From Aso Rock Villa to London ICU, Nigerian Presidency: A study in failure

By LaBode Obanor

What’s more dangerous than corruption, a reasonable person might ask. It is a president who flies abroad to die because he never built anything at home.

This is the tale of former President Muhammadu Buhari, who recently died in a London hospital.

This national embarrassment is now etched into history. What many Nigerians feared and criticized throughout his harrowing eight-year presidency: His story is a tragic symbol of a leader who never trusted the country he governed, never trusted the country with his health or with his life, and certainly not with the future of its people. What is the value of eight years in office if it leaves behind no hospital you trust with your own life?

His passing, far from the soil he once swore to lead, exposes the enduring rot at the heart of Nigeria’s political class, a culture of escapism, elitism, and institutional sabotage. Since Nigeria returned to democratic rule in 1999, successive presidents have made international medical travel their hallmark. The image of them flocking to foreign hospitals, particularly in the West, like sickly pilgrims chasing salvation, is not only shameful but a colossal national disgrace and a security hazard of catastrophic proportions. In the case of Buhari, a former head of state, after nearly a decade in power, dies in a foreign hospital, paid for by public funds, it’s not merely an indictment of him. It is an indictment of the hollowed shell of governance he helped normalize.

Please allow me to be frank and deliver the unembellished truth: a president who cannot be treated in his own country has failed at the most basic duty of leadership, which is, at a minimum, to build systems that serve the living. Such a president is not a leader but a liability. No British monarch flies to Lagos for heart surgery or a French president sneak into Kenya for kidney dialysis, or an American president, put under anesthesia in Cairo. But in Nigeria, our so-called leaders book business class beds in European ICUs like it’s their birthright.

A move that is both myopic, suicidal, and frankly, a strategic vulnerability to the country.

Here is why.

What if a sitting president is drugged or injected with a substance that impairs cognition? Or exposed to pathogens or surveillance? Do you think that the CIA or MI6 would pause their intelligence games when a foreign president is wheeled into a medical facility on their soil and under sedation? No serious nation would tolerate this. Yet in Nigeria, these trips are glamorized and treated like prestige events rather than the emergency alarms that they are. The implications are not just embarrassing; they are outright dangerous.

Buhari spent more time on hospital beds in London than in any Nigerian medical facility. Was this due to a lack of funds? No. He had access to the federal purse. Was it due to a lack of time? Not at all. He ruled for eight years, the maximum allowed under law. It was due to a lack of vision, will, and respect for the Nigerian people. And now, in death, he reinforces a grotesque precedent: that the Nigerian presidency is less about nation-building and more about luxurious survival until the final breath, abroad.

Finally, I must reiterate and state that this is not about Buhari alone. It is about the generations of Nigerian leaders, including the current president, who have gutted their own institutions and then fled to foreign ones at the first instance of a cough. They turn their backs on their citizens’ dying hospitals, only to seek comfort in sanitized Western Emergency Care Units, funded by the same masses who cannot afford paracetamol at home.

And the final tragedy is that the former president died in exile from the very nation he once ruled. He entrusted his life to a hospital in London because he could not trust the house he built. And in that act, he wrote the clearest epitaph for his presidency. He ruled Nigeria, but he never belonged to it. Until Nigeria produces leaders who will live and die by the systems they create, this cycle of betrayal will continue. Medical tourism will remain the elite’s escape hatch, while ordinary Nigerians bleed in abandoned wards.

We’ll mourn the man, but we must indict the model. The time has come for a new standard of leadership, the type that builds a country worth living in and worth dying in.

July 14, 2025

The views expressed in this essay are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the League for Social Justice.