By UGO ONUOHA
LATE last year, precisely on December 28, a presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, wrote across his social media platforms that Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, had departed to Europe as part of his end-of-year pleasure and winding down activities. The statement was not explicit that he would be on vacation. He hates the word ‘vacation’ because it might require him to transfer power to vice president Kashim Shettima, who is an orphan in the administration. The statement was as vague as they come, including the announcement that Tinubu would travel from ‘Europe’ to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates [UAE] in January to attend the annual Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week [ADSW 2026] Summit.
Onanuga’s statement was careful to emphasise that Tinubu’s planned attendance of ADSW 2026 was to honour an invitation that was apparently graciously extended to him by the president of UAE, His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
The statement announcing Tinubu’s itinerary, which will be a blatant abuse of the use of that word ‘itinerary’, was deliberately vague, dismissive, and designed to demonstrate how much the presidency, the president himself, and his enablers hold Nigerians in utter contempt.
As president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is this country’s number one public figure. The statement said that he was departing for ‘Europe’ on December 28. The last time we checked, Europe was not a country, even if anyone is minded to stretch the concept of the European Union [EU].
To this presidency, Nigerians are veritable ‘mumus’ who do not know the difference between a continent and the countries therein. And even if they know the difference, they have been so pauperised and castrated by the rulers’ policies and programmes to ask questions and to demand answers.
Tinubu’s indifference to, and contempt for, Nigerians has been evident for close to one generation. He was not different while he was the governor of Lagos State. He could pretend for all he cares, but he’s not a democrat. Contrary opinion counts for nothing in his politics. The receipts are in the public domain.
His braggadacio, not withstanding, Tinubu exhibits the traits of an insecure person. Here’s a man who craves adulation and public office but despises accountability to the people. Not many Nigerians imagined that after the years of the locusts that marked the presidency of the former head of state, the late Muhammadu Buhari, that Nigerians would yet be saddled with another man who regards the presidency as a trophy, and not a call to service that imposes a duty of care on the occupant. One of the Obamas [either Barack or Mitchell] once said that the presidency of the United States does not change its occupant. It reveals the person. That profound assertion was prior to the emergence of Donald Trump as America’s president. Trump 2.0 is unravelling.
The presidency of Nigeria revealed the person of Buhari – as incompetent, low on energy, clueless, sectarian, myopic, divisive, and a man with little or no redeeming feature. Buhari came, he saw, and he was overwhelmed and conquered. Some of us were surprised only by the magnitude of his spectacular failure.
Tinubu was an open book ever before he ascended to the presidency. There was not much waiting to be revealed about him. He said that becoming Nigeria’s president was his lifelong ambition. Ahead of the 2023 presidential election, he commanded his henchmen and supporters to “grab, snatch, and run” with ballot boxes and ostensibly the result sheets. His supporters dutifully went beyond the brief. They disrupted balloting in places suspected to be the stronghold of opposition political parties. On election day, they attacked and bloodied voters whom they feared would vote for candidates other than Tinubu. State security agencies played their own part in an alleged industrial scale electoral heist.
Earlier, during the stomping, Tinubu had declared that it was his turn to be coronated as president in his fraud- tainted and entitlement-laddened claim of “emi lo kan”.
Like Buhari, but from a different prism, the Nigerian presidency is also unmasking Tinubu – that he’s at best a pseudo-democrat if not a dictator, he’s unprepared for the job in spite of claims to the contrary, he may not really be in the best of health, he prefers to operate as a sole administrator or an emperor, he’s epicurean, he listens only to himself, he detests accountability, he delights in adulation and praise-singing, faces of citizens contorted by pains do not move him to sympathy and empathy, that he can only work with people from a section of his Yoruba nation, among other parochial considerations.
The other concerning aspects of his current end of year trip to ‘Europe’ has to do the Abu Dhabi leg this January. For the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week Summit, the presidency would rather treat it like the mystery of Tinubu’s travel to ‘Europe’ where nothing definite was disclosed. Not the country or countries he was travelling to; not the specific purposes of the visit beyond the claim of end-of-year activities; not how long he would be in ‘Europe’, or any other things for that matter.
Except for the cruise and the opportunity to ‘flex’ as we are wont to say on Nigerian streets, no serious president of any serious country, especially a country like ours which is in the lower rungs of the global development index should ever elect to waste one whole week in a foreign land for this kind of summit. In any case, we are not persuaded that the president is currently equipped with the necessary alertness, mental capacity, and requisite attention span to absorb the technical details and jargon of such a summit. We have seen the president at events at home and abroad, and his struggles to remain alert and follow conversations have been, to put it mildly, very embarrassing.
Furthermore, it was difficult to imagine that Nigeria’s president departed for ‘Europe’ hours after the US president, Donald Trump, ordered the American military to bomb alleged terrorists enclave in parts of Sokoto state in the north west region of our country. Tinubu behaves in a troubling manner. His behaviour can be likened to the case of “onye ulo ya na-agba oku ona achu oke,” or a home owner who is busy chasing rats while his home was being consumed by an inferno.
In a little over two years of this regime, one issue has dogged its leadership – persistent allegations of forgery. Somehow, a sentence on forgery and sundry shenanigans is deemed incomplete until the name of the president of Africa’s most populous country or the ruling APC is featured in it.
If any name is controversial, some people would be minded to use the name of the president to illustrate the unsavoury subject. If a certificate is suspected to be from the ‘Oluwole’ area of Lagos, instinctively, some Nigerians would allow their minds to wander to the same suspect. Why not, given that Tinubu and his team created their own bishops ahead of the 2023 election. By the way, ‘Oluwole’ is a byword for anything and everything fraudulent in our country.
When unknown persons suspected to be from the bureaucracy, the presidency and the national assembly [NASS] forged the 2024 budget with the insertion of strange items worth billions of Naira, it was difficult to exculpate the lead figure and the usual suspect. The same thing is currently playing out with the alleged forgery of the new and controversial tax laws, which came into effect on January.
The abduction of Maduro
It was bound to happen – the abduction of the president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, by the president of the United States, Donald Trump. It did happen last weekend. The pretext was drug trafficking by Maduro, but the quest was to seize the over 300 billion barrels of crude oil in the belly of Venezuela.
Trump framed the exercise as a ‘capture’, but it was not. It was a case of the abduction or kidnapping of another country’s head of state. Trump violated the US constitution and ignored international laws. He has said that he would run Venezuela for some time. This is curious coming from a man who bankrupted casinos as a private businessman. What Trump has succeeded in doing is turning the world’s order upside down. And made it less safe. The sovereignty of nations is now a myth and the United Nations a caricature. Might is now right. It will be a matter of time before China seized Taiwan, and Putin escalated his hunger
for an imperial Russia to straddle Europe.
