Shame, Foreign Medical Trips Portray Buhari as Colossal Failure – HURIWA Replies Femi Adesina

 

The Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA has lambasted Femi Adesina, Special Adviser, Media and Publicity to President Muhammadu Buhari after he defended the President's foreign medical trips.

 

HURIWA described the trips as totally indefensible, reprehensible, despicable and a shame.

 

HURIWA noted that Buhari has been in charge of Nigeria both as a military head of state and two terms as a democratically elected President, adding that it was indefensible that during these years, the President could not fix Nigeria’s health infrastructure to end travelling abroad for medical reasons.

 

According to the human rights group, Buhari, who is in the second year of his final tenure, should not be seen globetrotting in search of medical assistance for his personal medical challenges.

 

“The failure of President Muhammadu Buhari to use six years to fix the health infrastructure in Nigeria so as to stave off medical tourism that drains Nigeria of the much-needed foreign reserves is totally indefensible, reprehensible, despicable and it is a shame to the nation that the president is even defending this immoral behavior,” the group said.

 

HURIWA was reacting to a recent statement by Femi Adesina, spokesman to the President, where he had given reasons why his principal travels overseas for medical tourism.

 

The organisation dismissed as puerile and illogical the position of Adesina, telling him to stop deceiving himself thinking he is convincing anyone about a matter that exposes the profound hypocrisy of his boss.

“President Buhari’s continuous junketing at huge expenses to the public in search of private health issues is a demonstration that he is a colossal failure as a political leader because as far as medical history is concerned, the current Nigerian President is the only leader in any civilized democracy that travels outside his nation in search of medical treatment,” HURIWA said.

 

HURIWA said that Buhari had personally condemned medical tourism which he claims drains Nigeria of resources, adding that it was hypocritical for him to continue engaging in medical tourism.

“If Buhari is honest, he would have deployed the right resources since 2015 to fix the health infrastructures and even build a state of the art medical centre to invite his British born medical doctors to relocate to Nigeria to avoid doing the same thing the President condemns,” the organisation added.

 

The rights group pointed to the fact that the National Assembly has been voting billions of Naira to fund the running of the presidential clinic in Aso Rock since 2015 with nothing to show for the funds.

 

The group further recalled First Lady, Aisha Buhari, had lamented the poor state of the presidential clinic, accusing the management of misusing the yearly budgets for the health institutions, saying that there were not even syringes at the clinic.

“We in HURIWA are shocked that the same President that makes heavy weather of fighting corruption has done nothing about this damaging allegation of corruption made by his wife but only yesterday, the President administered oath of secrecy on his staff in a bid to undermine the anti-graft crusade purportedly being carried out by the same government,” the group said in a statement signed by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, said on Thursday.