Starting from yesterday, President Muhammadu Buhari commenced a ten-day working leave to the United Kingdom during which he will also embark on a medical check-up as revealed by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina.

There is nothing unusual in a president going on a working leave: like every other human, they can get burnt out from the job, especially a stressful one as running a country.

However, in President Buhari’s case, besides the insensitivity of leaving the country after the disaster caused by the mistaken bombing of a camp for internally displaced persons by the Nigerian Airforce and the thoughtfulness when the nation’s soldiers are part of a regional force to The Gambia, there is also the matter of constantly going abroad for medical checks.

It had been expected that President Buhari’s administration will break from the tradition of Nigerian leaders going abroad to seek medical treatment, even if he regularly went to the UK for medical check-ups prior to becoming president. However, this trip makes it the second time out of his three vacations taken in the last one year where he also had a medical checkup.

This is moreso when you consider the huge sums budgeted for the State House Medical Center which is meant to serve the President, Vice President, their families and staff of the State House:  N3.85 billion in 2016 and N331 million in the 2017 Appropriation Bill currently before the National Assembly. The 2016 sum is at par and even more than what federal teaching hospitals received.

It is thus curious that despite these huge allocations, the Presidency does not deem it sufficient in terms of facilities and personnel to have the president checked. Surely, it cannot be said that an E.N.T. specialist in Nigeria that is qualified and experienced to attend to the president is not available or that there are no competent doctors to tend to him. Unless the president is suffering from a rare ailment for which the specialist treatment is completely unavailable in Nigeria, there is no need for him to continually jet abroad to see doctors.

Not only that, there is the matter of optics and sensitivity towards the Nigerian people. In a country where affordable and reliable healthcare is insufficient and expensive with only about 10% of the country on health insurance and the non-implementation of the National Health Act that will go a long way in improving healthcare access and delivery, a president constantly going abroad for medical check-up and treatment is bound to rub off wrongly on the citizenry.

It entrenches the belief and perception that the political leadership in Nigeria is disconnected from the electorate and self-serving, since only a small percentage of the citizens are able to access the same quality of healthcare, whether home or abroad.

We hope that this trip will be the last abroad for a medical check-up for the president, and pray that he and other top officials in the administration make better use of our own health facilities to justify the sums currently allocated yearly and to also spur them to want to improve them further.

We wish the president a well-deserved rest and the best of health.

Isime Esene