Amuta
The Nigerian political opposition is scoring desired attention from the Tinubu’s disappearing antics. In apparent response to the growing outcry of opposition voices and the enlightened citizenry about the President’s prolonged absence in a bad time, the Presidency has just issued a second statement explaining and justifying Tinubu’s mysterious vacation in Europe. The new statement is not different from the original one except that it aims at indicating that the President is at work even if away from his physical office in Abuja. It is becoming futile and even foolish creating an illusion of presidential overwork to cover up whatever else is keeping Tinubu away from Abuja. The man has been absent from his official place of work for longer than makes sense. Period.
Ordinarily, the political opposition has every business commandeering the matter of Mr. Tinubu’s whereabouts. Every misstep of the president is a quarry for the opposition. His inexplicable long absence is of course part of the opposition’s arsenal in the build up to the frenzy of the 2027 campaigns. A president missing in action in a period of general worsening insecurity and anarchic breakdown of order is everybody’s business. Predictably, the opposition has conveniently added the president’s prolonged absence to their growing inventory of anti Tinubu atrocities.
Both Atiku Abubakar of the PDP and Peter Obi of the LP , leading opposition figures, have screamed out loud that Tinubu has no business being away from the country at a time when the nation is in dire straights. There is trouble everywhere. People are being killed on an industrial scale almost daily in Plateau, Benue, Ebonyi and other vulnerable states. Boko Haram has reportedly returned to full business in Borno and its environs, gobbling up local governments and villages and killing as many soldiers as they can find. The political atmosphere in Rivers state remains uncertain and confusing as the Sole Administrator of the emergency rule there seems somewhat confused about his precise mandate or the exact meaning of emergency rule in a functioning democracy. Whether or not Tinubu willed it, his latest mysterious vacation has given his growing opposition an early consensus.
Very few Nigerians care about where Mr. Tinubu will spend tonight. Fewer still ever seem to notice when the president is present or absent in Aso Villa. The street side logic is that our life circumstances remain the same whether or not the president is at home or abroad, at work or asleep. It is sad that a president that has been in office for just under two years has worked his way to a level of consequential irrelevance and ineffectuality where his presence or absence makes no difference to the people whose mandate he parades. In contrast, his predecessor only managed to get to this point at the middle of his second unimpressive term. At that point, it no longer mattered to mot Nigerians whether Mr. Buhari was coming or going!
From the onset, Tinubu has been mostly abroad anyway. In preparation for his busy air miles presidency, the president hurriedly equipped himself with a super luxury “new” presidential jet bought under a very opaque procurement process or lack of it. Some argue that it is part of his job specification that he jets around the world doing the business of Nigeria. Lobbying for investment. Expanding the reach of Africa’s largest democracy and attending the many meetings that make statesmen something of travelling salesmen. No one has yet explained why and how a nation with dwindling fortunes and strategic importance should be present at every small gathering of world leaders even if Nigeria has tangential interest.
Nonetheless, the more significant side of the argument on Tinubu’s junkets is that an elected president has an implicit obligation to stay home most of the time to man the ever –turbulent boat of the Nigerian state. Purveyors of this argument go further to insist that the greater part of the president’s attention is required at home. The reasons are many: our nationalism has far too many unresolved grey areas. The business of nation building is far too incomplete for those elected to man the ship of state to stay too far from home for too long.
These clashing perspectives do not quite impress Mr. Bola Tinubu and his handlers. The man loves to work from anywhere else but home or his luxurious Abuja office. He loves to be air borne like his predecessor who would jet out to the nearest European capital to check an ear ache or bad tooth in a small clinic.
For Tinubu, his handlers insist that his far too frequent foreign missions and sojourns have little to do with any specific ailments or health concerns. He just feels uncomfortable with too many distracting visitors from local politicians and associates. For him, the business of overseeing Nigeria is too serious to allow for too long a stream of time wasters. So, he escapes from the rowdy crowd every now and again.
