By PETER ANOSIKE

A chieftain of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Nelson Ahamefula Akuma, has described the N34.39 spent on foreign exchange for international travel by the presidency as a huge waste of resources.

The figure is according to data compiled from GovSpend, a government spending tracker managed by BudgIT.

According to him, if the APC government is telling itself the truth, it would have known that investing that money in Nigeria would have been far better than chasing elusive foreign investors.

He said that with the state of insecurity, power supply, compromised judiciary and deficiency in infrastructure, there is no serious investor that would want to come to Nigeria.

Speaking further, he said that investors are attracted and not invited, adding that as Nigeria stands today, there are no incentives or enabling environment to attract investors.

According to him, it even seems as if President Bola Tinubu is simply trying to break former Nigerian presidents traveling record to become the most travelled president in the country.

He said if not, there are diplomats and workers in foreign affairs ministry who are collecting allocations yearly who could easily do what the presidency is doing at a far reduced cost.

He also said that a lot of the trips were unproductive because they were mostly vacations to enjoy tax payers’ money with a very large entourage of people who doesn't even anything to do on the trips.

Akuma said that it is difficult to understand why a poor country like Nigeria should have a fleet of presidential jets while United States, the largest economy in the world only have Air Force One as their presidential jet.

His words: “For a country with more than 141 million people in multi-dimensional poverty to spend more than N34 billion in procuring forex for foreign travels by the presidency in two years is tragic. The only way this country can survival is by cutting cost and never on jamboree trips. The truth is that you don’t invite investors rather, you attract them with the facilities that you have on ground that would make businesses to thrive. In 2024, Nigerian ranked 19 in foreign direct investment in Africa and none of the presidents in Africa traveled as much as Bola Ahmed Tinubu. So, what that means is, despite all the billions spent on foreign trips there is absolutely nothing worthwhile to show. Our image as a country remains unattractive to investors because of insecurity, epileptic power supply, compromised judiciary and corruption in government and with that there is no way investors would have confidence in investing in an environment like ours. So, lets tell ourselves the truth and stop wasting tax payers’ money.”

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