Oh, this is not good. Nigerian President Umaru Yar-Adua’s health is apparently a serious problem. He has effectively disappeared at a time when crisis in the country’s North and the tenuous cease-fire with the Movement for Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) require serious leadership and no one seems to have any serious grasp as to just how he is doing. Making matters much worse, officials have announced that “Yar’Adua would neither resign his office nor allow his Vice, Dr. Jonathan Goodluck, to act as President for a second.”
This is a recipe for instability and potential chaos. Not only in Africa but across the globe and over the course of history (think of the death watches in the old Soviet Union) mysteries over the health of leaders have led to crisis. Not always, of course, but enough to make this a situation that bears close scrutiny. Perhaps we will all wake up tomorrow and Yar’Adua will be just fine and Nigerian politics will take a step away from the brink. But if his health really is bad, this has all the makings of a tinderbox.