Unease over Buhari’s foreign travels

By Dr Moses George

Despite the massive criticisms of President Muhammadu Buhari’s incessant foreign trips, the president and his handlers seem unperturbed by such outcries. In the first three years of his administration, the president spent over one-third of that period outside Nigeria; though a large part of the period was for medical treatment of an undisclosed ailment in the United Kingdom.

The President has embarked on twenty international trips between the last quarter of 2021 and the first half of 2022, spending cumulatively over 40 days outside Nigeria. During this period, he has travelled to: Addis Ababa, Belgium, Gambia, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, France, Kenya, Portugal, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and United Kingdom (UK).

These frequent foreign trips are a sharp contrast to the president’s announcement some few years ago that he would embark on several cost – cutting measures as a way of reducing the cost of governance and shoring up the country’s dwindling revenue.

According to Nigeria’s 2022 budget, President Buhari will spend N1.5 billion on foreign travels during the year; that is N200 million less than the N1.7 billion that was budgeted for the same purpose in 2021. Presently, the President has already attained the number of total foreign trips made in the whole of 2021 and it is expected that he will embark on more foreign travels before the year runs out.

So far, Buhari and his deputy have spent over N10 billion on foreign trips in the last seven years. These humongous expenses have drawn massive criticism across Nigeria. Recently, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) accused President Buhari of “squandering taxpayers’ resources on meaningless, insatiable international trips”.

The question on the lips of many Nigerians is: why does the President choose to continue his frequent and expensive foreign travels when he could simply send a few representatives to some of those events, thus cutting costs and giving him more time to attend to essential national issues at home.

There is no doubt that the job of a president includes foreign trips. However, considering the prevailing economic and security challenges in the country, it seems more logical that the president should stay back in Nigeria to fix these problems since his foreign trips have apparently not achieved much in this regard.

It is ironic that President Buhari would accept to travel to Liberia to deliver a lecture on security to commemorate that country’s 175 years of self-rule when Nigeria’s security challenges have reached an all-time high. President Buhari’s visit to Liberia becomes his 13th foreign trip in the past six months

It is laughable that some of his handlers try to justify Buhari’s foreign trips as attempts to woo investors to Nigeria. It is a deception to expect foreign investors to come into a country that is ravaged by insurgency, state brigandage and broken-down infrastructure. If there is a conducive investment environment, President Buhari does not need to travel outside the country as frequently as he does to plead for foreign investors to come to Nigeria.

Rather, it would be more profitable that the president should concentrate more on solving the various domestic challenges threatening the very existence of the country instead of junketing many countries of the world to attend functions that do not seem to have any direct positive impact on Nigerians.