Where is our President today? In China, Paris or Swaziland? I ask because you never know with a wandering man. Men really ought to wander. They ought not to sit in sedentary solitude and bemoan their fate. A man, a real man, should be up and about, daring circumstances and conquering heights. Even the Bible, the Holy Writ, warned about the danger of a little slumber, a little sleep and a little folding of hands. Such indolent indulgence, the Bible warns, is a ready recipe for poverty.

So, to wander may not actually be a bad habit or hurtful hobby, but when the wandering becomes too frequent, albeit needless, even avoidable, there is cause for concern. It gets more worrisome if the wanderer is a President, even much more worrisome if such President is presiding over a country perilously steeped in the straits of despair, social discontent, blood-chilling insecurity, economic stasis and political paralysis. When a President is faced with such floodgate of crises, the natural reaction would be to stay back and fix it and not to take flight to fantasyland. Such a President should delegate some of the offshore engagements especially one that has a good 36 ministers and sundry aides at his disposal.

This is why I wonder as President Muhammadu Buhari wanders from Africa to Asia, Europe to America. In six months, Mr. Buhari has made about 14 sorties out of Nigeria, away from his subjects, far removed from the plaintive cries of grinding and groaning women, detached from the bloodbath in the North East where the demented Boko Haram sect is on a vengefully murderous voyage, killing, maiming, raping and making a mockery of what we mouth as ‘our territorial integrity’.

Buhari’s resort to nomadic escapism indexes his lack of preparedness for the office he occupies. Or even much more damaging to his reputation, it portrays him as a leader who does not care a hoot about his people; their cries, pains and agony. There is trouble in the family and all a father could do is to pack his baggage and saunter away to sojourn in another man’s family where peace reigns. That is bad parenting and a horrendously unhealthy option. When terror struck in Paris, President Francois Hollande did not jet off to US or UK, he rolled up his sleeves, stayed back and hit hard at terror; Barack Obama did not have to gallivant from Washington to Warsaw each time America convulses. Leaders lead by showing the way, by example and by being available when it matters most. The President has made himself unavailable, uncaring.

Granted, Buhari inherited a politically fractured nation; a country that dithered between despair and despondency. But if he cannot heal her, he should not make her case worse. The President seems to have chosen to finally bury a patient he was ‘hired’ to save her life. It makes me wonder why he cannot stay back to witness, first-hand, the growing fuel queues at filling stations that now exist only in name, not in functionality. The fuel scarcity scourge is biting harder and urgent solution, not platitudes and explanations, is required. It is a huge embarrassment and a slap in the face of the Buhari administration that in urban Lagos, fuel is sold in black market at N250 per litre; that filling stations that managed to have fuel sell at N130 per litre. The embarrassment has turned Dr. Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu, an otherwise ebullient speaker and cerebral mind into a sudden stammerer. The Minister of State for Petroleum, obviously for want of any cogent alibi, has in recent weeks been repeating the same lines…”we have enough fuel, Nigerians should not panic-buy…” Poor soul; he needs to come to Lagos and see for himself that the fuel tanks have dried up, he needs to make a quick dash to his home state, Delta, to see deserted, even abandoned, filling stations. He would see fuel being sold by the roadside in battered and tired jerry cans in an OPEC-member Nigeria.

Perhaps, Buhari does not know this. The nomadic President is not likely to see the tears streaming down the cheeks of commuters who have to wait in vain for commercial buses and taxis because the transporters and their vehicles are locked down at filling stations. He would not notice that many car-owners have abandoned their vehicles at home or office because they cannot afford the exorbitant black market price of fuel.

I wager that our absentee President may not have realized that the marginal improvement in electricity supply witnessed in some states in recent months has regressed considerably and that the nation has retreated ingloriously into the blackness of darkness. How would he even know that crime and criminality now stalk the nation in the most primitive manner. Under Buhari, criminals seem to have gained both confidence and traction in their evil enterprise.

In spite of his promise and avowal to end Boko Haram insurgency this month, the scourge has surged. Boko Haram has killed more people in the last six months than they did in previous years. Will it matter if I tell Mr. Buhari that there is a silent gale of retrenchment of workers in the banks and other private enterprises because of the gloomy economic climate that has swaddled the nation.

True, Buhari did not create any of these problems. He inherited them but he suffers crisis of expectation because he promised ‘change’. He has yet to beget change in a progressive sense. The change Nigerians see is a sure-footed retrogression into the abyss. I am sure this is not the type of change he promised. Unfortunately, the President is seldom at home; he is too busy holding court with leaders in far-flung nations. A father who is never at home would not know how his children fare; he is not likely to know who is hurting, who is nursing a wound or whose head aches. An average of over two offshore trips in one month is not good for the President of a despairing nation. He should travel less and delegate some official trips to his ministers and aides. Then and only then would he hear the muffled voices of beleaguered Nigerians crying: ‘Give Us Our Change’. Going abroad to look for investors when your country is immersed in crises is wrong-headed economics. Keep your house in order and investors will come.

Author: KEN UGBECHIE…first published in the Sun newspapers of Sunday, December 6, 2015