Tinubu’s Saint Lucia trip and a president’s lack of compunction

• Since the economic angle won’t hold water, the presidency had to cobble together an assortment of historical inconsistencies to give legitimacy to the needless trip

Last week, President Bola Tinubu departed the country for Saint Lucia, a tiny island country in the Caribbean that many Nigerians had not heard of until last week. The trip is the latest in perennial Tinubu’s junket which has now become the hallmark of his administration. Aside from the questionable motive of travelling to a country with a landmass less than that of Alimosho local government and with a population less than that of Makurdi, there is also the question of timing. Nigeria has been battling a widespread and deepening security crisis, which has intensified in recent months, as seen in the deadly carnage that left over 200 people dead in Yelwata village in Benue State earlier in the month.

Expectedly, the presidency has provided justification for the trip and labelled it a cultural immersion and strategic historical exchange. According to the presidency, the visit will rekindle Nigeria’s ancestral and strategic ties with the Caribbean nation and the wider CARICOM bloc. The reasons for the trip are light on economic justification — because what economic benefit can an obscure, largely rural Caribbean country with a GDP that is less than one per cent of that of Lagos State offer a country like Nigeria — but heavy on historical rationalisation that’s draped in half-truth and obfuscation.

Since the economic angle won’t hold water, the presidency had to cobble together an assortment of historical inconsistencies to give legitimacy to the needless trip. The presidency had claimed
that many people in St Lucia are descendants of slaves from Nigeria, this is not entirely true. The majority of the slaves that settled in St Lucia hailed from Senegal, Gambia, Mali and Eastern Nigeria. A handful from Ghana, Cameroon and Congo. Also, the claim that President Clinton visited St Lucia in 2003 was false. Clinton wasn’t the president in 2003, and no sitting American president has ever visited St Lucia.

If St Lucia does not have a predominant population of Nigerian descendants or a large Nigerian diaspora population, what then is the purpose of the president trip to the country when Nigeria is at its lowest economically and security-wise, when Nigerians need the president to stay at home and tackle the myriad of challenges facing the nation. Many have come to see this utter lack of optics, urgency, compassion and pragmatism in governance that has become part and parcel of Tinubu and his government.

He has spent his first two years in office focusing on politics and the satisfaction of the elites, while the masses grapple with unprecedented hardship and suffering. In the past two years, more people have died in Nigeria from all manner of criminal activities and violent attacks than in a country that is officially at war. Nigeria ranks among the most insecure places in the world. Nigerians are hungrier, and most people do not know where their next meal will come from.

Even more worrisome is the fact that the trip to St Lucia is coming less than two weeks after his holiday in Lagos. Lest we forget, the president did not find it worthy to visit Minna, Niger state where over two hundred lives were lost and over 700 persons still missing in a flood natural disaster. You’ve to wonder how many of this type of calamity and disaster do Nigerians have to experience before a President is compelled to show physical sympathy to the distressed citizens.

Tinubu will spend seven days in St Lucia, but he could not spend a night in Benue state, where over two hundred people were brutally murdered. It took immense public pressure for him to visit Makurdi, the state capital, for what turned out to be a political jamboree rather than a condolence visit, as a public holiday was declared and children were made to line up to receive the President, who couldn’t even reach the village, the scene of the brutal attack.

The president makes so much song and dance about taking tough decisions needed to make Nigeria a better and prosperous country, but it appears these much-needed hard decisions do not extend to him as he cannot submit himself to reforms that require him to make sacrifices and treat Nigerians with dignity and respect. The president has abandoned his troubled country for a questionable trip to an inconsequential country. He is gallivanting and frolicking while his house burns.