Date Published: 09/24/09
24TH SEPTEMBER 2009 PRESS RELEASE
PRESIDENT YAR’ADUA’S VISIT TO SAUDI ARABIA IS ILL-ADVISED
Afenifere considers it a diplomatic blunder and misplacement of priorities that President Umar Yar’Adua decided to go frolicking to Saudi Arabia, when world leaders are converging at a United Nations Summit. The Nigerian President should be nowhere else but at a forum that would easily afford him the opportunity of meeting other world leaders capable of rendering assistance for the plethora of problems besetting the country. The UN Summit holds in at its headquarters in New York with leaders of about 100 nations in attendance.
The Summit will consider issues like climate change, economic development in the face of the meltdown and energy policies and issues. In all such discourses our country needs to participate at the highest level. These are international issues that should not be left to a low ministerial representative.
If there are other motives for the Saudi Arabia, the Nation needs to be told, especially when His Excellency has just returned from performing the lesser Hajj at the same place. The excuse is that he is on a working visit again to Saudi Arabia at the instance of host King Abdullah Bin Abdul-Aziz Al-Saud and will honour the opening of a King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. This excuse just does not sell. It only highlights a government lacking a coherent foreign policy.
If the president had been indisposed as he often is, one would have been resigned once more to excuse his absence at the Summit to his frail health, which he may have no control over. But officials say he is going on a working visit to Saudi Arabia, which should be a second-rate assignment, which can easily be handled by the Vice President, First Lady, a Minister or the Ambassador.
Moreover he needs to urgently address the international embarrassment the country faces over the Minister of Justice, Chief Michael Aondoakaa, who unilaterally cleared three former governors facing corruption investigations by the London Metropolitan Police.
CHIEF REUBEN FASORANTI, OFR
Afenifere Leader.
