Opinion

Interrogating Tinubu’s recurring absence at the UN General Assembly…

Published

3 weeks ago

September 23, 2026

By Bola BOLAWOLE,

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s decision to skip the ongoing 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, the third such abstention in a row, has raised eyebrows and sparked speculations.

Also read: Enugu Gov Names Anunobi, Okonkwo as Aides

Expectedly, opposition politicians have wasted no time in feasting on the official announcement that the vice-president, Kashim Shettima, will, once again, stand in for the president.

This trumps an earlier announcement by Jimoh Ibrahim, the country’s Ambassador to the United States/Permanent Representative to the United Nations, that not only would the president attend the annual meeting of world leaders at the UN headquarters in New York, USA, but that a vantage position had been secured for him to sit very close to the maverick United States’ president, Donald Trump!

Since he assumed the country’s leadership in 2023, Tinubu has yet to attend a single UNGA meeting; so also has he yet to pay either official or private visit to the United States despite that he has reportedly embarked, so far, on 52 foreign trips. He has visited at least 30 different countries across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, spending approximately 261 days.

As we speak, the president is out of the country on holidays, first to the UK after which he is expected in France. So, is there anything that aileth Tinubu about the United States? That is where the speculation begins; however, it does not end there!

Is President Tinubu deliberately avoiding the United States? Has it got anything to do with the unending controversy and legal battles over the FBI files and Tinubu’s past activities in the United States? He schooled there; he also worked there before returning to Nigeria decades back.

During the giddy days of the Sani Abacha military dictatorship, the US provided succour and a safe haven for Tinubu and many other pro-democracy activists. What has since changed is the question to ask if the suspicion is that the president is deliberately avoiding the United States.

Or has it got anything to do with the unpredictability of President Trump and the activities of anti-Tinubu politicians here at home and the paid groups doing their bidding in the US? Who dare put anything beyond a president that organized the storming, arrest, and rendition of a sitting foreign leader, hauling him and his wife to the US for trial on drug-related charges, with the country of the leader concerned and the international community as a whole helpless to do anything about it! “What if” then becomes the question should Tinubu set foot on US soil! Is it not better, then, to err on the side of caution?

Another school of thought is that Tinubu’s health might need attention. Unlike in much of the Western world, the secrecy that surrounds the health conditions of Nigerian, nay, African leaders makes it difficult to speak authoritatively on their health conditions.

And this is not new. Babangida, Abacha, Abdulsalami, Yar’Adua all had rumours swirling around their health conditions while in office. Abacha and Yar’Adua died in office. Buhari spent close to one-third of his tenure shuttling between the country and his doctors in the UK. It has been said, this time around, that Tinubu’s doctors are in France.

With part of his holiday reportedly scheduled to be spent in Charles de Gaulle’s country, could this holiday be another disguised medical tourism? Health is wealth, as they say, and prioritizing one’s health and wellbeing over and above a meeting, no matter how important, can be justified, especially when we have been told that the president can be (adequately?) represented at the UNGA.

Then I asked Google: Is it compulsory that the president lead his country’s delegation to the UNGA? The answer is: No, it is not compulsory for a president or prime minister to lead their country’s delegation to the UNGA.

Alternatively, the president or prime minister can be represented by the vice president or deputy prime minister, the foreign affairs minister or the country’s permanent representative at the UN who can speak, vote and act on behalf of the country or member-state concerned.

History records that many world leaders have frequently failed to personally attend UNGA due to divergent reasons, such as pressing domestic issues, disasters or local crises needing their personal attention or for health reasons.

Super-power rivalry and politics, and the need to remain non-committal or stay neutral from taking sides on volatile issues have also been known to compel foreign leaders to skip personally attending UNGA.

When a country’s leader attends the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in person, it provides several distinct strategic, diplomatic, and political advantages that cannot be replicated through virtual participation or lower-level delegation.

