By Ighomuaye Lucky. O
The Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in the 2023 election, Peter Obi has chided the way and manner President Bola Tinubu runs the country, saying it can’t be run on mere issuance of press releases.
This comes after records allegedly showed that the president spent 196 out of 365 days abroad in 2025, while the country descended deeper into poverty, hunger, insecurity, and mass unemployment.
To him, Tinubu’s prolonged absence, including a European holiday since December without a New Year’s address, represents a collapse of leadership under his presidency.
He warned that “a nation of over 200 million people cannot be governed by press releases and aides while its president is missing in action.”
Obi, on his verified X handle on Monday, January 12, argued that Nigeria is now home to the largest population of extremely poor people on earth, one of the hungriest nations globally, and a country where over 80 million young people remain unemployed, yet its president has failed to speak directly to the people at a critical moment.
He condemned what he called the “outsourcing of leadership,” noting that Nigerians learned of foreign military strikes on Nigerian soil through U.S. and international media rather than from their own president.
Referencing a controversial digitally generated presidential photo earlier this year, Obi said, “Leadership is not all about dishing out AI-generated images or press statements; it is standing before your people when they are afraid, hungry, and uncertain.”
According to Obi, Tinubu’s repeated foreign trips and prolonged silence have created a dangerous vacuum, weakening national unity at a time when Nigeria urgently needs direction, reassurance, and collective purpose.
He, however, said that in times of crisis, absence is not neutrality but failure, and quickly added that no economic reform, security strategy, or political agenda could survive in a country where citizens feel abandoned by their own government.