Hundreds of angry Nigerians marched down this capital's broad avenues on Tuesday to protest the long absence of their president, who has been away for nearly two months getting medical treatment in Saudi Arabia. Until a few halting sentences were uttered to the BBC from his hospital on Tuesday, President Umaru Yar'Adua had been silent and his government uncommunicative about his condition since he left Nigeria on Nov. 23, though he is known to have acute pericarditis, or inflammation of the membrane around the heart. Politicians in this ethnically fragile country have met to discuss the constitutional void, there have been repeated calls for a handover of power to the vice president, federal lawsuits have been filed over Yar'Adua's absence, the news media have engaged in a frenzy of speculation about his health and Nigerians have been left perplexed about their apparently rudderless nation. The president was not even around to sign a supplementary budget bill. The press, in particular, has bemoaned the absence of an effective national spokesman as the country smarts from its inclusion by the United States on a terrorism watch list after the failed Christmas airliner bombing attempt, in which a Nigerian passenger has been charged. Finally on Tuesday, a fragile-sounding Yar'Adua, 58, told a BBC reporter that 'I am undergoing treatment and I'm getting better from the treatment I'm getting, and I hope that very soon there will be tremendous progress which will allow me to get back home.' He said he would return to Nigeria 'as soon as my doctors discharge me.' His few words failed to satisfy about 1,000 protesters who rallied Tuesday under a hot sun. Led by the Nobel laureate and writer Wole Soyinka, they held signs reading, 'Umaru Where Are You?' and 'President Yar'Adua Speak to Us,' and marched to the National Assembly building. Soyinka addressed the crowd at the beginning and the end, criticizing all segments of the political class. The writer denounced 'the insolence with which the legislators have treated this nation,' and he said of Yar'Adua, 'We challenge him on the continuing corrupt company that we see plotting around and controlling affairs from Aso Rock,' the presidential villa. The Nigerian president's long absence and his failure to transfer power during this period to Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, who comes from a different region, have led to 'the complete distortion of the constitution,' Soyinka said in a brief interview. Some protesters alleged that the northerners surrounding Yar'Adua were reluctant to relinquish power and its perquisites to those from the ethnically separate south. The march hardly filled this city's streets, and many of those interviewed appeared to be solidly middle-class or above, suggesting that Yar'Adua's presence, or absence, meant little to the impoverished citizens who constitute the overwhelming majority in this nation. 'Our country is drifting,' said an investment banker in the crowd, Bashir Abdulrahman. 'The people in power don't respect the constitution. We have no direction.' 