El-Zakzaky, what happened?

Less than four days of arriving in India with his wife for their heavily litigated leave for medical treatment, Sheikh El-Zakzaky and his wife are on their flight back to Nigeria. The treatment hardly took off before it was canceled.

The question on every lip is: what happened? What is the effect of this on the health of the Sheikh which was said to be seriously fragile?

The development is trailed by allegations and counter allegations. The representatives of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) accuse Nigerian Government of frustrating the Sheikh’s treatment in India by making life unbearable through extremely restrictive conditions which the Indian authorities agreed to enforce. In counter, the Nigerian Government accuses the Sheikh of sabotaging his own treatment by making impossible demands such as wanting to be accommodated in five-star hotel with unrestricted access to visitors.

This difficulty is not totally unexpected. This is the first time a Nigerian court would be granting a criminal defendant leave for medical treatment overseas. This underscores the fact that the court did not grant Sheikh El-Zakzaky bail. Instead, it granted him permission to receive treatment overseas. That gave rise to the need for conditions that restricted his movement. If he was granted bail, the conditions would not have been too restrictive and suffocating.

DPA News was reliably informed that the source of tension that scuttled his medical trip to India was the attempt by the Indian authority to enforce the conditions imposed by the Nigerian court, especially as regards restriction of access to visitors. If this were happening in Nigeria, there would have been flexibilities and wider discretion on the part of those charged with enforcing the conditions. But the Indians must have approached the order the way they would in India. But in India, probably, no court would have given such conditions. No wonder the Sheikh was reported as saying that the restrictions on him in India were worse than what would be the case in Kirikiri Prison.

In the end, this was a storm destined to happen. Who knows what happens next? We believe that upon his return to Nigeria, he will plan another medical trip to a different country with a possible variation of the conditions.