His current absence in Paris is one such example. He was probably seated in the aircraft when his handlers informed Nigerians that the president would be away in France for the next two weeks on a “working visit”, not vacation. During the absence, he would receive and review reports from government departments on the mid term report of his administration. He would be free to summon officials, interview them on the activities of their ministries and departments. For a whole fortnight, the president would work a crowded schedule remotely from Paris!
Where officials need to show up in person, they have to fly to Paris if they cannot fully explain their points on the phone or by email. The president requires a minimum number of aides and assistants to do the heavy paper work required by his mid term assessment. These officials and assistants will incur costs in hotel bills, estacode allowances and other costs. A two week working vacation in Europe will take a significant toll on the national treasury in an economy that is struggling with liquidity issues. It is even a very scandalous public relations gambit to inform Nigerians that their president is gone abroad for a whole two weeks to do the work for which the state lavishly provides for him to perform in Abuja. I hardly can think of any other country where the leadership will embark on such an expensive excursion in the name of a “working visit.”
Of course Tinubu’s handlers have readily drawn our attention to the fact that the president is still working for Nigeria from Europe. In the modern era of real time information technology and speed of light communication, executives can discharge their functions from anywhere without any significant loss of efficiency and effectiveness. That is hardly at issue.
A president is the political leader of a nation. He is elected to lead people through the vicissitudes of daily life. That is why most leaders only leave home in extreme necessity. And when they do leave to undertake important foreign trips, they adhere to a tight schedule that brings them home as quickly as possible. Political leadership is a homebound undertaking. The leader is not self -employed. He is an employee of the people as an electorate and public in a republican democracy. Every excuse to move from one point to the other must be credibly explained to the people. Such explanations must make sense from a cost benefit perspective and even at the level of common sense.
Casually telling 300 million Nigerians that their president is relocating from Abuja to Paris on “a working visit” is an insult of the intelligence of the people as well as a reckless waste of public funds. The various statements that have emanated from the Presidency on this matter cast a pall on the basic intelligence of the issuing presidential minions that issued them as well as casting the institution itself in very poor light.
Yes indeed, the presidency can be a crowded enterprise. That is why a good number of countries have established presidential retreats outside the official residence of the President. In the United States, the Camp David retreat was designed and established to provide the president with a comfortable and convenient getaway destination. It has all the conveniences of a presidential palace and also a vacation destination but also serves the president as an alternative work station. He can do his daily schedule from there and even host foreign leaders there while breathing the fresh air of a getaway location.
Nigeria has so many locations that could host a Camp David- type resort for the president. The Obudu Hills, Yankari Falls, Nike Lake, Ziba Beach, Ikogosi Warm Spring. Each of these and many other locations can host a world class presidential getaway resort built at a cost that is only a fraction of the billions being budgeted annually for renovating existing residences for the President, Vice President and other high officials of state. We can can give such locations our peculiar cultural flavor: have resident dance troupes, entertainers etc. We can build helipads, airports and other facilities to ease access to the location.
These speculations presume that the reasons that have been advanced so far by the presidency for Tinubu’s current absence are altruistic and basically honest and true. There is a high possibility that the president could be on an extended medical vacation if beer palor whispers in Abuja are to be believed. In that case, it is still irresponsible of the presidency not to openly inform Nigerians if indeed the president needs overseas medical attention. It is in fact easier to communicate a medical bulletin and save themselves and the public these convoluted and fake adolescent explanations. Nigerians would understand that the president is human and has a right to suffer ailments from time to time for which he might need better medical care than what is available at home.
A man above seventy would be expected to suffer one health issue or the other from time to time. If indeed his personal doctor is in Paris or London, he is well within his rights to undertake such medical trips or even take medical vacations to attend to his health needs while the Vice President acts in his absence. All these Mickey Mouse statements and childish attempts to disguise the truth are devaluing the credibility of the presidency as an institution. The truth is often light in weight. Incoherent lies are heavy baggage on the other hand.
