YAR'ADUA: A DEATH FORETOLD
When former President Umar Musa Yar'Adua passed on Wednesday night, so ended the theatrics and sad opera, which his failing health was reduced to by his erstwhile kitchen cabinet that transmogrified, sometime in December 2009, into what became known as the Cabal.
Back then in November 2009, six days after the late president was secretly spirited out to Saudi Arabia for emergency medical attention, Sunday Sun in a cover story published the views of medical experts who asserted that Yar'Adua would be hospitalized for a minimum of eight weeks, meaning that he would not return to the country until early this year.
Their views were based on the known prognosis of pericarditis, particularly in a patient with an underlying kidney problem that had previously necessitated a transplant some years earlier.
That cover story was the first in a series of cover features, which consistently maintained the informed opinion of the medical experts we regularly consulted.
Recognizing that the laser-sharp reports were dead-on-the-mark, and being privy to the detailed medical report of the then ailing president, who had been reported by a webzine to be suffering from Churg-Strauss Syndrome, a debilitating and terminal medical condition that ultimately results in progressive multiple organ failure accompanied with irreversible weight loss that leaves the sufferer looking like a skeleton covered with thin skin, the Cabal set an ignominous agenda to keep the nation in the dark about the deteriorating health status of Yar'Adua.
By their ill-advised antics, reminiscent of the modus operandi of Nazi Germany's Joseph Goebbels, the master of propganda, they wove a horrible net of lies and deceit that failed to fool anybody and achieved nothing.
Rather, the elaborate but misplaced energetic efforts of the Cabal only succeeded in demonizing and alienating the emotionally distraught wife of the late leader, Turai, and made her look like a politically rabid Jezebel, which she probably is not. They disconnected her from what could have been the greatest outpouring of empathy for an ailing leader.
Genuine concern for the recovery of the ailing president was unfortunately replaced by a thunderbolt of anger demonstrated by the series of rallies for a change in the political status quo.
Who knows, if the cabal had come clean right from the beginning, nominal Christians, Pentecostals, Muslims and even traditionalists, would most probably have held interdenominational prayer vigils, weeping before God, asking for a miracle, which one of the doctors who spoke with us had said was the only way for Yar'Adua to recover from Churg-Strauss Syndrome, the medical condition believed to have caused the death of the late president.
Despite the efforts of the Cabal to obfuscate facts and pool a wool over the eyes of Nigerians, Sunday Sun cover stories remained consistent in pointing the direction the president's health was unfortunately and irreversibly heading.