Buhari & Co: In Cargo They Return

By Jide Akamha

If there is one thing Nigeria’s ruling elite have proven consistently, it is this: they neither learn from history nor care about its verdict. Professor Chidi Odinkalu’s blunt reminder remains timeless: “Those who die in foreign hospitals only get to return to the country as cargo. They don’t pass through @immigrationng. Rather we clear them through @CustomsNG as import.”

This is not just Nigeria’s reality as it seems to be policy by precedent. As I write, former military head of state, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, lies in the London Clinic, adjudged as the most expensive private health facility in the UK. With the casual arrogance peculiar to Nigeria’s privileged class, he reportedly tells visitors that he’s receiving treatment in the same London Clinic where Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s late president, spent his last days. Buhari, the same man who once boasted he would end medical tourism and overhaul Nigeria’s healthcare system, died not in Abuja but abroad, and as Prof Odinkalu remarked, had to be ferried back home as cargo and cleared by Nigerian Customs!

The poignant irony deepens even further. Buhari’s nephew, Mamman Daura, the acclaimed puppeteer lurking behind Buhari’s disastrous eight-year presidency, is also currently hospitalized in London. Vice President Kashim Shettima recently led a federal government delegation to visit him. It wasn’t to negotiate investments, salvage the economy, but to conduct a bedside courtesy call in a foreign hospital room. Nigeria’s statecraft has been reduced to sick visits and sympathy cards abroad, while the country burns at home.

But perhaps the most humiliating confession came from within Buhari’s own circle. His former spokesman, Femi Adesina, admitted on a Channels Television live programme that “Buhari would have died long ago if he had relied on hospitals in Nigeria for his medication.” It was a stinging confession not merely shameful but damning. After ruling Nigeria first as a military head of state from 1983 to 1985, and again for eight ruinous years from 2015 to 2023, Buhari could not bequeath to himself or the nation one single world-class hospital capable of treating his own failing health. What a legacy!

The rot was so blatant even within Buhari’s household that his own wife, Aisha Buhari, could no longer pretend otherwise. She once screamed publicly that there wasn’t even an ordinary syringe available at the Aso Rock Clinic, a facility meant to serve the First Family and maintained with billions of naira in public funds. Imagine: no syringe in the president’s clinic, yet billions budgeted yearly. If this is the fate of the First Lady, what then is the hope of ordinary Nigerians in General Hospital?

This is Nigeria’s ruling class: loud abroad, empty at home. They shout patriotism at the masses while secretly clutching foreign medical visas like lifelines. They commission hospitals they will never use, ribbon-cut projects that exist only on paper, and then vanish to London for treatment of coughs, headaches, and last-minute resurrections.

Meanwhile, back home, the people perish, not for lack of complex medical technology but for want of basics: gloves, syringes, electricity, water. Pregnant women die on delivery beds because doctors are on strike. Children die of malaria because antimalarial drugs are out of stock. Accident victims bleed to death at hospital gates because “consultant is not on duty.”

When death finally comes, as it will, it finds these rulers not in their “world-class” hospitals at home, but abroad. And so they return, not via Immigration but Customs, not as dignitaries but as freight, labeled in chilling bureaucracy: Human Remains. Handle With Care.

Think of the long, shameful procession: Umaru Musa Yar’Adua vanished abroad for treatment until his corpse returned in diplomatic silence. Buhari took the same route. Abdulsalami Abubakar is reportedly rehearsing his exit. Mamman Daura waits his turn. Others will follow, one cargo manifest after another.

London hospitals have become extensions of Nigeria’s seat of power. ICU wards serve as cabinet annexes. Delegations pay homage between dialysis sessions. The absurdity is now routine.

If they had any wisdom left, if they cared even a fraction for their own dignity, perhaps, they would have built just one hospital at home, if not for us, then at least for themselves. But they won’t. Their arrogance is incurable. Their mediocrity?  Simply terminal! And history will remember them, not for their empty speeches or broken promises, but as freight, handled by Customs, and returned to the soil they despised.

#InCargoWeReturn

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