By Emeka Alex Duru
Twice in the last couple of months, rumours of President Muhammadu Buhari’s death had literally seized the internet super highway. The tales of the development had taken place while the President had been on medical trip, abroad. But just as the stories had crept into the social media without any credible sources, they had fizzled out with time. And the President lives.
The last in the series of the Buhari death rumour, broke on Sunday, May 13. Following what has largely become a particular pattern since February, various account had claimed that the President, who left for London last week, may have passed on.
One of the stories had claimed that the President had been put to life support in the London hospital where he had gone to receive medical treatment.
But the more disturbing was the one that insisted that he may have died.
The rumours were almost gaining ground when the President’s media adviser, Garba Shehu, weighed in, and dismissed them as baseless. He urged Nigerians to disregard the claims, insisting that nothing untoward had happened to the President.
Shehu said; “Baseless rumours are trending again that an unpleasant thing has happened to our beloved President, Muhammadu Buhari.
“If you have received this information on WhatsApp or Facebook, disregard it because it is plain lies spread by vested interests to create panic.
“Nothing unpleasant has happened to the President. No cause for apprehension”.
Even with Shehu’s intervention, insinuations on the President’s true state of health, still ran high, on Monday. The air of uncertainties was not merely an affair of the ordinary citizens. It also persisted among the elite.
Buhari, the Emir of Daura, Alhaji Umar Farouk Umar and Magajin Gari of Daura Alhaji Musa Umar at the Eid-El-Kabir Prayer in Daura Katsina on 12th Sep 2016
At the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos, for instance, a Research Fellow, who spoke off record, blamed the President’s information managers for his rumoured death. He identified the poor information flow surrounding the President’s itinerary as contributing to the situation, adding that when a leader’s movement, is shrouded in secrecy, it creates room for rumours.
In his words, “The President’s information managers are responsible for the ugly development. It is their poor handling of the situation that is giving room for the insinuations. What is too much in letting Nigerians into the true state of their President? Why are they conducting the whole exercise in utmost secrecy? They created the vacuum. Nature, you know, abhors vacuum. But since they have created the vacuum, mischief makers are helping them feel it. I am not in support of the death rumour. It is inhuman. But that is what you get when you shut the door of information against the people”.
Elsewhere, the insinuation was that the President may have slipped into a bad shape, perhaps, momentarily. At the Acme Road Lagos State secretariat of the All Progressives Congress (APC), party chieftains refused to comment on the matter.
Senior Journalist and public relations practitioner, Muyiwa Akintunde, however took clear exception to the development, reminding the peddlers of the rumour of what eventually happened to those that had engaged on the unprincipled act against a former Nigerian President, Nnamdi Azikiwe, in the past.
“Go and ask R. B. K. Okafor and K. O. Mbadiwe in their graves. These elder statesmen gleefully announced the death of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe and constituted themselves and others into a funeral committee. The Great Zik lived to witness their burials. He died only at God’s appointed time. Go on, wish PMB dead!” he wrote on his social media, Facebook page.
In 1988, Okafor, Mbadiwe and others, had on a Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), news hour, announced the death of Azikiwe and unfolded a burial committee. Zik, on listening to the news, simply went philosophical, stressing that he was not in a hurry to cross over to the world beyond. In a curious twist, all the people that endorsed the announcement, died before the former President.
Buhari is not the only person to have been visited with death rumour in the current dispensation. Shortly after the commencement of the present civilian arrangement, a Lagos Pastor, Tunde Bakare, had likened Olusegun Obasanjo, who had run for the presidency on the ticket of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), to the biblical Moses, who was shown the Promise Land, but could not enter it for disobeying God’s instruction.
His audience had interpreted the prophecy to mean Obasanjo winning the Presidency but not living to enjoy the office. When shortly after Obasanjo’s election, rumour was injected into Lagos of his “death”, the commercial city was literally set ablaze by his South West kinsmen, who alleged foul play. It took a national broadcast by Obasanjo to arrest the situation that was almost seeing indigenes of some ethnic groups taking on one another.
Late Umaru Yar’Adua, was not spared the trend. In fact, his own death rumour predated his election. In one of PDP rallies while Yar’Adua was abroad on medical trip, it was alleged that he had died. It took Obasanjo’s telephone call to him on his sick bed to convince Nigerians and his supporters that he was alive.
Even in office, while it was obvious that he was not in the best of health condition, there were regular interventions by his image makers that he was hale and hearty. While his status deteriorated, the rumour profile was upped till he eventually died on May 5, 2010.
As in the current insinuations on Buhari’s real state of health, what essentially feathered the rumours of Yar’Adua’s death before he eventually passed on, was the level of secrecy that surrounded it.
Buhari’s handlers have not helped matters in this case, analysts insist. As if their opaque tendency on matters concerning the President, even in the best of times, is not enough, they have even gone further in announcing that there would not be update on his state of health. This is in addition to the wordings of his letter to the Senate announcing his exit, where he remarked that the length of his stay in London would be at the instance of his doctors.
Our NIIA source, described these strategies in information management as falling into the outdated and discredited United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) era, where the citizens were deemed unfit to know certain developments in Moscow. “This is not proper. It does not fit into the new world order. They (Buhari’s managers) must change their style. The citizens must know the true state of the President. They elected him. They are his employers. They have the rights to know. Unless they are acquainted with firsthand information on this, the rumour mills will continue to thrive”, he said.
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