DEEPENING DEMOCRACY: Does the president matter?

President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua has been away to Saudi Arabia on health grounds for the past 48 days. We have not heard any medical bulletin on his state of health. We do not know whether he has been healthy enough to govern. If he is not, we do not know who has been taking decisions on his behalf, as his deputy was not empowered to act on his behalf. This is a real crisis of governance.

As I have argued previously in this column, the new principle in democratic governance is that there must be full public disclosure of the health conditions of the president because serious sickness affects the quality of decision-making of human beings. When presidents are sick, there must be regular health bulletins provided for citizens. The decision of President Yar’Adua and his handlers to disclose to the whole world that he was suffering from a serious heart condition was a brave and correct one. It must however be followed up with updates. That did not happen.

Given the absence of further information, it is correct that lawyers be in court to get the judiciary to compel the transfer of power to Vice President Goodluck Jonathan as we continue to speculate on the state of health of our president.

While we continue to wish Umaru Musa Yar’Adua rapid recovery from his ill health, the governance of the country must continue.

Our Constitution vests executive powers on the president and ministers act on his orders. That is why the culture of presidential democracy insists on public disclosure of serious ill health so that citizens know that someone is in charge. We know that public discussions of a person’s health is always a delicate matter as people are usually not responsible for their state of health and social ethics requires that our attitude to a person’s ill-health should always be focused on rapid recovery rather than mundane issues about the material implications of the prognosis of the person’s illness.

In a presidential democracy, the political implications of ill health are too serious to ignore. The people have a right to know that those who have taken an oath to provide good governance are physically and mentally capable of doing so. It was on this basis that the disclosure principle emerged to overturn the previous political culture of covering up the ill health of rulers. The democratic calculation is simple, the people should know about situations in which their rulers cannot perform optimally so that they can use their good judgment as citizens to demand for a change. Preferably, leaders who know that that their capacity to provide good governance has been diminished through an act of God should be schooled to withdraw from their public roles. This is however easier said than done. The reason is simple, the less the capacity of the president to rule, the higher the power of his immediate entourage. In such situations, the reality of health and ill health enters the arena of obfuscation. And that’s unfortunate.

Taking a longer view of the problem, we must begin to ask ourselves the fundamental question whether the president matters. Let’s do a comparative analysis of governance before and after the president’s illness. In both situations, Nigerians have groaned under epileptic power supply, absence of petrol and long queues,

growing inflation and poor performance of public institutions. The result cards before and after show declining quality of public education and public health, rising corruption, stagnation in agricultural production, regression in industrial production and growing insecurity. If the president had been in country and healthy, would the report card be different? I doubt it.

The growing saga over the president’s ill health and absence should be an occasion for us to pose bigger questions about the governance of our country. Governance is more than the weekly meeting of the Federal Executive Council presided by the president or his second in command.

The state performs three functions. It provides laws and rules for the regulation of society, it extracts resources from the people through various forms of taxation and it uses the resources extracted to produce public goods such as security, infrastructure and social services. These are the constituent elements of governance. The fact of the matter is that we have had very poor governance in all three departments long before the president’s ill health.

Presidents matter if they are able to harness national resources and energy to improve governance. As we continue to ponder about whether we are being governed at all and by whom, we must begin to factor in broader demands for improved democratic governance of our country.