The question here is whether a president of a beleaguered nation should be spending ample time away from his country. Should the leader of a forlorn and distressed people lock himself away in a foreign land for an extended period of time?
On Saturday 63 people were killed in Darajamal, a community in Bama Local Government Area of Borno State. The carnage is the latest in what has become a daily reality of Nigerians and a national feature of the country since President Bola Tinubu came to power two years ago. As it is with many of the previous large-scale killings and other disasters, the president is not on the ground to provide the kind of leadership needed in a country grappling with a perennial and deepening security and socio-economic crisis.
Last week, the presidency announced that the president will depart for Europe for his 2025 annual leave. The leave, which will last for ten working days, will be spent in France and the United Kingdom, after which he will return to Nigeria. We can debate the optics of spending his leave outside Nigeria when there are beautiful and breathtaking tourist attraction centres and holiday destinations in the country, but that is not the crux of the matter here.
The concern here is the incessant foreign trips of Mr President. The question on the tongue of many is if it’s right and wise for the president to be junketing around the world while the nation bleeds profusely from the blow of troubling insecurity, should a president be globetrotting while the people groan under the sheer crippling weight of unprecedented economic hardship and cost of living crisis? Even more worrisome is the fact that the details of many of these trips are not usually fully disclosed and are mostly a cover for other unannounced and undisclosed trips that have no positive impact on Nigerians.
In 2025 alone, Tinubu has made fifteen foreign trips across eleven countries and a total of forty-five international trips since becoming president in 2023. His latest trip came barely a week after he returned from a trip to Brazil and Japan. His choice of France for trips whose details are not fully disclosed or hidden in vague phrases like “working visits” has raised eyebrows and got tongues wagging. By the end of his latest trip to a Western European country, Tinubu would have spent a total of seventy days on nine trips to France.
Furthermore, there hasn’t been any significant change in the nation’s fortune commensurate with his globetrotting, prompting many to conclude that the trips are more about his personal agenda rather than national interests. Two key plausible reasons have been cited for his frequent trips to France, one of which is his medical tourism. Some believe his travels to France are for medical reasons as he seeks to get proper and world-class medical care to fix his purported frail health. Tinubu’s alleged medical tourism, if true, would be a continuation of the practice during the Buhari years when his predecessor was in the United Kingdom for months on end receiving medical treatment that gulped millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
Other critics opined that Tinubu’s incessant trips have little or nothing to do with his health but are a link-up with his associate and man Friday, Hilbert Chagoury, in Paris, to hold quarterly business talks with the 79-year-old Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire entrepreneur. Chagoury was born to Lebanese immigrant parents in Lagos and lived in Lagos for years before he retired to the French capital.
In 2024, Tinubu brazenly violated public procurement law and unilaterally awarded the $11 billion contract for the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway to Hitech Construction Limited, owned by Chagoury, without competitive bidding or approval of the National Assembly as required by law.
We can only speculate as to what the reasons for many of his foreign trips are, especially the ones to France which are shrouded in secrecy, but the popular verdict is that they have little or nothing to do with addressing the plethora of challenges we are facing as a nation because if they actually do we won’t be where we are today. By and large, the question here is whether a president of a beleaguered nation should be spending ample time away from his country. Should the leader of a forlorn and distressed people lock himself away in a foreign land for an extended period of time? Since his departure last week, over a hundred people have been killed in a spate of attacks across the country.
Those close to the president must tell him the truth regarding the state of the nation as he doesn’t seem to be abreast of or have the true picture of what is going on around the country. He needs to sit at home and confront the issues he promised to tackle during his campaign frontally.
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