Amplified by the Good Governance Group (GGG)
Since assuming office in May 2023, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has made France a frequent destination, sparking curiosity and debate among Nigerians. By April 2025, he had spent at least 59 days in France across eight trips — more than any other country.  Now, in May 2026, he has gone again.
President Tinubu left Abuja on Sunday , May 3, for official visits to France, Kenya and Rwanda. His first stop is France, before proceeding to Nairobi for the Africa-France Summit, co-chaired by French President Emmanuel Macron and Kenyan President William Ruto, scheduled for May 11 and 12.  The summit’s stated focus is energy transition, digital development, and climate action. The Presidency describes it as an expression of Nigeria’s commitment to partnerships with France and the African continent.
That is the official story. It is not the whole story.
The Pattern That Will Not Explain Itself
Diplomacy requires travel. No reasonable person disputes that. What is harder to defend is the consistency of the destination, the vagueness of the disclosures, and the growing suspicion that the official record and the actual agenda are not the same document.
Except for one official state visit in 2024, Tinubu has always shrouded these quarterly trips in secrecy, labeling them “private visits” or “working visits.” Critics read them differently: as medical tourism conducted at public expense, and as a recurring opportunity to meet a man who no longer lives in Nigeria but remains, by every measure, at the center of its political economy. 
As of January 2025, it was reported that Tinubu had spent over 30 percent of his time in office outside Nigeria.  For a country whose citizens have watched their purchasing power collapse since 2023, that statistic carries weight. It is not merely a scheduling concern. It is a governance question.
The Man in Paris
At the center of the France question is a name the Presidency never volunteers but never successfully avoids: Gilbert Chagoury.
Shortly after winning the 2023 presidential election, Tinubu travelled to France “to rest” and was reportedly joined by Chagoury in Paris.  That early encounter established what has since become a fixed geometry: Nigerian president, French capital, Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire.
Critics allege that Tinubu goes to Paris quarterly to plan business strategy with Chagoury, the Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire entrepreneur who lived in Lagos for decades before retiring to the French capital. 
The relationship between the two men is not in dispute. Tinubu has made it public himself. In a birthday tribute, Tinubu said of Chagoury: “He is generous with both his heart and his resources. With friends like him, one can sleep with a still mind.” 
What is in dispute is whether that friendship — maintained across continents, across state visits, and across billions of dollars in public contracts — constitutes a private matter or a public accountability issue.
The Contracts
The answer to that question begins with money. Specifically, with the money Nigeria’s government has directed toward the Chagoury Group since 2023.
In 2024, Chagoury’s Hi-Tech company was awarded the $11 billion Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway project. In 2025, ITB Construction Nigeria Limited, a Chagoury Group subsidiary, was selected by Nigeria’s Federal Executive Council to refurbish two major ports — Tin Can and Apapa — in a contract worth 1.1 trillion naira. 
Chagoury’s ITB Nigeria has also been tapped to build the Snake Island container terminal under a $1 billion concession agreement spanning 45 years. 
These are not incidental transactions. They represent some of the largest infrastructure contracts in Nigerian history. They were awarded without competitive public tender processes that inspired public confidence. And they flow to a man who lives in Paris and meets, by multiple accounts, with the Nigerian head of state during his visits there.
In January 2025, Tinubu conferred on Chagoury Nigeria’s second-highest national honour — the Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger(GCON),typically reserved for the vice president, Senate president, and chief justice. 
That honour did not go to a civil servant. It went to a contractor. In the same period in which billions in state funds were directed toward his companies. That is not a coincidence requiring conspiracy to explain. It is a pattern requiring transparency to resolve.
What “Private Visit” Actually Means
In February 2025, Tinubu travelled to France for another “private visit,” which was later revealed to be a medical trip. Just two months later, in April 2025, he departed once again for a two-week “working visit.” 
Several “private visits” — including those in January 2024, August 2024, and February 2025 — are thought to contain medical components, though they were officially described as diplomatic or personal. 
The Presidency has denied, repeatedly, that the president is ill. It has offered, repeatedly, no documentation to support that denial. In any functioning democracy, a head of state’s capacity to govern is a matter of constitutional significance. Speculating about his health is not mischief. It is the direct consequence of a communications strategy built on concealment.
Labour Party’s 2023 presidential candidate Peter Obi was among the prominent public figures to publicly question the lack of transparency, advising Tinubu to prioritise domestic tours over foreign trips to better understand and address the country’s worsening economic and security situation. 
Obi is right — though not only for the reasons he cites. The problem is not the travel. The problem is the silence around it.
France, Chagoury, and the Architecture of Influence
There is a harder argument being made — not by fringe commentators, but by people who study how influence is structured and how capital moves.
Detractors argue that France uses figures like Chagoury to indirectly support Tinubu, channeling investments that benefit elite allies while mortgaging Nigeria’s resources.  During Tinubu’s November 2024 state visit to Paris, Tinubu and Macron signed deals worth €300 million, targeting infrastructure, agriculture, healthcare, and renewable energy. 
Those figures are not inherently suspicious. France and Nigeria have legitimate grounds for economic cooperation. But legitimate cooperation does not require opacity. It does not require a president to conduct his midterm policy review from an apartment in Paris rather than a ministry in Abuja. And it does not require the primary beneficiary of Nigeria’s infrastructure contracts to also be the president’s host city.
Nigeria’s colonial history is a British one. The legal system, the currency architecture, the parliamentary traditions — all of it flows from London. So the question is not merely geographic. It is structural. Why has this president chosen France, above all nations, as his second home? And why does he remain so reluctant to say clearly what he does when he is there?
What the Record Demands
There is a simple test for any government that claims its foreign engagements are legitimate: disclose them.
Full itineraries. Complete meeting records. The names of participants. The contractual outcomes, if any, of interactions between the president and private businessmen. The medical status of the head of state — not because illness is shameful, but because incapacity is unconstitutional.
The frequency of these trips has raised growing concerns among Nigerians regarding the transparency of the president’s health and his capacity to discharge his duties effectively.  Those concerns will not be answered by press statements. They will only be answered by facts.
Until those facts are provided, every flight to Paris carries the same freight. Not the weight of proof — but the weight of a question that a democratic government should be desperate to answer, and has instead chosen to evade.
A Final Word
This is not an attack on a president. It is a defence of a country.
When the largest infrastructure contracts in a nation’s recent history flow to the personal friend of the head of state — a friend who lives abroad, who meets with that head of state during undisclosed foreign visits, who has received the nation’s second-highest honour in the middle of that contracting relationship — the public is not being paranoid by asking questions.
It is being responsible.
Nigeria deserves a president who governs from Nigeria. It deserves procurement processes that are competitive, transparent, and free from the interference of personal loyalty. And it deserves an accounting — clear, complete, and verifiable — of exactly what is discussed, decided, and agreed whenever its president boards a plane to Paris.
Not diplomacy as cover. Accountability as standard.
That is not too much to ask. It is the minimum a sovereign people are owed.
Kio Amachree | Stockholm, Sweden | President, Worldview International
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