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Nigeria’s Labour Party (LP) former presidential candidate, Peter Obi, has condemned the decision by the country’s President Bola Tinubu to travel the evening of June 28, 2025, to Saint Lucia, and Brazil in what the presidential spokesman described as a combination of official and personal leisure trip.
Obi who contested against Tinubu in the 2023 election lamented that “This is a President going for leisure when he couldn’t visit Minna, Niger state where over two hundred lives were lost and over 700 persons still missing in a flood natural disaster…. I wonder which type of incident will happen before a President is attracted to show physical sympathy to the distressed citizens…. Dear Nigerians, I am struggling with my senses to understand what is happening to governance in this country…. What I have seen and witnessed in the last two years has left me in shock about poor governance delivery and apparent channelling of energy into politics and satisfaction of the elites, while the masses in our midst are languishing in want.”
Obi posted his reaction to his X account on June 28, titled: “No, Mr President, this is not the Time for Holidaying.” He stated that “The other state in crisis where over two hundred lives were murdered, the President yielded to public pressure and visited Makurdi the state capital for what turned out to be a political jamboree than condolence as public holiday was declared and children made to line up to receive the President who couldn’t even reach the village, the scene of the brutal attack.”
Obi pointed out that “In terms of land size, Makurdi is 937.4 Km, which is over 59% bigger than St Lucia, which is 617 km², and Minna is 6789 square kilometres, which is ten times bigger than St Lucia….. I don’t think the situation in this country today calls for leisure for anybody in a position of authority, more so the President, on whose desk the buck stops. This regime has repeatedly shown its insensitivity and lack of passion for the populace, going by the way it prioritises the rich and shows indifference to the poor. This very obvious indifference of the federal government to the suffering of the Nigerian poor should urgently be reversed.”
The presidency issued a release regarding Tinubu’s participation in the 17th Summit of BRICS in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from July 6 – 7, 2025.
Obi argued that “One had expected the President to be asking God for extra hours in a day for the challenges, but what we see is a concentration of efforts in the 2027 election and on satisfying the wealthy while the mass poor continues to multiply in number. The time has come to put a stop to this drift before it consumes all and focus on pulling people out of poverty.”
