Buhari’s Foreign Travels

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

 In arriving at the fact that the nation throbs with a plethora of questions over the necessity of the foreign trips of President Muhammadu Buhari, the presidency succeeds in feeling the pulse of the citizens. But it clearly underestimates the difficulty of stemming the impatience of the citizens by offering justification for the president’s travels. The citizens may not have wholly aligned themselves with the Emersonian disparagement of travelling as a fool’s paradise since those who made England, Italy or Greece venerable were not peripatetic. But the urgency of the need to solve the country’s myriad of problems at home and the unsavoury memories of the globe-trotting of past political leaders  have crashed what was left of the brittle confidence in our leaders’ fascination with overseas’ trips.

*President Buhari 

Our leaders have left the stark records of not sparing a thought for the suffering poor citizens. Instead of staying at home to consider strategies for taking the blight of poverty off the people, they are rather attracted to a life abroad at the expense of their states or the country. This is why they travel abroad to attend birthdays of their cronies and paramours. Some even travel abroad to organise weddings for their children or they are guests at the weddings of their friends which they have sponsored. In some worse cases, such travels have been used as opportunities to negotiate how to stash slush funds in foreign accounts. But our political leaders justify such travels as opportunities to bring foreign investments to the country.

Still, travelling abroad is a means of escaping from the problems at home.  Our political leaders have no problem with leaving the citizens to writhe and wither away under the weight of the crises sired by the former’s misbegotten governance. And when they are overseas, they do not bother to copy the good things they see there. They do not pay attention to how through transformational leadership, what would have been a barren country is turned into an investors’ delight. Nor do they observe how on account of the fact that leaders live by example, the citizens are ready to obey the laws of the country that would redound to the peace and good of all. What our leaders are only interested in as they travel abroad are the homes that are the exemplifications of modern architectural  ingenuity. They would come home and then loot the treasury in a bid to replicate these architectural masterpieces for their private use.

For a Nigerian leader who travels to the Vatican and takes a photograph with the pope, his or her day is made. Then such a leader would now strive to push the photograph to the front pages of major newspapers in the country. A political leader does this perhaps because he or she would like the citizens to know the opportunity he or she  has just got to put the name of their backwater carrying the beautiful title of a state or country on the map of the world. It could also be to gleefully announce to the hell-bound citizens that their leader is on the way to heaven.  For some politicians, putting the pictures on the front pages of newspapers is not enough. Billboards must be erected in every strategic corner of the state to announce this treasure trove. This was exactly what Governor Rochas Okorocha did in Imo State after taking a photograph with President Barack Obama during a visit to the United States.