HERE AND THERE: Whose president

The comments that followed the news that President Yar'Adua had left on what sounded like an unscheduled medical check up to Saudi Arabia as the week began, were full of sympathy and prayers for recovery. Three times in as many months suggests there is more than a routine examination going on.

This whole business of the president's health has been surrounded by the kind of awkwardness that just leaves you feeling as if your presence has been completely ignored.

The year was 1965 and school had resumed after long vac, as we used to call, the two month holiday from July to September when boarders from far away could make the long journey by road home to the east or some by train to the North. One girl came back very different from the bullying in your face personality she had been before. , Silent and taciturn she kept to herself, and picked up some strange new habits.

Beside the building where the kitchens and dining room stood was a trio of lemon trees. Every afternoon, after prep this girl would be found seated on a bench under those trees, sucking on lemons, one after the other, looking at no one. As the months passed, the blouse of her uniform grew tighter and tighter across her breasts while the waistband of her pinafore expanded until she could no longer pin the ends together.

No one called it a name, this strange affliction of hers that she thought she could treat with lemon juice and ink. No teacher took it on herself to explain, not even when matron and nurse found her bleeding upstairs in the toilet in the bathroom of the newer dormitory wing. There were tight-lipped grim faced tutors and a terse announcement at Assembly after that eerie afternoon. All it said was that so and so had been ill and would not be coming back to school. We junior girls were left to make what sense we could of the scraps of information we could glean.

American presidential candidates are required to disclose details of the state of their health. They are vying to be elected as leaders of their country, the highest office in the land that demands commitment and the ability to do the job and stay the course. When New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000 the detail about the condition and the course of treatment it had been decided he would pursue was almost stultifying. Prostate cancer is a widespread disease that affects men.

Regular tests for it are advised for males who have reached a certain age almost the same way that mammograms are recommended for women for early detection of breast cancer.

Giuliani's doctors began a treatment that involved the injection of radioactive seeds in his prostate gland. Diagrams showing the step-by-step process, of what would be done to Giuliani's balls confronted you at every turn. It was tough to take if you had no particular love for Giuliani.

The point was that the office of the mayor of New York was an important one, and his role in it vital for the daily running and welfare of the city and its inhabitants, the country and its economy. Perhaps there was a little too much information, but the point was that the people had a right to know what was happening to their mayor, just as it was imperative that men who were vying to become leaders of the free world were in the right physical state to do so. Not because it is just nice to know but because there is a respected pact, one of honour and duty, between the leaders and the led.

It is amazing that in a country where we hold dear the communal traditions of our culture, no such understanding exists between those who fight tooth and nail to acquire power only to treat with scorn those at whose behest they claim to want to lead. Clearly the power is for them, not for us. We are back to siddon look all over again.

Concerns about stability, the prestige of the nation, the continuity of policies and maintaining a trajectory of growth, do not intrude on the primary mission of exercising privilege and perpetuating the personal benefits of the position.

Quite simply it is an insult to Nigerians not to tell them the truth about the state of health of their president. Who does he belong to if not to us? Why do a bunch of foreign doctors have more right to know what is wrong with him than the people among whom he was born and on whose behalf he exercises power?

A man is ill. That man is the husband of a wife or wives, the father of children who will dread the pain of their loved one. To keep such news hidden from Nigerians is to treat them as though they were the enemy and not part of the wide family that a nation should be.