President Bola Tinubu has not been seen since he departed for an official trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last week to attend a special session of the World Economic Forum. 

The forum concluded on April 29, but the president’s whereabouts remain a mystery, leaving Nigerians concerned about their leader’s whereabouts in the face of severe fuel shortages, depreciating currency and skyrocketing inflation.

Peoples Gazette’s checks showed the president left Riyadh on April 30, one day after the summit ended, and arrived in London on the same day. He departed London Stansted for Paris Le Bourget on May 2, where he has remained ever since without the knowledge of most of his key aides. 

“I am just learning now from you that the president might be in Paris. We were all fooled that he was visiting someone in London even as of yesterday (Sunday) evening,” a senior presidential aide said under anonymity to discuss frustration among officials over the president’s conduct. “We don’t know why he is hiding his movement from us.”

The president had travelled on the Gulfstream G550 typically assigned to Vice-President Kashim Shettima, but after the main presidential jet broke down, Mr Tinubu picked up his deputy’s plane to do his own foreign trips.

The Gazette was not immediately able to ascertain whether or not Mr Tinubu was in Paris as of the time of this publication. Previous administrations had used presidential jets as a veil to hide the actual whereabouts of a president, even though a jet’s location, especially abroad, often accurately indicates the location of the Nigerian leader travelling in it.

The State House did not return a request seeking comments about the Nigerian president’s whereabouts.

Mr Tinubu is known to frequent Paris and London.

Checks by Peoples Gazette on Aboki Forex, a platform that displays the official and parallel rates of the naira against other currencies, revealed Monday morning that the Nigerian currency trading at N1390 to one dollar, indicating a reversal of the gains the naira had made against the dollar. 

The naira, which sold as high as N1,850 to one dollar in February, traded at N1,060 against the dollar in early April after the Central Bank of Nigeria sold thousands of U.S. dollars at lower rates to numerous bureau de change operators to crash dollar rates.

Weeks later, a Bloomberg report revealed that Mr Tinubu’s administration was “burning through foreign exchange reserves” to address the currency crisis, a temporary solution with devastating economic consequences if not properly checked.

Nigerians last week endured a torrid fuel shortage that made commuting difficult for millions of on-site employees across the nation. Petrol sold as high as N1100 in Abuja and N1000 by black marketers in Lagos state which jerked up transportation fares by 100 per cent.

Last Friday, the president’s chief of staff, Femi Gbajabiamila received a delegation from the African Association of Automotive Manufacturers and the Nigerian Automotive Manufacturers Association on behalf of the president.

Similarly, the vice-president travelled to Kenya on April 29 to represent Mr Tinubu at the International Development Association (IDA21) Heads of State Summit in Nairobi, Kenya using a commercial aircraft.