A PETITION ON THE MENTAL HEALTH OF AN AFRICAN PRESIDENT
By Femi Olugbile
A curious little item appeared on the social media in the last week. It was difficult to decide whether to treat the development as a tongue in cheek action, or as a serious effort to exercise issues in a court of law, and to discombobulate, if not remove from office, the sitting President of a major African nation.
The news item concerned a group of Kenyans who had filed a case in a Kenyan court, requesting Chief Justice Martha Koome to ‘establish a bench’ to assess President William Ruto’s mental fitness. They invoked Article 144 of the Kenyan Constitution, which, according to them, ‘allows for the removal of a president due to mental or physical incapacity’.
If the ‘prayer’ of the group sounds at least plausible thus far, leaving the reader curious to go on to look at the premises on which such a portentous request is being made, what follows immediately takes the logic down from the mainstream psychiatric descriptions that might have been expected to build a cogent case of mental incapacity, to street-level politicking, and subjective controversy.
According to the petitioners, Kenya has become a Police State, under the President. The Parliament has been effectively disembowelled, leaving its timorous members without the courage to be the ones to initiate this ‘medical recall’ of their President, ‘as required by law’. The central premise of their case is that the President is guilty of ‘excessive lying’.
The petitioners move beyond the issue of ‘lies’ to even more tenuous grounds. The President’s leadership has ‘left the country on autopilot, with rampant corruption, theft of public resources, and poorly thought-out policies…’.
According to them, these signs ‘suggest that the President is no longer aware of the country’s state, leaving Kenya vulnerable to further decline’.
They conclude by calling on the Chief Justice to review the evidence they have advanced, and, ‘if warranted, establish a Medical Board to assess the President’s mental health.’
If indeed such a petition has been filed about the President of Kenya, and that is a big ‘IF’, it is right to say straight-off that its contentions are essentially bogus, and the conclusions derived from them are a non sequitur. For example, even if someone has installed a ‘lie-o-meter’ that can accurately say that President Ruto has lied 5000 times in the two years of his Presidency, he still does not hold a candle to Donald Trump, former and possibly soon-again-to-be President of the United States of America.
The Ruto case, or Ruto no-case, may be used as a trivial, risible point of entry to a very serious matter, which is the mental fitness of people who serve in public office.
The late father of Nigerian Psychiatry, Professor Adeoye Lambo retired home to a quiet house with an adjoining office in Shonibare Estate, Maryland, Lagos, after his tour of duty as Deputy Director General of the World Health Organisation. On some mornings, Baba would sit in his study in his velvet dressing gown with its pocket square and share some of his concerns with you. He was appalled at the general behaviour of Nigerian politicians and had concluded they should be mentally tested before being allowed in office.
You discussed the issue back and forth. You conceded that mental state testing could be included in a ‘Medical Examination’ that could be made mandatory for candidates seeking elective office anywhere in Nigeria. Ongoing mental illness could be flagged during the clinical examination. Drug abuse could be picked up as part of a compulsory laboratory health screening, as the NDLEA demonstrated with Kano LGA political contestants recently.
Uncovering a past history of mental illness and treatment would be more problematic in its implication. Psychiatrists worry about stigma, and advocate that past illness should not be held against anyone for work and other purposes, if they are adjudged mentally fit now for the assignment in hand.
The Shonibare Estate discussions went on till the great man died.
In 2016, many prominent Psychiatrists and Psychologists in the USA agitated to get Donald Trump disqualified from running for the Presidency, claiming he would be a danger to the USA. They averred he manifested evidence of severe personality disorder, which they described by various terms, such as ‘Narcissistic’.
However, there was no provision in the American constitution for such a disqualification, and it failed to fly.
You sometimes reflect nowadays on the discussions with Prof Lambo in his study, and wonder what would have happened if he were still alive.
The existing, evidence-based reality is that most of the bad behaviour people complain about in their leaders are not proof of ‘madness’ but of personality deficiencies, in the Nigerian case amplified by a generalised values deficit in the wider society, and extremely weak institutions.
‘Madness’ has featured only in a few of the more lurid leadership aberrations in human history, such as the case of ‘Emperor’ Jean Bedel-Bokassa of the ‘Central African Empire’, possibly Idi Amin Dada in his latter days, as well as some of the grandiose and erratic dictators of ancient history.
The take-away message is that, by and large, leaders are responsible for their behaviour, and should be held accountable – through strengthened institutions, through generally agreed and strongly enforced value systems, through a vigilant and enlightened electorate, through strong and transparent law enforcement, and through a strong, patriotic and independent judiciary.
Chief Justice Koome of Kenya would probably by now have already leafed through the Ruto petition, convinced herself of its lack of merit, and thrown it in her waste bin.
Good citizens have a right, and a duty, to hold their leaders to account, as the Kenyans have done. In doing this, it would be better to assume that a ‘bad’ or ‘incompetent’ leader is responsible for his actions, rather than seeking to prove he is ‘incapacitated’, in which case he would not be legally or morally accountable for his ‘sins’ or ‘errors’.
