The Speaker of the Federal House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, stopped breathing at some point in his childhood, forcing neighbours to ask his father to “bury this boy” as he moved from one health crisis to the other.
His father, in distress, asked the sympathetic undertakers: “How can I bury such a promising boy?”
Tired of using local herbs that failed to address his son’s failing health, the father finally decided to take him to a hospital in far-away Vom, in present-day Plateau State, where doctors treated the young boy but suggested that he might die before his 10th birthday.
These rare stories are contained in his biography, ‘A Reed Made Flint’, authored by Ovation International Magazine Publisher, Dele Momodu.
The book, made available to only The Cable, is due for public presentation on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 to mark the 50th birthday of the speaker.
Saratu, Dogara’s mother, actually thought his son would die — despite the extraordinary fact that he spent an extra three months in the womb.
Momodu wrote: “Such was the frailty of the boy’s health that most people would even say it to Saratu’s hearing that she was nurturing a boy doomed to die in infancy. They had their reason. Dogara was very sickly as a child. Despite its immense healthy atmosphere, the weather of Gwarangah and this scion of the Ganawuris were seemingly at eternal loggerheads. The health challenge worsened when Dogara was five years old.
“Sometimes in the morning, he would be very healthy, buoyant and full of life,” Saratu told Momodu. “But by noon, his condition would suddenly make a volte-face and you would never believe it was the child that earlier effervesced with life.”
Wherever she was, even when in the church or outside, people would call her, alerting her, yet again, to her son’s swooning spell.
“During one of those spells, Dogara actually stopped breathing!” the author wrote.
Dogara himself could not pin-point what was really wrong.
“I cannot express it but I wasn’t just a normal child health-wise. I knew something was drastically wrong. I sometimes had some kind of attacks and in most cases I would faint. I can’t say what was wrong most of those days until I was taken to Vom Christian Hospital near Jos. Since I was operated on, many years after that, I was never sick again.”
