DEEPENING DEMOCRACY: The health of presidents

I join millions of Nigerians wishing President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua rapid recovery from his ill health. His state of health started generating heated debate from the time of his campaign three years ago when he had to break his political road show and go abroad for treatment. His repeated medical trips abroad have kept the debate on the front burner.

Public discussion 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. Discussing the health conditions of persons in power is even more problematic as in such situations; personal ill health translates into the highest levels of national security and politics.

Historically, heads of state have always been presented as strong men, occasionally as strong women, whose health and strength is the guarantee for the nation's strength and well being. Aging, ailing and sickness of those at the pinnacle of power were therefore developments that were covered up on the grounds of national security.

While I was doing my doctoral studies in France in the 1980s, one of the books that became a bestseller was a comparative study that showed over three quarters of the countries in the world at that time were ruled by people in their seventies and eighties who were physically or mentally sick patients whose sicknesses were impacting negatively on their capacity to provide good governance.

It led to a major French debate on whether there should be public disclosure of the health conditions of the French president. It was resolved that there should be disclosure because serious sickness affects the quality of decision-making of presidents. Indeed, there are numerous publications on how failing health negatively affected the quality of the decisions taken successively by Presidents Pompidou, Mitterrand and Chirac.

The disclosure principle was obeyed in France as health bulletins were regularly published on President Mitterrand while he was in power. On leaving office, the French public was shocked to find out the rapidity with which he died of prostate cancer, a condition they were not aware he had.

A new medical profession had been born, the health bulletins of President Mitterrand were written in a way to obfuscate the reality of his sickness so information was released in a way that would confuse rather than clarify his health condition.

The same was true of President Reagan.

Over the last couple of months, many voices have been calling on the British Minister, Gordon Brown to resign over allegations of ill-health which he has strenuously denied.

The alerts over Tony Blair's heart condition while he was in office were deliberately misrepresented to the people. The disclosure principle on the health of presidents is observed in ways that are aimed at deceiving the people.

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 therefore a brave one. They must have known it would lead to calls for his resignation. They must also have known that it would heat up the polity by bringing to the fore Nigeria's ethno-regional dynamics related to zoning and implications of transition for the current zone's leadership that is ruling and ruining Nigeria.

Had they not disclosed his medical conditions however, the situation would have been worse.

The political class the world over lives in a glass cage today where it is difficult to hide. The stories about the President's ill-health would still have circulated. The tone and claims would have even been worse than the reality and the objectives of cover up would have been defeated.

In a democracy, the people have a right to know that the people 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.