Nigeria’s been without a President for at least two months. The incumbent, Umaru Yar’Adua, is in Saudi Arabia getting treatment for a heart condition. So the country’s effectively been without a leader all this time. As The Guardian reported on January 12th: “The 58-year-old devout Muslim took off without informing the legislature and did not transfer power to his deputy.” This, while Nigeria has been placed on the US’s list of countries identified with terrorism and when political violence is tearing one its states apart.

In a clip from an interview broadcast last night on British television, the Nigerian foreign minister acknowledges that he as not spoken or had no contact with the President for at least two months (!), contradicting a Cabinet colleague who created the impression the president was in the country this whole time.

One bright note about Yar’Adua’s background: as an undergraduate student at Ahmadu Bello University (a hotbed of leftist campus politics in the 1970s and 1980s) he identified as a Marxist. But that’s about all. A member of the northern elite, his only political experience was a state governor of a small northern state. Apart from that, his brother was a close associate of former president and military leader, General Olusegun Obasanjo, who incidentally handpicked him to succeed Obasanjo as president. Yar’Adua was a chemistry professor before he went into politics, which may explain his dour, unassuming speech style.

When Yar’Adua was inaugurated in 2007, his presidency was greeted with much optimism. It marked “… the first time since independence from Britain in 1960 that Nigeria has witnessed the peaceful transition of power from one elected civilian leader to another.”  But not even two years into his term of office, he was already perceived as an ineffective president. Not sick enough to become rich very quickly. An informal agreement between Nigeria’s elites in the north and south, means Yar’Adua was put in the presidency to safeguard northern elite interests (next a southerner will get his turn to be president), so his illness will leave northern elites, anxious. It also doesn’t bring confidence for a country facing a recession and insecurity. That Yar’Aua has had a record of ill health is an open secret. Per The Guardian: “… Yar’Adua had a serious kidney complaint in 2000, and tried to dismiss rumours of continued ill health in 2007 by challenging his critics to a game of squash. He interrupted his campaign months later to seek medical care in Germany. He was recently diagnosed with acute pericarditis, an inflammation of the heart membrane that can be life-threatening.”

At one point rumors even went around that Yar’Adua was dead. It forced him to broke his silence. He called the BBC, but not his own country’s media (there’s something deep in here, but I can’t quite put my finger on it), to announce that he was definitely alive. Nigeria’s highest court has now ordered Yar’Adua’s Cabinetto decide within fourteen days whether he is fit to lead the country.