Some of these advantages are: High-level bilateral diplomacy (the “Margin” meetings); spontaneous networking whereby leaders hold informal, face-to-face meetings on the sidelines (the “margins”) of the assembly, allowing them to resolve disputes or advance treaties quickly.

It also affords the opportunity of building rapport. Personal presence helps build trust and personal relationships between heads of state, which can be critical during international crises.

Other advantages include enhanced global visibility and influence as UNGA gives leaders a global or world stage to operate from.

A speech delivered in person by a head of state commands significantly more international media attention and diplomatic weight than a pre-recorded video or speech read by a representative.

Some world leaders have been noted for setting agendas on issues of national, regional or international importance at UNGA. Leaders can directly pitch their nation’s foreign policy priorities, economic opportunities, or security concerns to a global audience.

Personal attendance at UNGA also helps to facilitate efficient multilateral engagement or what is called “mini-Summits” among leaders.

Leaders can participate in localized, high-level side events or regional summits (such as G7, BRICS, or regional blocs like the EU and the African Union) that have been known to convene in New York during the UNGA week. When leaders attend UNGA in person, direct access to decision-makers is made possible.

Smaller or developing nations also can seize the opportunity to have direct, unmediated access to leaders of superpower nations as well as heads of major international organizations like the UN itself, the World Bank and IMF. We can go on and on!

At the level of individual nations, attending UNGA is said to project an image of strength, global respect, and statesmanship to citizens back at home.

Newly-elected leaders especially use UNGA to announce themselves to the international community to garner support and recognition, to state their goals and set agendas as well as make profound statements on their administration’s foreign policy direction.

UNGA also serves as a formal introduction to the international community and signals the leader’s commitment to global cooperation.

From the above, it is, without doubt, a disadvantage when leaders absent themselves from UNGA. No matter how “powerful” a substitute representation is, it cannot be the same as when the president or prime minister of a country leads it.

There is what is called “bragging rights” among leaders. Presidents prefer to deal with presidents; vice presidents or foreign ministers will be shuffled down the ladder to discuss with their equivalents or counterparts.

The reverse is the case, however, where presidents of less powerful countries queue or consider it a privilege to have an audience with the foreign affairs minister or envoy of powerful countries such as the US, China, Russia, etc.

One narrative for Tinubu’s recurring absence at UNGA being spinned by his detractors is the fear of the unknown over the FBI files and Tinubu’s alleged past encounter with the US judicial system.

But a man, once tried and acquitted of criminal charges, cannot be tried again on the same offence except fresh evidence pops up that possesses the likelihood of affecting the outcome of the trial in the opposite direction.

Furthermore, can any harm come the way of a visiting president attending UNGA? Or, put more directly and blatantly, can a foreign leader attending UNGA in New York, USA be arrested for any reason whatsoever by the US authorities? The answer is, no; leaders attending UNGA cannot be arrested, charged or tried in the US because they enjoy immunity.

Under the UN Headquarters Agreement, the United States has an international obligation to allow accredited representatives entry and transit to the UN as well as respect their diplomatic inviolability.

In like manner, no US state, city, local government or county official possesses the legal power to arrest a protected visiting foreign leader.

From the above, it is most unlikely that President Tinubu stands the risk of being arrested in the US if he chooses to personally attend UNGA.

What may happen is that demonstrators may mass at the UN headquarters venue of UNGA, organize protests and heckle him and his delegation.

That will be embarrassing enough. For sure, it will portray the country in bad light and dent its image – which all Nigerians, including the president’s adversaries, will suffer from.

Also read: Enugu Gov Names Anunobi, Okonkwo as Aides

To avoid such an embarrassment and the deleterious effects it may have on the country’s image appears as the most germane reason why Tinubu has kept away – and may continue to keep sway – from UNGA until, maybe, a more predictable president mounts the saddle in the United States. And the losers? – Nigeria and Nigerians!

(Published in the TREASURES column on the back page of the NEW TELEGRAPH newspaper edition of Wednesday, 23 September, 2026).

