Once again, as though bewitched by the perfume of foreign boulevards, President Bola Tinubu has fled the burning house of Nigeria and absconded from the soil that anointed him, embarking on yet another “working visit” to Paris – a city whose cobblestones have never known the anguish of Nigerian hunger, nor echoed with the cries of abducted schoolchildren. In this spectacle of hubris masquerading as governance, the president and commander-in-chief has chosen to exile himself from the chaos he is charged with taming, to assess his “mid-term performance.” Tinubu retreated not to his people, but to France of all places; France, the erstwhile imperial spider, whose web of fingerprints still glisten across the face of Africa, especially Francophone Africa. What profound irony! That a leader, entrusted with the arduous task of rescuing his people from economic despair, would abandon his post to reflect in the comfort of a European capital. Let us not mince words: the optics and symbolism of this pilgrimage to France is more than pathetic; it is a grotesque dereliction of duty dressed in diplomatic platitudes. This is not governance. This is abdication.
This is the sixth time the president is travelling to France, since he assumed office in May 2023. Barely a month after taking office on June 20, 2023, Tinubu participated in the Paris Summit for the New Global Financial Pact. Three months later, in September 2023, he spent five days in Paris after attending the United Nations General Assembly in New York. On January 24, 2024, Tinubu embarked on a private visit to Paris, returning in early February. It didn’t take up to six months for Mr. President to travel again to Paris on August 19, 2024, for what was described as a brief work stay in France. He was back in Paris three months later, on November 27, 2024, for another three-day state visit. For a president who neither speaks, nor understand French, these visits are indeed strange.
A statement by presidential adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, said during this latest two-week visit, Tinubu “will appraise his administration’s mid-term performance and assess key milestones.” The President will also use the “retreat to review the progress of ongoing reforms and engage in strategic planning ahead of his administration’s second anniversary. This period of reflection will inform plans to deepen ongoing reforms and accelerate national development priorities in the coming year,” adding that: “while away, President Tinubu will remain fully engaged with his team and continue to oversee governance activities.” Mr. President, do you not feel the weight of irony? That a nation trembling on the verge of implosion is left fatherless while you sip espresso coffee on the Champs-Élysées? That while your people barter dignity and are scavenging for survival, you conduct introspection beneath vaulted ceilings, far from the markets of Minna or the slums of Mpape and Warri?
What kind of governance is this, where the president prefers the echo of French applause to the voice of his own people? What kind of leadership is this, that seeks clarity not from the trenches but from the terraces of empire? What strategic planning can be done better in Paris than at Aso Rock? What reforms can be accelerated by drinking Dom Perignon and Chateau Petrus at the Brasserie L’Alsace? Is it only in Parisian salons, under the golden chandeliers of colonial memory, that the president finds inspiration for reform? Shall we measure the success of the Tinubu administration by the number of its meetings held abroad, while potholes fester on our highways and fuel and food queues lengthen like shadows at dusk?
Mr. President, if you must reflect on your performance, let it be in Abuja, not Paris. If you must strategize, do it in Owerri, not Opéra Garnier, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. You don’t need French pastries and Parisian lights to hear the cries of the Nigerian people. You only need to open your window in Abuja. Mr. President, no amount of communiqués nor press statements will sanctify your absence. Nigeria does not require a peripatetic septuagenarian tottering on the borders of senile decay, cloaked in presidential garb; the country needs a steward, anchored, attentive, and unflinching in the face of chaos. Nigeria does not need a globe-trotting philosopher-king. It needs a leader with dirt under his fingernails, sleeves rolled up, and boots on the ground. Not a Parisian planner but a Nigerian fighter.
The people of Nigeria are not blind. They see the fuel queues, the collapsing naira, the hunger that gnaws like a rabid dog in every home. They hear the gunshots in the North West, the kidnappers’ whispers in the South, the cries of unpaid civil servants and students whose futures float in limbo. And what does their president do? He sojourns to France, again and again, like a restless monarch seeking prophecy in foreign stars. Tinubu certainly is a poor student of history; else how can anyone forget so soon the crimson threads that connect France to Nigeria’s own historical trauma?
Why has France; the same France that fed the flames of Biafran secession, stoking the embers of division and bloodshed while posturing as a friend, suddenly become Tinubu’s destination of choice for statecraft and reflection? A nation whose parasitic grip over its former African colonies remains unbroken, whose policies have left vast swathes of West Africa impoverished and unstable, now serves as a haven for our own president to contemplate reforms? Was it not Paris that lent succor to Biafra, not in solidarity, but in strategy? Not for justice, but for oil and influence? The ghosts of that war, unburied, now look on in dismay as the leader of a united Nigeria chooses the land of perfidy as his confessional booth. This is a slap in the face of history, and a betrayal of our collective memory.
Mr. President, the arithmetic of your governance is bewildering. How does one weigh “strategic planning” abroad against the staggering cost of a nation unraveling at home? Can one calibrate reform by frequent flyer miles? The optics alone are calamitous: a country bleeding, and its leader abroad, reflecting. No, sir! The business of national renewal cannot be outsourced to cobblestoned capitals. It demands proximity to pain, to people, to problems. Nigeria is not a colony of your ambition. She is a nation in travail, crying for a present father, not an absentee president. And let us be clear: the presidency is not a throne, nor is it a private jet. It is a calling. A sacred, solemn duty to be present -bodily, mentally, spiritually – with the people you serve.
The optics of this retreat are not just shameful; they are damning. While the poor tighten their belts to the bone, the president flies across the world like an emperor on a sabbatical. The truth is harsh, yet must be spoken: this is not statesmanship, it is escapism gilded in protocol. The time for cowardice masked as consultation is over. Mr. President, if you cannot feel the heat of the fire raging in your own house, then perhaps you do not belong in the kitchen of power. Return home. Face the storm you swore to calm. History will not be kind to a leader who dances abroad while his nation drowns. Return, Mr. President – not in body alone, but in resolve. Let your presidency not be defined by the cities you visit, but by the country you build. History is watching, and history is unsparing. For in the ledger of legacies, there is no footnote for presidents who reigned from afar in absentia.
