Buhari is giving me PTSD -By Ngozi Okafor

President Buhari, leaving for London for Medical check up

I was just about to go to bed when I decided to scan through the Linda Ikeji’s Blog (LIB) app that i have on my iPhone. (Shout out to my girl! wooop whoop!, or more accurately to the creator or the app). Helps me know wha’gwan in Nigeria in 3 minute or less.… Thank you.

Anyway, I read through different posts about celebrities etc and kept doing my right swipe for more news until I saw it: A photo of Buhari on the steps of yet another airplane. My heart LITERALLY fell to my stomach. Then skipped a beat. My pulse rate increased as I read the headline: President Buhari to proceed on a 10 day vacation to London…to see an ENT specialist.

The one paragraph post then went on to detail the press release by the president’s special adviser on Media and Publicity stating that Buhari has had a persistent ear infection and would be going to London to see a medical specialist as a precautionary measure. I began to have symptoms of a minor panic attack, many questions invaded my mind.

1.    Who is actually running Nigeria through all these absences?

2.    How many trips has he been on since he entered office?

3.    Is Nigeria way too much headache and way too complicated that he feels like he has to get a reprieve as often as he can?

4.    Is this presidency a one week on, one week off assignment?

5.    What the hell?

6.    Is he overwhelmed with the task?

7.    Does he hate us?

8.    What does all this overseas travel say about where our priorities lie?

9.    Can you run a country in absentia?

10.  Is Nigeria on autopilot? or is it such a lost cause that he doesn’t consider anything he does pertinent?

11.  Don’t we have doctors in Nigeria?

12.  Aren’t Nigerian doctors in the diaspora the best doctors in class?

13.  Aren’t we getting ashamed of going overseas for medical treatments in this day and age?

14.  Must every president follow his predecessor with medical tourism without thinking of building our own facilities?

15.  Wasn’t he the one who said that it was hard to get FOREX and we should patronize Nigeria rather than spend our money overseas?

16.  How come Nigerian doctors are good enough for Nigerians but not good enough for the Nigerian president?

17.  How long does it take to prepare for, travel to and recover from these countries? (Notice I didn’t ask how much, the =N= implications of these trips are beyond the bounds of my present trauma)

18.  Is this some sort of bucket list?

19.  When does he have time to actually RUN the country?

20.  Are all his trips necessary?

21.  Do they all have to be done by the president himself? (In this instance, we could fly in a doctor if we actually don’t have ONE good one)

22.  Don’t we have ministers of foreign affairs, trade and investment, ambassadors etc? What is their role in all the traveling?

23.  Wasn’t there a tweet from his office about him being in full health only 2 days ago?

24.  Why is it so quick and easy to leave us?

To put it in plain terms, it’s like when a child is abandoned by their traveling father. But the difference here is that children who are abandoned often have mothers to take care of them. Who is Nigeria’s mother? Moreover, children whose fathers frequently travel overseas for business, reap the rewards of such travels. Daddy comes home having handled his business and the children get to enjoy the riches of their enterprising father….. But in this case, where are the riches? What are we benefiting from our traveling father? The traveling makes me feel like our home, Nigeria, is unguarded, vulnerable and open to attack. We are left to our own devices, to fend for ourselves, to defend ourselves, to protect our homes, businesses and assets. With no guarantee of electricity, security or the retention in the value of our hard earned/invested currency.

The message that comes through loud and clear is ‘Daddy is gone and he didn’t leave a note. He will be back when he’s ready, but if you people misbehave, he will leave again’.

This is the source of my trauma.

PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) is a psychological condition that emerges when one has experienced a traumatic, shocking, distressing or scary event. Symptoms include intensely distressing and intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, nightmares, physical symptoms such as rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, panic attacks, sweating and trembling.

By constantly abandoning us and never being there for us, our president is inducing symptoms of PTSD in me. The mere sight of him on a tarmac gives me palpitations and anxiety. It’s like he is signaling that he is not concerned about the things that concern our nation; power supply, education, health care, transportation, employment, youth development, the economy. It’s like he is not concerned about what concerns our Nigerian family and the destruction it is experiencing between the Fulani herdsmen, Niger Delta Avengers and Boko Haram. He would rather be anywhere, literally: Chad, Niger, Iran, India, Ghana, Cameroon, than with us.

Which begs the question, if my president feels this way, then how would foreigners regard me? If I am overseas in Malaysia or Thailand and I’m being treated poorly, there is no one to report to or to come to my aid because my own president has abandoned me. When I am at home and simultaneously out of work and petrol, there is no one to run to because my president has left me to fend for myself. So I am a citizen without a home, I cannot feel at home abroad or in my own home.

This is traumatic.

President, when you said ‘I belong to everybody and I belong to no one,’ we didn’t understand the ‘I belong to everybody’ to mean that you belong to (and in) every country nor did we understand the ‘I belong to no one’ to mean, you don’t belong to us.  We should really have known then, as it was a warning, that you were planning to be a free spirit, being everywhere else and nowhere near. But we need you here, we elected you to be here.

President Buhari, please come home and put your hands to the plow.

You were elected to run the country not to run from it.

NGOZI OKAFOR

Atlanta

Ng511@yahoo.com