Tinubu’s frequent disappearances send a dangerous message: that governance is optional, that leadership can be outsourced, that symbolism can replace sacrifice. But our country is not an abstract idea, it is a people. A hungry, hurting, hemorrhaging people. They do not need fables or fashion or foreign handshakes. They need a president who governs, who listens, who acts and not one who flees. They need a leader in Makurdi, not in Montmartre; in Zamfara, not in the 16th arrondissement.
As our country staggers under the weight of what appears as its own internal collapse, the man “elected” to steer the ship of state through the storms has vanished. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has once again embarked on a self-styled “working visit” to Paris. The phrase, “working visit,” is now a tired euphemism for what many citizens increasingly suspect – a vacation, dressed in presidential regalia, far removed from the cries of a people betrayed and abandoned. To understand Tinubu’s detachment from the realities of governance, we may find an apt metaphor not in modern political science, but in the literary genius of George Orwell’s enduring allegory, Animal Farm. There, in the aftermath of a revolution that promised equality and justice, two peculiar characters emerge to centre both fantasia and the attachment to self-aggrandisement: Mollie and Moses.
Mollie is the pampered, self-absorbed mare more interested in sugar cubes and pretty ribbons than in the shared hardship and ideals of the farm. Moses is the raven who vanishes when labour is required, only to return later, preaching of a fantastical paradise called Sugarcandy Mountain; a place where animals go when they die, as long as they work hard and obey their leaders. In these two characters, Mollie, the vain, and Moses, the escapist storyteller, we see uncanny reflections of Tinubu’s presidency. When Orwell wrote of Mollie, he describes an animal that could not part with the comforts of the old regime. She would sneak sugar, admire her own reflection, and pine for the days when ribbons were tied prettily in her mane. Work on the farm? That was beneath her. Responsibility? Not her portion. Mollie eventually deserted the farm for a life of ease with humans, leaving her comrades behind to sweat and bleed.
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Today, there is something unsettlingly familiar about this in Tinubu.
Tinubu ascended to the presidency on the tide of the dubious promises of renewed hope, economic revitalisation, security, and infrastructural transformation. Yet, scarcely two years into his tenure, our country reels under a tsunami of insecurity and economic hardship. Farmers in Benue and Plateau states, once the food baskets of the nation, are being slaughtered by marauding herdsmen. Welcome to the bloodlet of Bokkos and Okpamaju. Hamlets, villages and towns are either under siege or have been sacked, with people fleeing for their dear lives. Bandits operate with impunity in Zamfara, Kaduna, and Katsina. Inflation, particularly food inflation, has reached staggering heights, pushing more citizens into poverty. Public debt has ballooned, and the naira fluctuates like a dying heartbeat.
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Where is Tinubu in all of this? In Paris. Again.
Each time our country finds itself on the edge, the president either disappears or issues tepid statements through aides who dare not speak in firm tones. He is not among the displaced in Plateau, not in the hospitals of Southern Kaduna, not in the mourning communities of Benue and Enugu states, not in Uromi – sleepless in its vigil against those who threaten it with reprisal attacks. Instead, he’s often seen in high-profile photoshoots, flanked by aides and foreign dignitaries, wearing crisp agbadas and radiant smiles. One almost expects a ribbon in his cap, like Mollie’s bows, as he poses for another round of staged diplomacy, while our country burns behind him.
The Paris trips serve as metaphors for Sugarcandy Mountain. We are told he is courting investors. We are told he is working hard, perhaps harder than we can imagine. But working for whom, and to what end? What economic miracle has followed these frequent sojourns? Which jobs have been created from these mysterious meetings behind French curtains? How many security threats have been neutralised by absent leadership?
Much like Mollie, Tinubu appears more captivated by the trappings of power than by its burdens. He prefers the spectacle of international travel, of economic summits where nothing is resolved, and conferences that yield no tangible benefit to the ordinary citizens. He acts not as a wartime president commanding a battered Republic, but as a monarch who sees suffering as something to be managed from a distance, or perhaps ignored altogether. Then there is Moses, the raven. Orwell’s Moses was the religious, mystic figure who, when things got tough on the farm, flew away. He would return only when the toil was done, telling tales of Sugarcandy Mountain – that fictional paradise where all animals would be rewarded in the next life, if only they toiled in this one. Moses’ stories were mere fantasia, distractions, designed to placate the animals and keep them docile.
