Buhari’s London vacation – Tribune

President Muhammadu Buhari is currently in London, Great Britain, on a ten-day vacation.  Against the background of the usual disposition of African rulers not to rest by observing proper vacation, President Buhari should be commended for not seeing himself as indispensable and for choosing to take appropriate rest when needed. This is the second time that President Buhari has taken time off to rest since the inauguration of this government and this is a positive step that other public officers should take a cue from in ensuring that nobody attaches himself/herself so much to official work without observing the need for rest.
Unfortunately, however, while President Buhari could be commended for going on vacation, the same could not be said for his choice of where to spend the vacation. He has chosen to spend  his vacation, on the two occasions, outside of the shores of the country, with the signal perhaps that the only way to observe vacation is to travel out of the country. Yet, this is a president that has been at the vanguard of the need for the country to look inwards in order to have a solid internal basis for its own development.
The president  is  on record  as  complaining  about  the propensity of Nigerians to import everything and anything from abroad, suggesting that this should stop if the country is to make real progress. And here we have the same president jetting out of the country to have his vacation every time. If all Nigerians were to follow the president’s style and seek to have vacation outside of the country, there is no way tourism would be developed internally and the current scarcity of foreign exchange would persist in that context. There is a sense therefore in which the president is sending the wrong signals everytime he journeys out of the country for vacation.
To be sure, this is not a situation in which the position of the president that he would indulge in whatever he could afford would suffice even as he is wont to say that he would not be able to stop any Nigerian from going abroad on legitimate grounds. The point is that the president is not any other Nigerian and he is expected to provide the right example to other Nigerians. When he goes out for his vacation, he is expressly stating that it is not just okay to go for vacation outside of the country, he is sending signals that the only way one could be on vacation is to travel outside of the country. And if the president gives such signals, who is expected to patronise tourist sites in Nigeria for relaxation and vacation?
Evidently, the president is not walking his talk here as he is on record to have indicated interest in Nigerians preserving scarce foreign exchange by patronising goods and services in Nigeria and yet he is the one leading the charge for vacation outside of the country. In his own particular case, he is not even expending his personal resources but official resources, including for all those officials who would have to accompany him on his vacation abroad.
To compound the situation, the president’s spokesman, Femi Adesina, stated that he would be using the opportunity of the vacation abroad to see specialists about a persisting ear infection, just for precautionary purposes. Yet it was the president who also publicly stated that the government would no longer be able to offer foreign exchange at official rate for medical treatment outside of the country to citizens except where there is absence of experts on the particular disease in the country. Since the announcement by the President’s spokesman, many doctors, including their different organisations, have come out to express dismay, wondering why the president would need to consult experts in London for an ear infection when there are many Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) experts in Nigeria.
President Buhari was even categorical about dissuading government officials from seeking medical attention abroad and yet as the foremost government official, he does not see anything wrong in seeking treatment abroad. This would look more like a case of prescribing for others what would not apply to himself. We want to believe that this is not the kind of perception the president wants Nigerians to have of him, nor would he want to give this dissonance between preaching and practice as the essence of the change agenda of his government.  The implication of this is that the president would have to give more thought and consideration to the national and overall implications of his personal actions, as these necessarily impinge on policies and the acceptance or otherwise of such policies by the public.
The personal action and disposition of the president give signals about the real direction of the government and many Nigerians would notice the current dissonance and read inconsistency into the framework of governance under him. This is what he would need to correct by changing the narrative and ensuring that Nigerians see less of this kind of dissonance from him.