An open letter to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, by Stephanie Shaakaa

I am writing to you from Gboko, where government is not experienced through communiqués or presidential briefings. People meet government when they go to the market, when they travel to the farm, when they pay school fees, when transport fares rise and when they have to decide which household expense can wait until next month.

But that is not the whole story of what it means to live here.

I am also writing from a place where fear is not an abstract word. In Benue, news of another attack is no longer something people encounter only in newspaper reports. Communities have been attacked, families have lost relatives and farmers have been forced to think carefully about whether it is safe to return to their fields. On September 10 and 11, an attack on Ayilamo in Logo Local Government Area left four police officers and seven civilians dead. Four days later, two more police officers were killed in an ambush while returning to the same community.

So when I write to you from Gboko, I cannot write only about the price of food, the cost of transport or the hardship created by economic reforms. There is another question that sits underneath all of them: whether people are safe enough to live, work and farm in their own communities.

That is the country I am thinking about as I look at your latest stay in Paris.

There is nothing wrong with a Nigerian president travelling to France. Nigeria needs France, just as France needs Nigeria. We need diplomatic relationships, investment, technology, trade and cooperation with countries whose decisions can affect our interests. A president should be able to sit across the table from another head of state and negotiate for Nigeria.

But there is a question that ought to follow every presidential journey: what comes home with the President?

On September 18, French President Emmanuel Macron received you for a private dinner at the Élysée Palace. The Presidency described the meeting as reflecting the enduring relationship between Nigeria and France and a shared commitment to strengthening bilateral cooperation. You also met Vincent Bolloré in Paris, where his group announced plans to deepen its investment and localisation in Nigeria’s creative and digital economy, including film, entertainment and fibre-optic infrastructure.

Those are legitimate areas of engagement. But Nigerians should be allowed to ask what these meetings mean beyond the photographs and official descriptions. What commitments were made? What does Nigeria stand to gain? What obligations, if any, has Nigeria assumed? What should Nigerians expect to see from these conversations, and when?

What do you bring back for us after these meetings?

Those questions are not hostility to France. They are the ordinary questions citizens should ask of their government.

They are even more reasonable because Paris has become one of the most frequent destinations of your presidency. The PUNCH reported this month that you had spent more than 270 days abroad since assuming office, on 51 trips covering at least 30 countries, with more than 50 days spent in Paris across official, working and private visits.

The number alone does not prove that every journey was unnecessary. Your administration has maintained that you continue to receive briefings, issue directives and oversee government while abroad. The Presidency has described the current European stay as a working vacation and has pointed to official engagements conducted during it.

But governing is not only the ability to issue instructions from another country.

There is a difference between being informed about Nigeria and being physically present in the country whose problems you are being briefed about.

That difference matters.

From Gboko, the question is not whether the President is permitted to travel. Of course he is. The question is whether the frequency and length of those absences are proportionate to the condition of the country he leads and the sacrifices Nigerians are being asked to make.

And this is where the picture from Paris becomes difficult to separate from the picture at home.

At the Élysée Palace, there was a table laid for a presidential dinner, polished glasses, fine surroundings and two heads of state seated together in one of France’s most important rooms. In Nigeria, displaced families are still struggling with food, shelter and the basic necessities of life after losing their homes.

The contrast does not mean that the President should not sit down to dinner with the French President. It means that a country should be able to look at both pictures at the same time. One shows Nigeria represented at the highest level of international diplomacy. The other shows Nigerians who need their own government to remember what life looks like when a person has lost the security of home.

A presidential dinner can last a few hours. Hunger does not keep diplomatic time. For a displaced family, an empty plate is not a metaphor, and there is no communiqué that can make it less empty.

The table in Paris is important. So is the Nigerian who has no table at all.

And while Nigeria is being represented abroad, Nigerians at home are asking a more immediate question: will we be safe tomorrow?

That question deserves the attention of the presidency as much as any foreign investment deal does.

Nigeria was never a French colony. That history matters, not because Nigeria should keep France at arm’s length, but because it should remind us of the basis on which the two countries meet: sovereignty.

We should trade with France. We should welcome French investment where it serves Nigerian interests. We should cooperate with France on security, culture, technology and diplomacy. We should also disagree with France whenever Nigeria’s interests require disagreement.

A sovereign country should be able to do all of that without the psychology of dependence.

Our relationship with France should therefore be a relationship between countries with interests to negotiate, not between a former colony and a former colonial power. Nigeria does not need to approach Paris with reverence. It needs to approach Paris with clarity about what Nigeria wants.

And whatever is negotiated in Paris in Nigeria’s name should eventually be understandable to Nigerians at home.

That is where transparency becomes important.

