The President's Health Status

By Eric Bawah


President John Evans Atta Mills

There are three ways of dealing with one's health status – Acceptance, Confrontation and Denial. Acceptance is an aspiration, not a strategy. Confrontation means putting the disease at the centre of your life; learning as much as you can about it and vigorously exploring alternative therapies. Confrontation is like holding the bull by the horns. Denial means letting the disease affect your life as little as possible. You smile even when the pain is unbearable. In fact, it means pretending as best as you can, that you don't even have it. Sometimes you try not to tell outright lies about your ailment and along the line you try some sort of Clintonian evasions and prissy parsing (Question: 'You look so tired. Are you ok?' Answer: 'I feel fine')

Confrontation and denial seem like equally valid strategies, and the choice between them is one of personal taste. Few things are more socially disapproved than inauthenticity or a refusal to face reality. In choosing confrontation, you embrace the 'community' of your fellow victims -another socially approved value. You get sympathy, not from your 'community' but the whole society. In choosing denial, you are guilty of 'self-hatred', like a Jew or African American putting on wasp's airs, or worse still passing himself off as white Christian. If you fool yourself skilfully enough, you can banish thoughts of the disease but still retain a liberating sense of urgency. You desperately search for cures while pretending that you are ok.

So I recommend denial- and defend it as a legitimate option. To work effectively, though, denial requires secrecy and secrecy pretty much requires deception. It is simply easier to go through the day not thinking about your disease if the people who interact with you don't know you are sick. This however complicates the case for denial. Deceiving yourself may offend the cultural prejudice in favour of relentless self-knowledge. It may not offend you, the one carrying the disease. The reason is that what you do with yourself in the privacy of your head is nobody else's business. On the other hand, deceiving those around you is more troublesome. Am I pontificating? Probably, I am in a state of circumlocution, but wait a moment while I light my Havana Cigar.

When I say I recommend denial, I had in mind the situation of the president as far as his health status is concerned. Nobody can convince me that the health status of the president is nobody's business. We the tax payers pick up all his medical bills because the constitution says he should not do any other work apart from the one assigned to him by the Constitution. In the run-up to the last general elections, Hon. Michael Teye Nyaonu, an NDC MP, told the whole world that President Mills was ill and as such he could not withstand the rigors of the campaign. The handlers of candidate Mills vehemently denied the assertion. Once a while, the candidate will fly to South Africa to seek medical treatment and return to tell us that all was well.

Fortunately for him, he was able to withstand the rigors of the campaign, thanks to the hard work of the South Africa doctors, and he was eventually voted to power as the president of Ghana. When he was running for the presidency, we did not care about his health status because it was his own business. After all, was he not simply a candidate of a political party? Now that he is the president of the nation, the issue is no more his own business and we will not allow him to mind that business which is not his, anyway. Since holding the reins of power, the health status of the president is simply suspicious. His handlers make sure his face is always doused with ponds and powder to make him look fine; but if you watch him very closely, you can see that all is not well at all. The last time when his palms turned black, his Deputy Minister of Misinformation, Okudzeto Ablakwa, told us it was as a result of a certain medication the president used. Then there was this sore throat and the sinuses, which were all explained away as normal. As at the time of writing this report, our president was attending hospital in far away New York.

When Ghanaians started talking about the bad eyesight of the president, his handlers kicked like buffaloes. A cameraman who focused his lens on the extra ordinary font size of a script the president was reading was threatened. Anytime the president decided to read his speech, we could see him literally burying his head in the script and finding it difficult to read. That is why he normally delivers his speeches extempore. Before the president went to deliver a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations, yours sincerely advised him, through this column, that he should not attempt to read the script. He did not take that advice and went there to read the script, which seriously exposed his bad eye sight. It looked as if two sentences were written on one sheet as the president kept opening the pages rapidly.

Dick Cheney, the former Vice President of the United States, adopted denial to survive his tenure of office. That is why I said I will defend denial as a legitimate option. This man had a heart attack but when he was interviewed by a journalist, he said it was not a heart attack but 'unusual heart throbs'. Another reason why I recommend denial is that in this part of the world, telling people the truth about your health status eventually invites stigmatization. Instead of helping you to get a cure for your disease, they capitalize on your predicament to make money. In this era of herbalists who have adopted the title 'Dr.', you would be convinced to pay huge sums of money to get a cure for your disease, which will not come anyway because every sick person is desperate to get a cure. So you keep denying while secretly looking for cure.

You see, if this Earth Angel Gabriel is sick, it is no big deal because that is my own business. After all, who picks my medical bills as a private citizen? In fact, what will the nation lose apart from the fact that I may not be able to contribute to this column, which I have been writing for 10 years now. (Yet, see how time flies?). But if an executive president who is the Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces is sick, that is a big deal. It is not for nothing that countries all over the world hire psychiatrists for their Heads of State. Can you imagine what a mad president can do when confronted with a decision to go to war or not to go to war with a neighbouring country? Just travel down memory lane and see what Heads of State like Emperor Bokassa of the Central Africa Republic, General Iddi Amin Dada of Uganda etc. did to their people. Under a lunatic called Adolph Hitler, Germany was blamed for the Second World War. The president is the number one civil servant of the nation and so if he gets sick, he cannot serve us well.

The handlers of the president are not doing him any good at all. When the president was able to bear the pain and went through his first term of four years in office, they should have impressed upon him to step down for John Dramani Mahama to carry on with the fight. John is comparatively youthful, vibrant and very energetic to withstand the rigors of the job of a president. The handlers of the late president of Nigeria made a similar mistake and drove the man to his untimely death.

When the evidence was clearly written on the wall that Shehu Umaru Yar'Adua was sick and dying, his handlers, for reasons best known to them, played the ostrich until the man was rushed to a foreign country, where he died. If he had stepped aside to seek medical treatment somewhere, I believe he would not have died.

For now, the president is fooling himself so skilfully while he continues to seek for cures for his multiple ailments abroad. Anytime he appears in public, he smiles so broadly to portray that everything is ok for him, but to some of us who have known him for many years, we know this is not the Mills that we used to know. We need him to share his experience with the younger generation so when he follows his handlers and dies untimely, (God forbid) we the people of Ghana would be the losers. Just look at the good things that we are getting from ex-presidents Kufuor and Rawlings. These are the only former Heads of State that the country can boast of and their contributions to the world are so immense that one is always proud to be a Ghanaian. While Kufuor was awarded a prize by the World Food Organization for his ability to fight hunger in Ghana, Rawlings is charged to bring peace to the people of Somalia and stop the famine in that failed state. But if President Mills thinks power is sweeter than honey, so will he continue soldering on till he dies, so be it. Can't those who are close to the president hear that sound of clocks ticking? Tempus fugit, assholes!!!

By Eric Bawah

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Ghana Telescope.Com. The contents of this article are of sole responsibility of the author(s). Ghana Telescope.Com will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements contained in this article.