Posted by BY ONAJOMO ORERE on
RELATIONS of impeached Bayelsa State governor, Chief Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, at the weekend initiated emergency plans should medical warning on the failing heart of the man come to pass....
RELATIONS of impeached Bayelsa State governor, Chief Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, at the weekend initiated emergency plans should medical warning on the failing heart of the man come to pass.
Alamieyeseigha was last Wednesday removed from his hospital detention to an Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) cells in Ikoyi, Lagos.
Security around him has been tightened and all perks of comfort such as television, CD player and books have been denied him again. Even the stream of visitors allowed him while he was at Barnes Hospital, Victoria Island, Lagos, have been reduced to a few relations.
There are indications that government officials doubted the medical reports, particularly those from Barnes Hospital that raised anxiety over the possibility of sudden death of Alamieyeseigha if he was not allowed to go abroad for medical treatment.
Before his return to jail, he was last week taken to the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, for the fifth medical opinion report. The result of the tests was said yesterday to be ready.
But the concern of his relations is that all four hospitals, from the one in Germany where Alamieyeseigha did a tummy tuck last year to that in London and the two in Victoria Island, Lagos that raised anxiety over the health of the man, could not be wrong.
According to a female relation of the impeached governor, the family has been meeting and plans to donate an Automatic External Defibrillator (AED) to the EFCC in case the man went into sudden cardiac arrest.
They have also contacted Tombra Life Support Company Limited, a medical specialty firm owned by a relation of the former governor, to train the EFCC operatives who guard him on Cardio-pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) because, as she put it, the "difference between life and death is early defibrillation and CPR skills."
The Executive Director of Tombra Life Support Company, Charles Okah, neither confirmed nor denied the move when contacted yesterday.
The former governor's physicians raised concerns about his health in April and urged the EFCC to release him for thorough checkup abroad.
The last medical report by Barnes Hospital, dated May 8, spoke of the man dying from "sudden cardiac" arrest if urgent "coronary artery surgery" was not carried out.
Since his ouster last December and arraignment in court for money laundering, Alamieyeseigha has spent more time in hospital than prison custody following complications from his surgery in Germany. About February, rumour of his death caused disquiet in Ijawland.
The two-term governor of Bayelsa, who would be 54 on November 16, was first operated upon in Alfried Krupp Krankenhaus (Hospital) in Germany. He was later treated by a consultant surgeon in London during his incarceration in the United Kingdom (UK) and finally in Kamorass Specialist Hospital and Barnes Hospital, both in Victoria Island.
All the physicians who had seen Alamieyeseigha since September when he was operated upon spoke of the man having "hypertension and diabetes."
When The Guardian met the former governor on his hospital bed at Barnes, he said that his life was in the hands of God, adding that he would not die "if the Almighty does not will it."
But the militant group that made the release of Alamieyeseigha one of the conditions for cessation of hostilities in the Niger Delta, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), said last month that if only Alamieyeseigha was released and other conditions not met, it would only "buy for the government one week respite" from their attacks on the oil industry.
Other conditions given by MEND are the release of fellow Ijawman and leader of the Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force, Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari facing treason charges in Abuja; the payment of $1.5 billion by Shell Petroleum Development Company for ecological restoration of the degraded Ijawland; and resource control.