The Presidency has told Nigerians what happened at the Macron dinner. It has told us about the meeting with Bolloré and the investment interests discussed there. But an official account is not the same thing as public accountability. Where important national interests are involved, Nigerians deserve to know enough to understand what their government has agreed to pursue on their behalf.

This becomes particularly important in a presidency that has asked Nigerians to accept painful economic changes

The petrol subsidy was removed. The naira was allowed to adjust sharply. Transportation costs rose. Food prices became harder for ordinary households to absorb. Businesses were forced to confront higher operating costs. Your administration has argued that these reforms were necessary to correct structural weaknesses and put the economy on a more sustainable footing.

That argument can be made.

But the people making the sacrifice are entitled to ask what the sacrifice is producing.

A family in Gboko does not experience economic reform as a policy paper. It experiences it when the same amount of money buys less food, when transport consumes a larger part of household income and when a young person with qualifications still cannot find work.

If Nigerians are being asked to endure the immediate pain of reform in anticipation of a better future, government must be prepared to show them the road from one to the other.

Otherwise, what exactly was the sacrifice for?

The same principle applies to the continuing dispute in the United States over access to investigative records involving you. Your legal team has challenged the release of records sought through a Freedom of Information Act case, while the Presidency has stressed that the proceedings are a civil records-disclosure dispute and that no US court has found you guilty of criminal wrongdoing.

That distinction matters and should not be erased.

An allegation is not a conviction. A record is not automatically proof of wrongdoing. A court dispute over access to documents should not be presented as though it were itself a criminal judgment.

But transparency has another side.

When questions about a public official persist, citizens are entitled to ask whether as much information as the law permits should be available to them. Public confidence is not strengthened merely by telling people that a matter is complicated. It is strengthened when the facts that can lawfully be disclosed are placed beyond unnecessary doubt.

The same standard should apply to public contracts, government honours and access to state opportunities.

Whenever the government gives an individual or corporation a significant public benefit, Nigerians should be able to ask what due diligence was conducted, what qualifications justified the decision and what the country received in return. That is not an attack on business or investment. It is what accountability looks like when public resources and public institutions are involved.

Mr. President, this is why I am writing from Gboko.

The concern is larger than Paris.

It is about the relationship between the places where presidential decisions are made and the places where Nigerians have to live with their consequences.

Here, insecurity is not a line in a briefing. It is the community wondering whether another attack will come. It is the farmer calculating whether returning to his field is worth the risk. It is the family that hears the news of another killing and wonders how long before its own community is mentioned.

Here, economic reform is not a policy argument on television. It is the household trying to make the same income stretch further.

Here, unemployment is not merely a statistic. It is the young graduate who has spent years looking for a job and is beginning to wonder whether there is any place for his education in the country.

These are realities that official reports can describe but cannot fully convey.

You may conduct government from abroad. You may meet presidents, investors and international business leaders there. Some of those meetings may produce agreements that eventually benefit Nigeria. That is precisely why Nigerians should insist on knowing what those agreements contain and how their benefits will reach the country.

The world will continue to invite the Nigerian President. Paris will continue to receive you. Investors will continue to request meetings. Foreign governments will continue to seek Nigeria’s attention because Nigeria matters.

But none of those audiences is the final audience of your presidency.

That audience is here.

It is in Gboko and Makurdi, Kano and Maiduguri, Lagos and Enugu, Port Harcourt and Kaduna. It is the Nigerian who wakes up every morning and has no choice but to live with the consequences of what government decides.

Mr. President, you do not need to stop travelling.

You need to make every journey answerable to the people whose country you are travelling on behalf of.

Engage France. Engage Europe. Engage America. Bring investment home. Negotiate firmly. Build partnerships. Open markets. Pursue opportunities

But do not allow the foreign capitals where Nigeria’s President is received to become more familiar to the presidency than the Nigerian communities where the consequences of presidential decisions are endured.

The people of Gboko do not have the luxury of stepping away from Nigeria when things become difficult. They stay. They work. They struggle. They adjust. They wait.

They are entitled to expect the government that asks them for patience to remain close enough to understand what that patience is costing them.

Nigeria is a sovereign country. Its resources belong to its people, and its institutions are supposed to work for the public. Those principles should not become less important because the President is dealing with foreign governments, investors or powerful individuals.

The presidency, too, exists because of the Nigerian people. It should never become so removed from their daily reality that the country being governed begins to look different from the country being represented abroad.

Whatever is discussed in Paris, whatever is negotiated abroad and whatever is committed in the name of Nigeria must eventually be capable of being explained to Nigerians.

That is not too much to ask.

It is the minimum owed to the people whose country you lead.

From Gboko, that is the question I leave with you:

After all the journeys, all the meetings and all the conversations abroad, can Nigerians still see themselves clearly in the government being conducted in their name?