Opinion

Tegbe’s 24-Hour Energy Zones and the Shift From Megawatts to Money

Published

2 weeks ago

October 2, 2026

Mariam Balogun

By Sufuyan Ojeifo,

There is a point at which a country’s electricity problem ceases to be merely an electricity problem. It becomes a problem of economic geography.

Also read: Everton Celebrates Nigeria’s 66th Independence With Football Legends

Where can factories operate with confidence? Where can businesses plan beyond the next appearance of a generator? Where can hospitals, schools, technology companies, markets and households begin to organise their lives around the reasonable expectation that electricity will be there?

This is the thinking behind the latest initiative from the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, to develop what the Federal Government calls Energy Zones – defined corridors where homes, businesses and industries could receive stable, 24-hour electricity.

The proposed zones cover the Lagos axis, the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor and the Enugu-Port Harcourt corridor. Tegbe’s latest move is a meeting with selected electricity distribution companies to begin working through what it would take to make the idea real.

At first glance, it sounds like another promise of uninterrupted electricity in a country that has heard too many such promises. However, there is something more consequential in the architecture of the proposal.

Tegbe is asking Nigerians to look at the power problem differently.

For years, the national conversation has been dominated by generation. How many megawatts are being produced? How much can the transmission grid carry? How many generating plants are working? These are important questions. But electricity does not become useful simply because it has been generated.

It must travel. It must be received. It must be distributed. And ultimately, somebody must be able to use it. That last part has often been treated as the end of the conversation when, in reality, it is where the economic value of electricity begins.

Tegbe has put the point plainly. The constraint is not limited to generation and transmission; it also includes how much electricity can be taken up and delivered at the distribution end.

The proposed Energy Zones are intended to address precisely that gap while improving commercial demand and the revenue performance of the distribution companies.

There is an important idea here.

Nigeria does not necessarily have to wait for every weakness in the electricity value chain to be solved simultaneously before beginning to create pockets of reliability.

A country of more than 200 million people, with enormous differences in industrial activity, population density and commercial demand, may have to proceed through carefully selected economic corridors while the wider system is repaired.

This is not an argument for abandoning the national grid. It is an argument for making the grid more economically purposeful.

The three corridors selected by the Ministry are revealing. Lagos and its adjoining industrial axis represent perhaps the country’s most concentrated commercial and industrial demand.

The Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor connects the political capital with major commercial and industrial centres in the North. Enugu-Port Harcourt links important commercial, manufacturing and energy-producing communities in the South-East and South-South.

These are not simply lines on a power map. They are lines on Nigeria’s economic map. That distinction matters.

For too long, Nigerians have experienced electricity largely as a household inconvenience. The light goes off. The generator comes on. A business buys diesel. A manufacturer factors self-generation into production costs. A hospital makes contingency arrangements.

A young entrepreneur learns, often painfully, that the real price of electricity is not what appears on the bill but what it costs to keep the business alive when the supply fails.

A reliable electricity corridor changes that equation.

If a factory knows that a particular industrial cluster has dependable power, investment decisions begin to change.

If a commercial district can plan around predictable electricity, operating costs become easier to manage.

If businesses can depend on supply for most of the day, generators can move from being the first line of defence to being what they were always supposed to be: backup.

This is where Tegbe’s technocratic instincts may prove significant.

His background is not that of a career power-sector operator. His professional experience has largely been in consulting, fiscal and economic reform, institutional transformation and advisory work. That background has been visible in his early approach to the ministry – diagnosis, audits, financial questions, infrastructure bottlenecks, and attempts to identify where one part of the system is preventing another from functioning properly.

His Energy Zones proposal fits that pattern. It treats the electricity market less as a single machine waiting for one dramatic repair and more as a system of interconnected constraints that can be isolated, diagnosed and addressed.

