Why President Bola Tinubu’s yea should be yea, by Rotimi Fasan

I think it is legitimate to ask if the controversy that trailed President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s so-called working vacation was inevitable. I personally don’t think so. The problem was as much with the message as it was with the messaging. This takes us back to the observation frequently made by critics of the president’s media team that it has not lived up to its billing. Its handling of the president’s public communication is getting too smug to be satisfactory. It may be inadvertently creating the image of a president that thrives on hubris. How does anyone explain the flippant shifts in the date of his return to the country during his latest vacation? A people should be able to take the words of their leaders at face value. President Bola Tinubu’s yea ought to be yea and no more.

When he left the country on August 30, it was reported by Mr. Bayo Onanuga, I believe, that he would be away in Europe for 21 days. The timeline was specific and left no room for equivocation. The fact that Nigerians were informed he would spend 21 days abroad speaks to the president’s spokesperson’s awareness of the constitutional requirement that the president could be out of the country for a maximum of 21 working days without transmitting a letter to the National Assembly ceding presidential powers to his deputy. This point needs to be acknowledged first, without prejudice to the qualifications being made to this basic position when it became clear that the president would spend more than 21 days abroad.

To rub that point in, Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Jimoh Ibrahim, gleefully announced that the president had promised to attend the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly, or UNGA. This, it would seem, was to douse speculations by opposition party elements and their supporters that the president had been barred from entering the US. To further sweeten the story, Dr. Ibrahim freely told Nigerians that the seating arrangement at UNGA had been made to ensure President Tinubu sat next to his US counterpart, Donald Trump. Of course, Nigerians now know that participants at UNGA sit in alphabetical order.

At any rate, President Bola Tinubu and his media team knew he had 21 days to spend on vacation, whether working or resting all through. As of the time I am writing this in the early hours of Tuesday, September 29, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu had been outside the country for 30 days. The latest update from his media team said he would be back in the country later this week, while other reports stated he would be back early enough to lead the celebrations of the country’s 66th independence anniversary. Before the president’s itinerary was fully disclosed after it was announced that he would be going on vacation, many Nigerians had already concluded that his destination was France. He spent one week in the UK and thereafter left for France, where he was to remain throughout the duration of his vacation. Just when Nigerians started anticipating his return to the country, after weeks of debates and speculations about the actual purpose of his frequent visits to the French capital, his media team announced a shift in his date of return. The 21-day duration was moved forward by a few days on September 23. Nigerians were then told he would be back in the country by the end of that week, which should have been anytime between the 25th and the 26th, or even Sunday, the 27th, although that was the beginning of another week. By Monday, the president was still nowhere to be found in the country, further raising the controversy around his trip, especially his failure or refusal to transmit power to his deputy, Senator Kashim Shettima.

Days before the commencement of the United Nations General Assembly meeting, it had been announced by the president’s spokespersons that he would be represented by Kashim Shettima, the Vice President. That would be the third time the president would not be at UNGA, which again reignited the controversy around his absence and the import of his trip abroad. While his supporters said there was nothing more to his absence than what had been announced, his critics argued that his absence was proof that he had no regard for Nigeria’s national interest. They concluded that he had a criminal charge to answer to in the US, where he would be detained on entry. This was despite evidence that the president had not only attended UNGA in 2023 but had also been to the US on private visits before then. While in Paris, he engaged in a few public events, visiting President Emmanuel Macron and signing an MOU on behalf of the Ogun State government.

But who do you blame for the speculations, if not the president’s media team? What were the constant shifts in dates about? Was it too difficult or impossible to have a clear sense of the president’s itinerary? The manner in which they have gone about this, with the suggestion that the president was acting in clear violation of Section 145 (1) of the 1999 Constitution, did not make for a good look. It created the impression of a president gone rogue. Beyond that, it also raises questions about his health and fitness to be in office. Even if he has been visiting France for health reasons, the manner in which the information is managed should not suggest that the media team is itself in the dark about the situation of the president or his whereabouts. That is adding petrol to a raging fire.

A government that is responsible and responsive ought to show respect to the people by the way it manages information and responds to their concerns. Many Nigerians worried about the president’s location have good reasons to be concerned. We had a President Umar Yar’Adua who was kept in office at a time when he was believed to be too incapacitated to do so. It was the controversy and confusion that trailed the management of information about his health that led to the constitutional amendment that limits a president’s stay out of the country or away from work to 21 days. President Bola Tinubu has so far proven to be a capable leader, taking many of the decisions that are right for Nigeria at this time. It would be good to see where his reforms take the country, but it would be a matter of great regret if it turned out that the demands of the office were challenging to his health. Whatever the case, he and his minders, particularly his media team, should avoid the kind of messaging that has turned his last vacation into a media fiasco and, indeed, a matter of national security.

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