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So too has Tinubu perfected the art of appearing after the disaster has passed, spinning narratives not of accountability, but of miraculous recovery. When the economy tanks, he speaks of turning the corner. When food prices rise, he speaks of the good life coming soon. When hunger looms, he speaks through aides who excoriate citizens for demanding to be fed when one dollar can buy them a meal. When insecurity spreads like wildfire, he praises the bravery of the military. Therein lies the cruel irony of a military establishment so storied in valour, brought low by the impotence of circumstance, with its serving and retired officers reduced to pooling resources in a desperate whip-round to secure the release of one of their own, a General held captive by criminals. If gallantry were the sole measure of soldiering, one might have expected President Tinubu’s brave men to storm the dens of kidnappers with unflinching resolve and rescue their comrade-in-arms with the fury and precision befitting their calling. But in this theatre of irony and tragedy, courage bowed before helplessness, and the myth of military might was quietly bartered for a ransom.
The Paris trips serve as metaphors for Sugarcandy Mountain. We are told he is courting investors. We are told he is working hard, perhaps harder than we can imagine. But working for whom, and to what end? What economic miracle has followed these frequent sojourns? Which jobs have been created from these mysterious meetings behind French curtains? How many security threats have been neutralised by absent leadership? The answers are as elusive as Moses’ paradise. Like Orwell’s raven, Tinubu disappears from the theatre of national distress, only to return with promises as tiny as a speck of dust in the wind. And like Moses’ tales, the rhetoric is intended to keep hope renewed and the next level that never truly arrives. What makes Orwell’s Animal Farm so resonant is its portrayal of how citizens are betrayed, how power is misused, and how the very leaders who promise the good life often become worse than those they replaced. The current tragedy is not just that the president is abroad, it is that he is not emotionally, politically, and morally connected to citizens who bear the brunts of his pernicious economic policies. Simply put, he is far removed from the lives of those he governs.
The true character of leadership is not revealed in peacetime but in the storm. Our country is in a storm, battered by poverty, haemorrhaging hope, and torn apart by violence. Yet, the captain of the ship appears to have retreated to a luxury yacht moored in the calm waters of the Seine. Tinubu’s absence is a dereliction. His posturing as a hardworking leader abroad, while the country burns at home, is nothing short of Orwellian hypocrisy. Like Animal Farm, our nation has become a place where slogans substitute for policy, where symbols matter more than substance, and where the elite insulate themselves with imported luxuries, while the masses scavenge for survival. And just like the pigs who began walking on two legs, those who swore allegiance to democracy now walk like the very tyrants they once decried. Leadership, more than visibility, is about accountability.
Tinubu has a choice: to abandon the Mollie-like infatuation with the ribbons of power and the Moses-like escape into fantasy, or to confront the hard truths of a country unraveling. If he continues down this road of neglect and narrative, history will judge him not as a reformer or visionary, but as a man who turned his back when his country needed him most.
It is a presence in pain, not just a celebration in pomp. Tinubu’s frequent disappearances send a dangerous message: that governance is optional, that leadership can be outsourced, that symbolism can replace sacrifice. But our country is not an abstract idea, it is a people. A hungry, hurting, hemorrhaging people. They do not need fables or fashion or foreign handshakes. They need a president who governs, who listens, who acts and not one who flees. They need a leader in Makurdi, not in Montmartre; in Zamfara, not in the 16th arrondissement. They need the President in Kano, not Cannes; in Uromi, not Rouen.
In Animal Farm, the uprising concludes not in the glory of emancipation, but in the bleak disillusionment of betrayal. As the animals peer through the farmhouse window, they are struck by a haunting revelation of the faces of the pigs that have become indistinguishable from those of the very humans they once cast out. The ideals that stirred their rebellion have withered, giving way to a new tyranny cloaked in familiar garments. Our country must not tread this same sorrowful path where the promise of transformation curdles into the mimicry of the old order, while the new order struggles to be born, as Antonio Gramsci famously wrote, and those who once cried for justice become the architects of oppression.
Tinubu has a choice: to abandon the Mollie-like infatuation with the ribbons of power and the Moses-like escape into fantasy, or to confront the hard truths of a country unraveling. If he continues down this road of neglect and narrative, history will judge him not as a reformer or visionary, but as a man who turned his back when his country needed him most. And so, as citizens light candles for the dead in Benue, Kaduna, Plateau, Enugu, Zamfara, and beyond, and as they bury children whose names will never reach the walls of the Élysée Palace, the President must be reminded that no nation has ever survived on fables alone, or on capping as Gen Z puts it nowadays.
Abdul Mahmud is an Abuja-based human rights lawyer.
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