Tegbe had already identified the three corridors as priorities for grid stabilisation, with technical audits intended to establish the condition of critical infrastructure. The latest engagement with DisCos suggests that the idea is now moving beyond technical diagnosis towards the more difficult question of how distribution will work within those corridors.

That is where the hard work begins.

A 24-hour power zone cannot be created by a press statement. It requires generation that is available when needed, transmission capacity that can carry it, distribution infrastructure capable of receiving it, transformers and feeders that can withstand the load, metering that properly captures consumption, customers willing and able to pay, and a commercial structure in which the various participants have an incentive to keep the system working.

It also requires protection. Vandalism and energy theft do not respect administrative boundaries. Neither do faulty equipment, unpaid bills or poor collection practices. Tegbe himself has acknowledged that the sector’s problems reinforce one another. Weak collections affect the market. Market weakness affects maintenance and gas payments. Unreliable supply in turn depresses collections.

This is why the Energy Zone experiment, if it is to succeed, must be judged by more than the number of hours electricity is available.

The real test will be whether reliability begins to produce economic consequences. Does industrial output increase? Do businesses spend less on self-generation? Does investment respond? Do DisCos collect more because customers are receiving a service they can trust? Does the government recover enough value from improved commercial activity to justify further infrastructure investment?

Those are the questions that should eventually accompany the glossy language of 24-hour power.

And there is another question that Tegbe and the Federal Government will have to confront: what happens outside the zones?

Nigeria cannot become a collection of electrically privileged corridors surrounded by communities waiting indefinitely for their turn.

The logic of concentrating investment in high-demand areas can be defended economically, especially if the resulting commercial activity strengthens the wider electricity market.

But the strategy will ultimately have to demonstrate how successful zones become stepping stones towards broader reliability.

That is the difference between an experiment and a system.

There is also a danger in admiring the architecture of reform from the comfort of an office.

It has to be said here that the statement issued by the minister’s media aide was long on ambition and conspicuously short on the details that matter. No timeline. No capacity targets. No specific investment figures. It is the kind of announcement that has, historically, been the precursor to nothing at all.

So Nigerians should watch the idea with interest, but also with the healthy scepticism that comes from decades of promises about electricity.

The minister deserves a measure of credit for at least diagnosing an important part of the illness.

For once, the conversation has shifted from the head to the feet – from generation to distribution, from megawatts to money.

At the same time, the Nigerian people have been given blueprints before. They have learned to admire the drawings while the building crumbles.

The Energy Zones remain a proposal. The government has not yet announced the detailed capacity requirements, implementation timetable or precise infrastructure investments that would make 24-hour supply possible.

That is not necessarily a fatal flaw. It may simply mean the idea is still being worked out.

But it does mean that the language of 24-hour power should be treated as an aspiration until it is matched by the machinery of implementation.

Yet the proposal deserves attention because it reflects a potentially important shift in the way the power problem is being conceived.

Nigeria may not fix its electricity crisis in one heroic sweep. It may have to build reliability corridor by corridor, demand centre by demand centre, and economic cluster by economic cluster.

There is nothing inherently glamorous about such work. It is engineering, finance, regulation, distribution and relentless attention to the weak link in the chain. But perhaps that is precisely the point.

The country has spent decades waiting for the great national electricity breakthrough.

Tegbe’s emerging approach suggests something less dramatic and potentially more practical: make a few economically critical parts of the system work properly, learn from them, strengthen the model, and expand it.

The success of that approach will ultimately be measured not in speeches or megawatts, but in what Nigerians can do with the electricity when it arrives.

Does the factory run a second shift? Does the business hire more workers? Does the hospital keep its equipment running through the night? Does the young entrepreneur stop budgeting for diesel and start budgeting for growth?

Also read: Everton Celebrates Nigeria’s 66th Independence With Football Legends

That is where the real power story begins. And that is the standard against which Tegbe’s Energy Zones should ultimately be judged: not by whether 24-hour power sounds impressive in a press release, but by whether the lights stay on long enough for Nigerians to build something with them.