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The Akunyili Memo: The Letter that awoke the Nigerian Cabinet and
galvanized the country to action.
On why she had to write the memo, Information and Communications
Minister, Dora Akunyili, the Nigerian Government's image maker said:
“I could no longer live with myself. I was not sleeping well. I was
depressed… I simply knew I could not continue to live a lie (referring
to the cabinet’s official line that all was well and President Yar’ Adua
was still in-charge). On Tuesday night (February 2, 2010), I could not sleep at all and
spent half the night praying. That was when I decided to do the memo.”
In her memorandum titled “State of the Nation,” Minister, Akunyili pointed out some of the consequences of the president’s absence and power vacuum in the country:
- Delays in new appointments in government, including her own
ministry's permanent secretary.
- Inability of the VP to do the routine things the president usually does, such as presentation of documents to the National Assembly.
- Many had been openly challenging the VP’s right to order troops to quell the most recent civil unrest in Jos.
- The renewal of dangerous militancy in the Niger Delta.
- For the first time in Nigeria the out-going Chief Justice of the Federation
had sworn-in his successor.
- The country is failing to meet its international
obligations and the poor image of Nigeria abroad is compounded by
the power vacuum in the country.
- The nation’s economy is taking a serious hit.
The memo put much of the blame for the crisis on President Yar' Adua.
It said the president has made a mistake because he failed in his "moral and constitutional obligation" to hand-over pending his return.
It urge the FEC to right that mistake by acting “now in the best interest of our dear president and our dear nation.”
Akunyili said in the memo that the FEC needed to do the morally and constitutionally right thing
to make it possible for the president to officially hand-over power and enable the vice president become the acting president. It
went on that if Yar’ Adua failed to hand over, the FEC would have to evoke whatever aspect of the Constitution
needed to make the VP Acting President (in other words, the FEC would
have to enable the impeachment of the president if need be). These actions,
Akunyili wrote in the memo, need to be taken so that the Nigerian democracy is not truncated.
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