Can Buhari be more selective of his international trips?

Terrorists have killed no less than 10, 000 Nigerians, while two million others have been displaced since the beginning of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009. The preceding statistics were provided by President Muhammadu Buhari in the course of his speech during the Queen’s Banquet at the Commonwealth Head of Governments Meeting in Malta last week. That speech by President Buhari was perhaps the most important news report on him at the CHOGM. While thanking the international community for their support in Nigeria’s fight against the insurgents, Buhari used the occasion of his speech to call for more international support.

Buhari’s account of the Boko Haram insurgency was not different from the kind of narrative that the international community has become familiar with from visiting Nigerian leaders in the last 16 years of our return to democratic governance. By implication, Nigeria’s only contribution to discussions at these international forums in which our relevance appears ever more questionable has been the display of our huge begging bowls that carries a check list of demands from the international community. Rather than the problem solvers we were hitherto known to be, Nigerian leaders now go abroad to seek foreign solutions to our home grown problems mostly spawned by corruption and irresponsible leadership.

Last week’s visit to Malta was one of many the president has made since assuming office six months ago. Most of these trips are concerned with finding solution to our insurgency problem. While the Presidency must surely know the number of times the President has made these international trips, I don’t know if Nigerians keep track of them. But what is clear to me is that the trips are becoming more regular. This is one of those many times when one remembers Gani Fawehinmi. As part of his larger objective of keeping our leaders on their toes and making them accountable to the people, he made it his business to document such trips. Meticulously he weighed these presidential trips against whatever benefits Nigerians were projected or could be expected to have gained from them.

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By Fawehinmi’s reckoning our leaders gain too little from these trips. He would rather have them stay back home more to serve the Nigerian people. Gani documented the many trips of President Obasanjo and was very critical of him for being too footloose. Gani had a soft spot for Buhari going back to the latter’s days as a military leader that took the fight against corruption rather seriously. Gani, Nigerians might remember, was the only notable Nigerian lawyer that flouted the Nigerian Bar Association’s order barring lawyers from appearing before so-called anti-corruption tribunals that the military established to try corruption cases against politicians in the mid-1980s. Fawehinmi was never a man to fight shy of taking on erstwhile read more from; http://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/12/can-buhari-be-more-selective-of-his-international-trips/