Akunyili’s Memo Shakes FEC Urges Ailing President to Write National Assembly

Official mascot of the 17th National Sports Festival, Garden City Games 2010 unveiled yesterday at the Atlantic Hall, Hotel Presidential, Port Harcourt.

As the seeming constitutional impasse actuated by the nearly 80-day absence of ailing Nigeria’s President, Umaru Musa Yar’Adua lingers, the Information and Communication Minister, Prof Dora Akunyili is said to have ventured what no member of the Yar’Adua cabinet has done.

In what many Nigerians consider to be another moral crusade akin to her years in the National Agency for  Food and Drugs Administration and Control, NAFDAC, Prof Akunyili has suggested that her ailing boss should transmit to the Senate the constitutionally required documents needed to swear in Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to act as President.

The Information Minister who made the case  in a memo to the Federal Executive Council, FEC Wednesday explained that such an action was not just the morally just thing to do, but a fulfillment of the yearnings of most Nigerians in the circumstance.

Her view which came after sharp denials by the ailing President’s personal physician that the president never transmitted any letter concerning his medical condition to the National Assembly, was said to have created sharp division, within the Federal Executive Council.

But Dora Akunyili insisted that the survival of the country and her nascent democracy was a challenge that requires personal sacrifice and utmost patriotism among key public officers.

The Information Minister who declined further comments on the full content of her memo said her views were expressed in-house and would be attended to as such.

It would be recalled that last week, following an Abuja High Court directive the FEC said that president Yar’Adua was not in anyway incapacitated and that the ailing Commander –In –Chief would soon be back on his desk.

However, Senate had in a separate resolution advised President Yar’Adua to transmit to it a letter on the cause of his long absence to enable the National Assembly consider steps towards the empowerment of Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to act as president as required by section 145 of the 1999 Constitution.

Prof Akunyili had by her latest memo emerged as the only member of Yar’Adua’s cabinet to openly voice support for the emergence of Vice President Goodluck Jonathan as acting President.