By Festus Adedayo
Subú-seré? Poetic licence gave me the indulgence of this headlining. Not even the English Language, in its pretentious globality, could capture Subú-seré. Like Shakespeare benignly prompted, I was in search of an appropriate word to capture my mind’s construct. Blank was however the wall. So I decided to stick to the word’s rendition in my native language. Subú-seré is a broad, idiomatic expression whose surface is barely scraped by words like “tumbling” or “falling”. Subú-seré cannot be captured by a single slip. It finds expression in repeated falls. It is deeper than its nearest English expression in connotation and texture. Subú-seré can, in one breath, be deployed to describe a state of chaos, mismanagement, or a “tumble”.
In the last few days, the Nigerian president’s fall in Ankara, the Turkiye capital, has engaged the Nigerian world. At a welcome ceremony by his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president suddenly stumbled and fell. He had just walked past a line of dignitaries which included Turkiye soldiers when, as he moved to the right of Erdogan, the Subú-seré occurred. A viral video uploaded on the Turkish president’s X handle showed him helping up his colleague president. Erdogan also held firmly to his hand thereafter like you hold a kindergarten kid crossing the road. About 45 seconds after the fall, the Nigerian president is seen in the video standing next to Erdogan and beaming a wry smile. The day after, while President Tinubu was shown being seen off Turkiye by Erdogan on a national television, ostensibly on his way to Nigeria, Nigerians do not yet know where in the whole wide world their president is holed up in.
Concerns immediately ripped through Nigeria. The presidency however downplayed them all, maintaining that Tinubu was “in great shape”. Sunday Dare, his aide, said not only was the president in good health and unhurt from the slip, he immediately continued with a scheduled bilateral meeting in Turkiye. Presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, took the explainer a notch higher. Tinubu had tripped as he stepped on a metal object “on the floor, which made him lose his balance,” he said. Onanuga then went into his usual argumentative fallacy of argumentum ad hominem. This fallacy is distinguished by enemy-repelling and blame-trading. It is an everyone-but-self narrative. While at this, the presidential aide took his time to school Nigerians on the difference between a fall and a stumble. “This is not a big deal, except for those who want to make mischief out of a fleeting incident. It was a mere stumble, thank God, not a fall” he said. As the Yoruba would say, even if we do not know anything else, we know that three people cannot stand in twos.
On June 12, 2024, during the Democracy Day celebration, President Tinubu had earlier fallen in public. It was at the Eagle Square. The president fell; pardon me, a la Onanuga, he stumbled, as he was about to board a parade vehicle. But Tinubu himself made a light joke of it. “Early this morning, I had a swagger and it’s on the social media. They’re confused whether I was doing bùgá or doing bàbáńrìgá (two popular dance steps),” he said. “But it’s a day to celebrate democracy while doing dobale (salute to elders) for the day. I’m a traditional Yoruba boy, I did my dòbálé.”
The president probably dobale-ed to Erdogan, too in Ankara last week, being a good Yoruba boy? But, not to worry, he is in a great shape, said his handlers. But, shouldn’t we be worried? As Onanuga said, it should ordinarily be no big deal that a mortal man falls, either literally, metaphorically or figuratively. Drilling deep into the figurative of falling, King Sunny Ade, Yoruba Juju music great, in a 1970s LP, pilloried his mockers who were deriding his fall. “Òtá mí má yó mí, b’é mi bá subú” he fired, submitting that “if I fall, I will heave myself up” – “b’émi bá subú, èmi á dìde è”.
Falling and rising are part of the existential slopes of humanity. Whether as a literal fall or as metaphor, it is doubtable whether a man can waddle through the sloppy contours of life without experiencing life’s fluctuations. They are embedded into the whole concept of living, so much that life would not be life if man doesn’t rise and fall. It was probably a realization that life is fraught with falling and rising that Francois-Marie Arouet, famously known by his pen name, Voltaire, one of the best Enlightenment philosophers, satirist and historian, said of life that it is “thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them”.
Voltaire himself lived a life of sicknesses and diseases. He is often quoted as saying “my life is a struggle” and frequently wrote about the miseries of existence. Born with a weak bodily constitution, Voltaire suffered afflictions of chronic health issues, one of which was the Crohn’s disease, distinguished by its frequently leaving him bedridden. He also had chronic dyspepsia, frequent attacks of colic, and a temporary blindness that afflicted him whenever it snowed. Scurvy, gout, bronchitis, and even apoplexy were also some of his life-long ailments. This life of illnesses probably got him cynical about medicine, leading to his famous quip that doctors “put drugs of which they know little into bodies of which they know less for diseases of which they know nothing at all”.
So also was Blaise Pascal. Voltaire’s French compatriot, Pascal was a mathematician, physicist, philosopher and a Catholic writer. He, too suffered from lifelong, debilitating health conditions which included celiac disease, severe migraines with visual auras, peripheral neuropathy, epilepsy, and possibly craniosynostosis (skull deformity) and autism. These manifested as chronic pains, stomach issues, and mental disorientation. These life health struggles deeply influenced his philosophy, leading to his early death on August 19, 1662, at age 39. His final days were recorded to have involved extreme abdominal pain, weight loss, and epileptic seizures. This life of chronic suffering was central to his work, influencing his famous view of sickness as the “natural state of Christians”.
There were and are many more great people whose lives were buffeted by ailments. Yet, sicknesses and diseases did/do not define them. The Lord Jesus Christ counsels that in this world, there would be tribulations. These include sicknesses, diseases and even death. Jamaican reggae group, Mighty Diamonds, a harmony trio which recorded roots reggae with a strong Rastafarian influence, said this much. In their famous track, Have Mercy, they sang that “Man was made to suffer, yeah/And women were made to feel the pain” but prayed to “Jah” to “have mercy” on him/her.
On 4 April, 2021 and 20 October, 2024, I wrote two pieces which centered on presidential ill health. While the earlier one was entitled, “The President is a sick man: Buhari’s Secret Therapy Inside the ‘Oneida,’” the second was, “The president is a sick man.” The first was a lamentation of President Muhammadu Buhari’s knee-jerk and off-the-cuff jetting out of Aso Rock Villa like a wandering evil spirit. The second lamented that in President Tinubu, Nigerians were “back to presidential night-time recourse to UK hospices and presidency’s spins to shroud the truth.”
In those pieces, I took my headlining from Matthew Algeo’s book with the title, The President Is A Sick Man. Algeo, Philadelphia-born, award-winning American journalist, did a chronology of the medical travails of Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States of America, presiding over America from 1885 to 1889 and 1893 to 1897. The book shows how inexorably linked the health of a president and the health of the nation are.
Festus Adedayo is a Public Policy Analyst.
