The six-man delegation mandated by the Federal Executive Council to visit Saudi Arabia and ascertain the true state of ailing President Umaru Musa Yar’adua’s health was billed to leave the country last night after the Federal Government eventually secured a landing clearance for the Presidential jet scheduled to convey them.
The team was earlier billed to embark on the trip on Sunday night, but the trip was cancelled following government’s inability to secure landing permit for the Presidential jet conveying them to Saudi Arabia.
Briefing reporters after emerging from a meeting with Acting President Goodluck Jonathan at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, yesterday, Foreign Affairs Minister Chief Ojo Maduekwe said the landing clearance was secured in the early hours of yesterday, and that the team would leave by midnight yesterday barring any last minute changes.
“We will leave tonight (yesterday) and we are not going to be there all week. It is not going to last long, and as soon as we carry out the purpose of our going there, we will start coming back. The request was made close to the weekend when I asked the Saudi Ambassador to come and see me. He promised to convey our request to the Kingdom. It is only by yesterday that the details of our going were concluded. So, by the time we have it, it was almost midnight. So, we couldn’t continue because we have to get the people on the delegation to be ready.”
Members of the team are Minister of Petroleum, Dr. Rilwanu Lukman; Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Alhaji Yayale Ahmed; Minister of Health, Prof. Babatunde Osotimehin; the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Chief Kayode Adetokunbo.
Others are the Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Sayyadi Abba-Ruma; and Foreign Affairs Minister, Chief Ojo Maduekwe.Maduekwe said the team would visit both the ailing President and the King of the Saudi Arabia. Asked whether their mission would include gathering medical report on the president’s health condition, Maduekwe said: “We are not a medical team. We are not a medical panel.”
He said the inclusion of the Minister of Health Prof. Babatunde Osotimehin on the team does not in any way make the team a medical panel. “The fact that he is the minister of health does not make him a member of a medical panel. An engineer can be minister of health; even a lawyer like me can be minister of health. The only position in the executive council, which by constitutional provision requires a particular profession to head that ministry is that of the office of Attorney-General, it must be a lawyer. The fact that the minister of health is on this team does not automatically mean that he is going there as a medical doctor. It could have been minister of culture, it could have been anybody else, so it should not establish any linkage between the presence of Prof. Osotimehin, renowned medical scholar and minister of health, there is no linkage between that at all and the purpose of this visit.
He said the purpose of the visit was to express the Federal Government’s appreciation to the King of Saudi Arabia and their solidarity with the first family and assure Yar’adua that under the dynamic leadership of the Acting President Jonathan, “governance was going on.”
“The executive council remains focused, united and that every issue whether it is infrastructure, health care or education or even diplomacy have been proceeding normally. You can see the floury of foreign visitors to Nigeria and we need to have this conversation in Saudi both with the government of Saudi and also members of the first family,” he said
It is not clear if the team will be allowed to see Yar’adua. It would be recalled that many delegations that went there in recent weeks could not see him.
His doctors at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital are said to be preventing visitors from Abuja to see him in the hospital. Nigeria’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia,
Abdullah Aminchi said he himself had visited Yar’adua on Saturday and that the condition of the president, who has not been seen in public for three months, was improving after treatment for a heart ailment.”I saw him the day before yesterday … He’s really feeling better now,” Aminchi told AFP.
He said it was Yar’adua doctors and not Saudi authorities, as some Nigerian officials have charged, who had denied access to the ailing president.
“It is only the doctors assigned to him who are preventing them (visitors) from seeing the president,” despite a green light from the Saudi authorities, Aminchi said.
The Charge d’ Affairs of the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Abuja, Jalal Hassan O. Almograby corroborated Aminci’s assertion that it’s not that the Saudi authorities that have been preventing visitors from Nigeria from seeing Yar’adua, but his doctors. Addressing newsmen yesterday at the embassy, he said the only person that can restrict access to the president is his doctor.