On Sunday, October 27, spokesperson to the Nigerian President, Garba Shehu, announced that President Muhammadu Buhari will depart Abuja on Monday for Riyadh, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to attend the third edition of the Future Investment Initiative (FII) organised by Saudi’s Public Investment Fund (PIF). The trip to Saudi Arabia is coming barely 48 hours after the president returned to the country from Russia where he had joined other African leaders for the Russia-Africa Economic Summit in Sochi.
Since coming to power in 2015, Buhari has visited more than 40 countries, even as many continue to speculate on the merits of these countless travels. Today’s visit to Saudi Arabia would be the third to the Middle East country since May this year, when the former army general was inaugurated for a second term after an election whose outcome was disputed to the highest court in the land.
Buhari shocked his guests who had left their personal endeavours to spend time with him at Eagle Square for his second term inauguration when he headed straight to Saudi Arabia- just one week after he had returned to Nigeria from the lesser Hajj in Saudi. Five months after, the president again is on his way to Saudi Arabia. Could there be more to this sudden fascination with the Saudis?
Buhari in the estimation of many is the biggest disappointment since the beginning of the fourth republic in 1999. It is hard to quantify the extent of failure this president represents but it is beyond argument that Muhammadu Buhari has not put up a decent performance in any of the critical sectors of the nation’s public life.
How does anyone rationalise that under the reign of a man who promised to create three million jobs every year in 2015, youth unemployment in the country according to recent figures from the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics- NBS- has risen to 55.4 percent? For a man who promised to make the Naira equal to the US dollar, it is such a shame that the exchange rate of the naira to the dollar rose to N520 as at January 2017.
With unprecedented poverty, unemployment, weak naira rates, there is little dispute that on the economic front, this president has been nothing short of an unmitigated failure. The naira has lost close to 70 percent of its value in the past four years and Buhari’s economic ideas have been uninspiring at best. The Nigerian Stock Exchange recently revealed that foreign investors withdrew almost N2 trillion from the stock market between May 2015 and April 2019. Investors in the real sector are also withdrawing their capital leading to the burgeoning unemployment and poverty levels.
Buhari’s failure is not restricted to the economy alone. Security wise, the nation has never been in more perilous time. In the last one week, an assistant commissioner of police and a federal high court judge were amongst the scores of Nigerians kidnapped across the country. Boko Haram terrorists, armed bandits, highway robbers, daredevil kidnappers, ritual killers, arsonists, rapists and associate group of freelance criminals are beginning to overrun Nigeria- sadly- under the watch of an army general who promised to “lead from the front” in 2015.
The roads across the country are in their worst possible shapes, power infrastructure remains comatose and across the country, life is becoming hellish for millions of people in urban and rural centres. Businesses are packing up as they cannot continue spending 40 percent of their overhead costs on diesel and generator maintenance.
From East to West, North to South, the general consensus is that Buhari has failed to live up to the huge expectations that greeted his emergence as president in 2015. The failure of the man who promised to “show the youths that the country can work” has forced several communities across the country to initiate measures to protect their homes from attack by criminal elements without any recourse whatsoever to the police. Is the nation better secured by neighbourhood watch associations, civilian JTF or vigilante groups? What are the long term security and social implications?
Is it not strange that amidst the chaos that reigns supreme in Nigeria, the Nigerian president fails to see the urgency to sit down and begin to address these concerns? Can anyone point to any tangible benefit that has accrued to the country since the president apparently established a branch of Aso Rock in the skies? With foreign investors voting with their feet, the economy in a tailspin and a hitherto bad security situation becoming worse, what then is the value of Buhari’s many trips to the far corners of the earth?
Do not forget, every time the president’s plane takes to the skies, hundreds of millions of tax payers’ money go up in smokes. The president, his coterie of aides, state governors and hangers-on he travels with remove thousands of dollars from our treasury every time they get into the plane with Buhari.
It is most unfortunate Buhari is running the country with neither conscience nor consideration for its future. What self-respecting president would personally attend every event in foreign lands when he can conveniently send in one of his ministers to represent him? Does the president understand that any of his ministers or aides can represent him at some of these events?
Come to think of it, what really does the president take away from these summits he attends? President Buhari has been to global events on nuclear energy, climate change and human trafficking, are these subject areas the president is remotely at home with? What business does Nigeria have with nuclear energy when it is apparent that it cannot feed itself? Is climate change a primary concern for a country with 13 million out of school children? Does the president not see a connection between human trafficking and rampant poverty in the land? How does his presence in New York or Paris improve Nigeria’s poverty ranking?
It is common wisdom that a man whose house is on fire does not run after rats. For President Buhari however, the best time to chase rats is the minute your house is in smokes. The President is expected to proceed to London on “a private visit” after three days in Riyadh and would return later in November by which time a 50Kg bag of rice would have risen to N40,000 and prices of basic commodities out of the reach of millions of people.
The impact of high inflationary pressures on the living standards of most Nigerians would not be the immediate concern of the president once he returns from London on 17th November; no, he would quietly look into the calendar and tick the next date to take to the skies. Talk of a modern Day Emperor Nero who junkets around the globe even as 100 million of his compatriots go to bed each night on an empty stomach.
[…] –Buhari’s Trips: When A President Governs From The Air […]