What President’s Doctor Did Not Tell Nigerians, By Falomo – The Guardian
December 5, 2009 by tim
Indeed as Nigerians are yet to be told of when President Umaru Yar’Adua will return to the country from a Saudi hospital where he is being treated for pericarditis, the controversy over his capability to continue in office rages just as it is believed in some quarters that his doctor did not disclose the president’s actual ailment.
Specifically, Dr Ore Falomo, a senior medical expert and one-time personal physician to the late Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, believes the President is not suffering from only pericarditis, insisting that Yar’Adua’s doctors should come clean by telling Nigerians the actual disease afflicting their leader.
In an exclusive interview with The Guardian, Falomo said: “The frequency of his going to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment, before we came to the present situation, showed that he needed regular review and follow-up of an ailment, which the country was not told about. We know that at a time, people took him to task to disclose the nature of his illness, but government thought that was the President’s personal business.
“But it cannot be his personal business, as it has now been revealed the last thing that took him to Saudi Arabia. We now know that pericarditis is the last condition that took him to Saudi Arabia, as has now been revealed by his doctor. We must be very clear on that. The doctor did not go ahead to tell us that in addition to that, the President has suffered so and so ailments. So, Nigerians were made to believe that it is only pericarditis that took the President to Saudi Arabia.”
Falomo, who has managed the health of some Nigerian leaders said further: “To some of us, we know that cannot and is not true. We know that if it is the first time he is having pericarditis, he doesn’t need to lose sleep over it, because he would recover from it and return to his seat.
“But when you have pericarditis on top of other debilitating situations, then the condition is grave. That is where we are, speaking as a medical person. Is it the isolated case of pericarditis or a retrogression of the health of our President that led to this pericarditis, because it is an auto-immune disease? You cannot divorce it, as if he got pericarditis overnight. No! It is very unlikely.”
For Prof Auwalu Yadudu, a constitutional lawyer and law teacher at Bayero University Kano (BUK), “If indeed the President, as we are speaking, is incapacitated and due to his incapacity, governance would suffer. I think the most logical thing to do and in the interest of democracy and constitutionalism is for him to invoke Section 145 of the constitution.
