“Silence is golden when you can’t think of an [intelligent] answer” – Mohammed Ali, 1942-2016.
Buhari’s death has exposed more horrors about the real attitude of those who held the highest posts in his government – which was largely a failure based on lies and hypocrisy.
Last week, my column addressed Garba Shehu’s confession that he told Nigerians lies about Aso Rock rats to cover up Buhari’s infirmities which might have rendered him unable to preside.
Today, it is Pastor Femi Adesina, another top official of the government, who is under scrutiny for what he said in defence of his late boss.
To be quite candid, if only the dead can be aware of what their “friends” say about them, they would seek the forgiveness of their enemies.
Adesina just rubbished Buhari’s reputation for simplicity and honesty by his recent utterances on a television show.
To be quite candid, I was not surprised. A man who could ask Nigerians to give up their ancestral farmlands to herdsmen, by saying “Your land or your life”, lost the respect of all farmers in Nigeria.
A pastor justifying coveting other peoples’ land by herdsmen – in order to keep his job – should step down from the pulpit or be pushed down.
I write as one of the victims of herdsmen.
The quote above was from Muhammed Ali long after he retired from the ring and was racked by Parkinson disease.
A younger boxer, then called Cassius Clay, had a different advice for people asked to make comments: “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool; than to talk and remove all doubt.”
Buhari’s death in a London hospital, apart from revealing the futility of expensive medical tourism, once God had said its time, has exposed finally the hypocrisy of a political candidate who campaigned on ending the idea of public officials going abroad for health care.
All the money in our depleted external reserves cannot buy life when the Almighty says “enough, come home”.
“It is unthinkable that wisdom should ever be popular” – Johann Goethe, 1749-1832
The Saudis were clever.
They made sure that Yar’Adua’s death was not associated with their hospital. They sent our former President back in a box – to go and die at Aso Rock.
The British were greedy and stupid. They should have sent Buhari back the same way.
Incidentally, if the doctors treating him and Buhari’s family had been wise, they would have brought him back alive to Nigeria instead of being delivered as cargo by Nigeria Air Force One.
They would have avoided the backlash trailing his demise now.
Few people would have remembered what he said when campaigning in 2014-5.
Hypocrisy is saying one thing and doing something else.
APC MANIFESTO PARTLY PRESENTED
As the PC of another party in 2014, he ran his campaign on a promise “to increase the quality of all Federal Government owned hospitals to world class standard within five years. Invest in cutting edge technology such as tele-medicine…”
That was his promise to Nigerians. Implied in that promise was another one: With world class FG-owned hospitals, all over Nigeria, nobody in government, or Nigeria, would need to go abroad for treatment.”
That was the solemn promise made to Nigerians by Buhari; which paved the way for his election.
That was not the only policy statement. He also criticized his predecessors for maintaining a fleet of presidential aircraft.
By 2021, none of the Federal Teaching Hospitals had been elevated to world class.
On the contrary, they have all fallen behind global standards.
Consequently, the President of Nigeria had travelled to London at least three times for treatment.
The first trip covered three months; and despite all outward appearances, the man was living on borrowed time.
He got steadily worse – physically and mentally.
From 2017 until he passed away in July 2025, Buhari’s health situation had been wrapped in deceptive cover-up by his family and handlers and only God knows how much Nigerians have paid – just for parking a presidential plane in the United Kingdom – waiting for a President who betrayed them.
We are now learning that he spent about 255 days in total in a London hospital – where the presidential room can go as high as 3,500 pounds sterling. Here is what my calculator told me about the total cost of Buhari just lying down.
Room charges at the presidential unit at 3,500 pounds sterling per day; 500 pounds per day to park his jet, estimated drugs and tests about 200 pounds per day; estacode for him and at least six accompanying staff; estacode and travel expense of officials who had to shuttle between Abuja and London altogether must have set the nation back about N20 million per day.
That was how much a famous banker, name withheld, was shedding before expiring in another London hospital. There is no reason to assume that President Buhari would off-load less. That is one of the truths they were hiding from us; because the monumental cost resulted in a President who could no longer go to office.
He had become vegetative – like Yar’Adua after Saudi.
That was why Aso Rock’s two-legged rats had to concoct a disgraceful lie about rats eating the cables.
Just as we were still reeling from the blow of Garba Shehu’s revelation, Adesina went on television to mount his own defence.
ADESINA’S DEFENCE
“If he had said ‘I will do my medicals in Nigeria’, just to show off or something, he would long have been dead because there may not be the expertise needed in the country. But, he needed to be alive to be able to lead the country to a point where we will have that expertise” – Adesina on Channels Television.
When Martin Luther, 1483-1546, declared that “For where God built a church, there the Devil would also build a chapel”, the theologian leader of the Protestant Reformation was in no doubt that majority of those who enter churches, including the pastors, go to the Devil’s chapel to worship. We are seeing this on display here.
Otherwise, how can a ‘man of God’ claim to know that Buhari would have died earlier?
Perhaps, he can also tell us when he would have died if he was treated in Nigeria.
His second statement, made after Buhari had died, has been answered by the Nigerian doctors as “ignorant, insensitive and disrespectful to thousands of professionals who continue to serve under challenging conditions in the country.”
They were being polite – extremely polite.
That declaration by Adesina sent me racing into the VANGUARD BOOK OF QUOTATIONS; to a quotation I hate to reproduce: “(Some) journalists sometimes say a thing that they know isn’t true in the hope that if they keep on saying it, long enough, it will turn out to be true” (Julien Benda, 1857-1952).
Buhari campaigned on vast improvement of our Teaching Hospitals. He was in office for two years and presented two budgets before his first known and most prolonged medical tourism occurred.
Can Adesina point to a single line in those budgets where Buhari made special allocations which would “lead the country to a point where we would have such expertise?”
One would have thought that after his brush with death and his return in 2017, he would have developed a more positive attitude towards improved healthcare for Nigerians.
Instead, he presented six more annual budgets with scant regard for his campaign promises and without leading us to “have such expertise”.
On the contrary, the gap between Nigeria and the world widened and infant and maternal mortality increased to the point where we now lead the world in those two calamities.
Buhari’s successor declared in far away Saint Lucia on July 3, 2025, “We inherited a country that was near bankruptcy”.
Even a dunce knows that a nation on the verge of economic collapse could not possibly have been led to improve on its health delivery.
Obviously, while the nation’s health system collapsed, the President was indulging himself to the tune of N2 billion or more.
Now that we know better the quality of some of Buhari’s advisers, we can forgive the man for his woeful failures while in office.
LAST LINE: I would prefer to make this the last article on Buhari’s health mis-adventure – if his handlers would let us forget the whole thing. Otherwise…
FUTURE CONSEQUENCES OF NAME CHANGE
“What’s in a name? …” – William Shakespeare, 1564-1616.
Renaming institutions, buildings, roads, etc is not new to Nigeria and the world. What is worrisome about the current trend is the frequency and the short-sightedness attaching to it.
It has become so blatantly political that it taints the honour with which it should have been invested.
A few are totally incomprehensible.
On July 3, President Tinubu proclaimed that he “inherited an economy on the brink of bankruptcy.”
Everybody knows who handed him that economy.
Less than two weeks later, a major university was renamed to honour him. The questions are: For what? For ruining the economy?
Dr Olunloyo was Governor of Oyo State for three months – October to December 1983.
Yet, the Ibadan Polytechnic was renamed for him. Why? Take it from me; some of these will be reversed in the future.
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