of citizens for a ride. The latter being a story that reveals the wicked intent of the mind and an overt usurpation of the reserved power of the almighty.

But the reality which the two self-serving narratives fail to appreciate, as a result of the obvious blindness instigated by an overt disposition to play god in hide-and-seek games, is that President Buhari is not more than human, and like all flesh and blood, cannot be exempted from their lots. If he is sick, weakened by diseases, it is not a big deal, because it is not something unusual.

There is nothing wrong in feeding us with the right news about his condition (it gives us clue as to what to pray about). In a similar vein, it will be diabolically insensitive to pour invectives and wish him death simply because he’s president and sick, as some would do. Such is a denial of their human nature and proud assertion of infallibility and immortality by those who so posit.

In the light of this, it is important that we appreciate how very well our president needs our support and prayers at this moment that stands out as a trying one for both the man and our nation.

Yes, we might not have been fed with the right information by those who should do so, as to know what to pray on. But then the reality of God’s omnipotence and his ability to heal whatever manner of infirmities should guide us to asking for healing and recovery from whatever has clubbed our national leader. This, I think, is the most important.

However, if at the most, the ill health, is such that he can’t continue in office, his handlers, as I’ve earlier posited, should advise him to let go. There’s no big deal in this, as well.

We can play politics with every other associative that abound in our sociopolitical clime. But to display our political prowess, on natural forces that we cannot contend with, especially as regards life, death and sickness is descending so low into the ebbs of what’s callous, insensitive, puerile and mundane politics.

Ahanonu Kingsley writes from Owerri. He tweets @kings_emz

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