Tinubu, Shettima trips don’t represent common sense — Obi
Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the general elections of 2023, has criticised President Bola Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima for their overseas travels.
He said it was alarming that the excursions were occurring at a time when the nation is facing internal difficulties.
According to The PUNCH, Tinubu left for a two-week working leave in the United Kingdom on October 2, 2024. Later on Friday, October 11, he left the UK for France for "another important engagement," according to a tweet from Ibrahim Masari, his Senior Special Assistant on Political and Other Matters.
Shettima, meantime, departed Abuja on Wednesday for a two-day visit to Sweden in order to represent Nigeria in bilateral talks with the country of Scandinavia.
The Presidency declared on Wednesday that both travels were justified by the absence of Tinubu and his deputy does not pose any vacuum in Nigeria’s leadership. It said the two principal officers are “fully engaged with the nation’s affairs, even while away.”
However, in response to the Presidency's defence on Friday, former Anambra State governor Obi maintained in a post on his X that it was troubling that Tinubu and his deputy were absent from the nation at a critical juncture.
The President and Vice President are both out of the country, as was reported in the media yesterday; while it is debatable that there is no presidential vacancy in this situation given their absence from the Villa, he wrote, "it's concerning for a country with such myriad domestic problems."
It was said by the President that he would only be gone for 14 days. Now that the 14 days have elapsed, we are waiting to see him in the country. One would have expected him to return earlier than expected, considering the volume of work that needs to be done in a troubled nation like ours.
"We require his immediate attention to guide the country out of this current situation because of the unimaginable hardship that some of his administration's policies have unleashed on our people."
He claims that one would wonder why the President did not simply attend the two-day business visit to Sweden given that he is supposedly in Paris, France, which is only 833 nautical miles from Stockholm, Sweden.
Obi said, "He could have easily completed it in a little more than two hours on his way back from France in his new, powerful jet. Time and the extremely limited national resources that we desperately need right now would have been saved by doing this.
As an alternative, he assigned the Vice President, who required to travel 3055 nautical miles, over nine hours, and (about 4 times the travel time from Paris) Abuja, Nigeria, to Stockholm, Sweden, to represent him at the event.
"To go from Abuja to Stockholm, one would have to travel approximately four times as long and far as it would from Paris. This is not the kind of economic responsibility or common sense one would expect from leaders whose people are suffering from extreme poverty and famine.
"Now is the moment to demonstrate to the people that you are a true and dedicated leader by making decisions that put their welfare first and efficiently use the limited resources of the country to lessen their suffering."
Since taking office 17 months ago, these excursions represent the second occasion that both executives have left the nation at the same time.
After travelling to Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands to attend the World Economic Forum, Shettima left Nigeria in late April or early May 2024 when Tinubu was in London. Her first stop was Nairobi for the International Development Association Heads of State Summit.
Following his return, he travelled to Dallas, Texas, to attend the Corporate Council on Africa's US-Africa Business Summit. But the vice president decided to change his plans midway and came back home.
On May 8, Tinubu arrived back in Abuja.