Tinubu’s state visit to the UK, by Rotimi Fasan

2026-03-17 - 23:44

Yesterday President Bola Tinubu began a two-day state visit to the United Kingdom. He was received with his wife, Oluremi, by King Charles III at the Windsor Castle. It’s been nearly four decades, precisely 37 years, since the last Nigerian leader made a state visit to our colonial lords. That was Ibrahim Babangida, a military dictator from the Armoured Personnel Corps of the Nigerian Army. He was accompanied on that visit in May 1989 by his glamorous wife, Mariam, Nigeria’s equivalent of Argentina’s Eva Peron or the Philippines’s Imelda Marcos. They were received by Queen Elizabeth II, the mother of the present King, in a lavish ceremony that was the hallmark of the entire visit. It was a different era when it was normal for bandit rulers from Africa and other parts of the world to be received even in full military gear with the honours befitting a king in Western capitals. General Yakubu Gowon and his wife Victoria had been accorded similar courtesy to Britain in June 1973. In just over a year later, he was back in Britain as a fugitive. About the time the United Kingdom opened its doors to the Babangidas, dictators from other parts of Africa were also making similar visits to America to the warm admiration of the world. But when King Charles received President Bola Tinubu yesterday, it was as the first Nigerian president since the country’s return to elective governance. No matter how imperfect is our practice of democracy, we are certainly not where we were 37 years ago. Yet, some people in a display of self-hate mixed with outrage have nothing good to say about the country. They tell us Nigeria is finished. It is they, perhaps, that are finished. Nigeria may be plagued with ailments we should ordinarily have no business with. We are held back and down by problems no country as endowed as ours should be grappling with. But those problems did not start in the last three years since the present administration came into office. Nor did we arrive yesterday in the sorry situation in which our people are scattered around the world in the manner of refugees from a war-torn country. We got here after decades of irresponsible governance. The panaceas to our problems will not be found in the placeboes that were vended to us as solutions by criminal politicians in khaki and agbada. These are the moments of hard decisions and they will not be made by politicians recommended only by their populist antics. Some of these hard decisions have already been made by the present government. They are not necessarily the best for our well-being but they are by the consensus of those who know the best in the circumstances we have found ourselves. That opponents of the present government refuse to see this does not mean the rest of the world is blind to the truth. And let’s not deceive ourselves, those applauding our leaders or inviting them for state visits are not doing so for nothing. They also are out to protect their own interests. Just as we should be looking out for ours. It would, however, be disingenuous and untrue to claim that such invitations as are extended to the president for a state visit are merely ceremonial, totally without merit or just an attempt to massage the ego of another Nigerian ruler. I do not share such pessimism. It is reasonable to assume against the background of the government’s reform agenda that there is something the rest of the world can see the government is or may be doing right. This has attracted the attention of the leading countries of Europe, from France to Germany and Turkey to the UK, where the President has been on a state visit. What we should be asking our leaders is what is in these visits for us, not demanding as with this latest case, that a visit that was probably planned over the course of many months, if not years, be called off because there has been yet another bomb attack that was probably timed to wrongfoot this visit in an insurgency-prone part of the country. It is also about time people started taking responsibility for the choice they make. While our heartfelt condolences go to the victims, what we must not do is hold one man or his government responsible for every little infraction in every part of the country just because we must play politics. Or demonise him for the crime of terrorism that many influential politicians and clerics from the North are not inclined to see end. They demand amnesty for the insurgents instead of justice for the victims and threaten retribution for, and stymie, every ameliorative step taken to address insecurity in their region. Why hold the president or the rest of the country responsible for that? Aside insecurity, Nigeria’s problems at the present time are largely economic. They require the buy-in of the rest of the world. Reforms of the last three years, signposted by the removal of oil subsidy and the unification of the foreign exchange market, are beginning to yield good results at the macro level. If we stay the course, they might still yield good result at the micro-level. Yes, no responsible government totally exposes its people to the vagaries of economic forces. But the skewed implementation of our subsidy regimes that benefitted only a section of wealthy middlemen has been to the disadvantage of the vast majority of Nigerians who need all the subsidies they can get. Giving it all up in order to stop the persistent corruption of the entire process amounts, no doubt, to capitulation but it is the path we must travel where the country’s elite have chosen to continually betray the people. If we must apportion blame for the problem of our country, it has to be directed at the political class as a collective. It is not something you heap on an individual in order to beatify his opponents who when judged in terms of their ability to address the challenges by which we are faced come short of expectations. None of them, at least as presently constituted, has any idea of better options, both economic and political, that are open to Nigerians than the ones being implemented by the Tinubu administration. Talk is always cheap as is criticism. But when one of the most vociferous of these critics, a businessman-trader obviously making huge profits at the macro-level from the reform policies of Abuja- when he was pointedly asked to mention what he would have done differently, all he could say was that he was a trader (as if that was an alibi). The rest of his words were swallowed in the maze of his verbiage.