A United Continental Post Editorial
He wasn’t even in the room to ask for it.
On Friday, September 25, senior officials of the Federal Republic of Nigeria gathered at the National Mosque in Abuja for a special prayer session marking the country’s 66th Independence Anniversary. The Deputy Senate President was there. State governors were there. National Assembly members, ministers, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the military service chiefs — all there. The President of Nigeria was not.
In his place stood Tajudeen Abbas, Speaker of the House of Representatives, reading words that were not his own: that the government’s failures of the past three years are “the cumulative mistakes and the missed opportunities” of previous administrations, now being corrected; that Nigeria is “on the right path”; that “Nigerians have finished making sacrifices for this country to be great again”; and finally, the line this newspaper cannot let pass without comment — “We should give this government more opportunity for it to come back and finish the good work.”
Bola Tinubu was not at the National Mosque to say any of that himself. He was in Paris. He had been in Europe since August 30, on what the Presidency called a three-week working vacation that grew, by way of a Monday statement from spokesman Bayo Onanuga, into nearly a month. He landed back in Nigeria today, two days after a stand-in told worshippers, on his behalf, that his country owes him more time.
More time than what, exactly?
This newspaper has resisted, across recent editorials, the temptation to trade in the number 261 as though it settles an argument by itself. It doesn’t. A president who never left Nigeria would not automatically be a better one. But a president asking 230 million people for a renewed mandate on the strength of time — his word, not ours — invites the obvious question: what has he done with the time he already had?
GovSpend’s own expenditure records, examined by Pulse Nigeria this year, put the tally at 52 foreign trips and approximately 261 days spent outside Nigeria between June 2023 and April 2026 — at a travel cost to the Presidency of roughly ₦37.64 billion. France alone has hosted him for more than 50 of those days across twelve separate trips, more than any other country on earth. Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s 2023 candidate and no neutral party in this argument, has gone further, alleging that Tinubu spent 196 of 2025’s 365 days abroad — a claim the Presidency has not offered a competing figure to rebut. In January of this year alone, independent tallies from Daily Trust and THISDAY both put him outside the country for 22 to 23 of that month’s 31 days, split between France, the UAE and Turkey. And now this: a “working vacation” that began in London on August 30 and did not end until this weekend — very nearly a month, spanning the exact days his government chose to ask Nigerians, through a proxy, for four more years.
We are not the first to notice the arithmetic doesn’t flatter him. We are pointing out that his own government chose this week, of all weeks, to make time itself the argument — and left him nowhere near the room when it was made.
What “more time” was needed for, at home, while he was away
While the President was in Paris, holding a private dinner with Emmanuel Macron and a separate meeting with French media magnate Vincent Bolloré, 37 Nigerians detained by the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps as suspected illegal miners in Minna died in custody. Tinubu ordered an independent panel to investigate — from Europe, by statement, the same way he now asks for a second term. The families burying those 37 people did not get a presidential visit. They got a press release with his name on it.
This newspaper has already documented, in earlier editorials, what three years of this administration’s signature economic policy have cost the ordinary Nigerian: a poverty rate the World Bank itself puts at 63 percent — roughly 140 million people — as of last year, rising even as headline inflation eased. An unemployment figure quietly redefined downward by methodology rather than by jobs actually created. A fuel subsidy declared dead in 2023 that resurfaced, relabelled, as a ₦17.5 trillion liability on NNPC’s own books. None of that reversed itself while the President was in London and Paris this September. None of it was likely to be fixed by a mosque address he did not deliver.
“The mistakes of the past” is starting to run out of runway
Here the original complaint against this speech has real force, and we will not soften it for the sake of balance. Three and a half years into a presidency is a strange moment to still be running against the ghosts of one’s predecessors. At some point — and Nigerians are entitled to decide for themselves whether that point has already passed — the debt, the insecurity, the poverty numbers and the currency stop being inherited problems and become this government’s own record, in full, with no asterisk pointing backward. “Cumulative mistakes of the past” is doing an enormous amount of work in that sentence, and the presidency has never quite specified how much of the last 40 months’ hardship it still expects that phrase to explain.
Nor is “insanity” — doing the same thing and expecting a different result — an unfair frame for what’s being asked here, provided it is aimed at the right target. The subsidy removal and the naira float, delivered within Tinubu’s first month in office without a transition plan, are not being repeated. What is being repeated is the appeal: trust us, the pain was necessary, hold on a little longer. Nigerians heard a version of that appeal in 2023, when transport fares doubled overnight, and food prices followed within weeks. They are being asked, three years and one World Bank poverty report later, to hear it again.
In fairness — what the government would say, and what it can’t yet say
The APC’s national chairman, Professor Nentawe Yilwatda, has described the President’s travel schedule as “a sacrifice made in the national interest,” pointing to genuine agreements signed on those trips — a Comprehensive Economic Partnership with the UAE eliminating tariffs on more than 7,000 Nigerian export categories, among others. That is a real defence, not a hollow one, and Nigerians weighing this administration’s record should hear it in full rather than have it summarised away. Diplomacy happens in rooms, and rooms are usually abroad.
But “sacrifice” is a strange word for a government to choose, in a country where it has spent the last three years telling ordinary Nigerians that removing their subsidy and floating their currency was the sacrifice that mattered. A nation that watched its own president’s spokesman confirm, unprompted, that the Presidency has spent tens of billions of naira on foreign travel is not going to find that word comforting on an empty stomach.
What Independence Day should actually ask of him?
Nigeria turns 66 on Thursday. Tradition holds that the President addresses the nation on that day, in his own voice, from Nigerian soil. This newspaper has one request for that broadcast, and it is smaller than anything demanded in our previous editorials — no procurement files, no court records, no forensic audits this time. Just this: show up, in person, and answer the question his own government raised on his behalf while he was somewhere else. Not “give us more time.” Show Nigerians, specifically and without a Speaker standing in for him, what has been done with the time already spent — the 261 days, the ₦37.64 billion, the three and a half years — and let them judge for themselves whether “the good work” is a description of his presidency or a request for one more chance to start it.
He is home now. Let him say it himself.
This is a United Continental Post editorial. It draws on reporting and public statements from Vanguard, TheCable, Pulse Nigeria, GovSpend, Daily Trust, THISDAY, AllAfrica, and the office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tajudeen Abbas, current as of publication. Peter Obi’s figure of 196 days abroad in 2025 is his own public claim and has not been independently confirmed against official travel records.
