I always knew that President Bola Tinubu won’t fly straight back to Nigeria after his trip (some say photo op) in France. In fact, it was a huge “miracle” that he managed to stay in Nigeria since his inauguration on 29 May until his first trip trip abroad less than a month later.
Spokesman Dele Alake said: President Bola Tinubu on Friday concluded his official trip to Paris, France, during which he had an outstanding participation in the summit for ‘A New Global Financing Pact’ hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Aside his participation at the event where he represented Nigeria well, President Tinubu also held high-profile sideline meetings with fellow heads of state and government, global business leaders and chief executives of leading multilateral and development finance institutions from around the world.
The summit afforded the President the opportunity of projecting, on a global stage, his advocacy for widening the fiscal space, economic justice for Africa as the world accelerates the pace of energy transition, and the urgency of addressing the pressing issues of poverty and climate change.
President Tinubu, who was initially scheduled to be back in Abuja on Saturday, will now proceed to London, United Kingdom, for a short private visit. The President will be back in the country in time for the upcoming Eid-el-Kabir festival.
Little evidence was presented of Tinubu’s “outstanding participation”, how he “represented Nigeria well”, or any product from his presence at the event – apart from the pictures.
The PR said he was going to return to Nigeria and now he has taken a detour to London (as his predecessor Muhammadu Buhari did after foreign trips) for an undisclosed reason.
Many Nigerians should surely be questioning whether Tinubu has come to be a continuation of Buhari in more ways than one. Where he spends an extraordinary amount of time abroad for possibly health reasons and refuses to disclose the reasons to the very people paying for his going AWOL from the problems that he declared he has the capacity to solve.
Eid-el-Kabir celebrations start in Nigeria on Wednesday 28 June, and there are no guarantees Tinubu will leave London by then, given that he was scheduled to leave France after the financing summit and failed to do so. The man who claimed “emi lokan” (“it is my turn”) seems to believe that it’s his turn to be an absentee president like Buhari.
