Who else noticed that President Tinubu and Emmanuel Macron wore matching spotted ties at their dinner in Paris on September 17? Before you rush to Google it, let me tell you about Tinubu’s confession after one month in Europe.

“I enjoyed myself. Fantastic,” were President Bola Tinubu’s first words to Nigerians on his Europe holiday when he landed in Lagos from Paris on Tuesday evening. Asked about concerns over his health, some of them raised by his own well-wishers, he said, “Ready to kick, ready to walk. There’s nothing wrong,” adding, “Rumour will always be emanating from politics, but the facts remain, I’m here. Healthy, sound, and ready to go.”

I couldn’t have been happier for the President, a man who, in May, confessed to losing weight and sleep while reforming the economy for the past three years.

However, a President’s holiday is never a private affair because he is public citizen No. 1. In that spirit, it is safe to ask the question many Nigerians are asking: “What did Tinubu’s enjoyment cost us?”

In counting the cost of Mr President’s enjoyment, I will not tread the periphery, such as the bill for keeping him and his closest associates abroad for a month.

While the President was away, the FAO and WFP projected that roughly 34.8 million Nigerians were at risk of crisis-level food insecurity during the lean season. And while Tinubu, at the United Nations General Assembly, pushed for cheaper finance, public debt at home now stands at around N716,822 per citizen, up 87 per cent in three years.

Meanwhile, external reserves climbed to an 18-year high of $54.69bn by September 17. Inflation eased for a third straight month to 15.39 per cent in August, and the stock market hit a record N163.06tn in capitalisation on September 23.

On security, in a single week from September 5 to 11, the police said it recorded 22 banditry incidents, five terrorism incidents, 27 kidnappings and 50 homicides nationwide.

The lowest low came when 37 suspected illegal miners died after being detained by the NSCDC in Minna, and the President had to order an independent panel from abroad.

I alluded to this trend in an earlier piece titled ‘Tinubu’s long-distance relationship with Nigerians’.

In Borno today, troops were still hunting for the 78 pupils abducted from schools in Mussa and Lassa, even though troops killed 12 terrorists and rescued 66 kidnap victims in the middle of Tinubu’s remote-work month. Among them was the Chief Imam of Ngoshe, who was abducted in March.

Of all the costs of Tinubu’s holiday in Europe last month, none took more points than his abrupt absence from the UN General Assembly after much-publicised plans to participate in the forum and even face President Donald Trump.

For three years now, Vice President Kashim Shettima has delivered Nigeria’s statement on Tinubu’s behalf, a task the faithful and eloquent deputy has discharged without complaint.

On its own, the national statement Shettima delivered on Tinubu’s behalf at the 81st UNGA was stellar. But put beside the address of Kenyan President William Ruto, it was like comparing an SS3 student’s end-of-term essay with a practical-based dissertation written for a doctorate at an Ivy League school.

Before you come for me with “Nigeria and Kenya went to UNGA with different priorities”, know that I am not the author of this comparison.

In April, the President told Nigerians to their faces that their suffering was no match for that of Kenyans, and that they should therefore be grateful. I critiqued it in my piece titled “Mr President, comparison is the thief of succour”. So pardon me; I am only walking a path he trod.

To be fair, Nigeria’s statement had its moments. It insisted that “the world of 2026 cannot remain captive to the distribution of power in 1945,” and it courted global partners for Nigeria’s youthful population in technology and innovation. Then came the part where Nigeria, in effect, said it needed money.

In the same spirit as former President Buhari, it asked for wider access to concessional financing, debt arrangements that recognise poorer countries’ needs, and the fiscal space to invest in people and infrastructure.

All these are valid points. But while our eastern brothers were holding out a new blueprint for the world to see, we still sounded like a nation holding out a bowl.

Ruto said, “Africa does not come to plead. We come to propose.” Less than three weeks after the same Assembly voted 164 to one, with the United States the lone objector, to back the Equal Earth map that shows Africa at its true size, Ruto asked how a continent of 54 member states, more than a quarter of the Assembly, could remain “permanently discussed but permanently excluded” from the Security Council.

He argued that Africa’s minerals, farmland, renewable energy and young people are part of the answer to the world’s search for food security, clean energy and resilient supply chains, and that skewed credit ratings have cost African countries about $75bn, according to a UNDP estimate. Then Ruto showcased a 700,000-barrel-a-day refinery belonging to our very own Aliko Dangote, which was about to break ground in Lamu. Let’s keep the lawsuit aside for now. It was interesting that a refinery built by a Nigerian became Kenya’s UN showpiece while Nigeria simply asked for cheaper loans.

Nonetheless, the defining image of Tinubu’s vacation was his dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron on September 17. Did you notice Tinubu’s matching tie with Macron? Take 30 seconds to Google the photos.

Okay, welcome back. If it was styled, it tells how far the choreography of their bromance has come. If it was unstyled, purely coincidental, it tells you something more interesting still: that the two men have spent enough time in each other’s company to begin dressing alike, the way close friends or couples who have been together for a while start finishing each other’s sentences.

Either way, it was the latest entry in a running friendship that has had implications for Tinubu throughout his presidency.

His first international engagement as President was Macron’s Summit for a New Global Financing Pact at Palais Brongniart in June 2023.

Macron hosted him and the First Lady for a three-day state visit in November 2024, and the two met over lunch in Paris on September 10, 2025.

Last December, Macron phoned to pledge deeper security cooperation. At a Sallah reception with governors in March, Tinubu revealed a “lengthy discussion” in which France agreed to collaborate on equipment and support for Nigeria’s counter-terrorism fight.

In May, Paris was the first stop on his Nairobi–Kigali tour. And this September came the Élysée dinner and warm words about an “enduring relationship.”

At some point, a typical Nigerian watching this would ask the question every African mother asks when her child keeps visiting the same friend’s house: “Can’t this friend come to your house too? Why is it always you going to meet them?” My mother asked me exactly that long ago, when I started spending so much time at a friend’s place. Carried away by the company, I had never wondered why he never visited me.

Tinubu has visited Paris at least 13 times and spent over two months there cumulatively. He made six of those visits within his first 18 months, and I was not the only one counting.

Niger Republic junta leader General Abdourahamane Tchiani was watching even more closely. When the time was ripe, he blamed his country’s woes on Tinubu, accusing him of colluding with France to destabilise his regime.

The Federal Government strongly denied it, but the claim sounded believable enough to sway many Nigerians, thanks to the optics.

At the last visit, Macron, his host, packed his bags for the very General Assembly Tinubu has, for three consecutive years now, delegated to Shettima. Macron, in effect, showed his guest where the spare key was and how to turn on the lawn sprinkler, then left for his national assignment as President.

I will not pretend to know the President’s calculus. But in New York, he would have met US President Donald Trump in person for the first time. Trump’s threat of military action over the much-argued Christian genocide had put the administration in a delicate spot late last year, so many thought UNGA would be the perfect platform to clear the air. The First Lady’s appearance at the prayer breakfast in Washington in February, and Trump’s warm letter in July, were seen as harbingers of that big September meeting. It was not to be.

Now that the President is back, I wish him well.