You probably call it something else, but I call it the Loyalty Line: that routine line-up of top government—mostly security-related—officials in front of the presidential jet when a Nigerian leader is about to travel.

You’ve seen it over and over: officials of the National Security Council and the National Defence Council standing against the backdrop of the aircraft.

In case you didn’t know, the NSC advises the President on security matters, including issues relating to organizations or agencies responsible for national security. Similarly, the NDC advises the President on matters concerning the defence of the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Given Nigeria’s fractured security and the growing lack of public trust in the government, these two overlapping bodies, along with the officials who populate them, are clearly critical today.

And yet, every time the President travels, they have room in their schedules—wherever they are and whatever they’re doing—to show up at the airport. In effect, the Loyalty Line has become more important than the hard work of securing Nigeria as anticipated by the constitution.

If the President travelled by helicopter from the Presidential Villa to the airport in Abuja, it would only take about 20 minutes. By road, every Nigerian knows it’s an exorbitant, exuberant, and expensive power show.

Since the Loyalty Line must be at the airport ahead of his arrival, it stands to reason that the loyalists don’t travel with him. Each must arrive in their individual convoys to pledge their loyalty for a few seconds.

The Loyalty Line is a reminder that officials do not have to deliver results; they simply have to be loyal. And that loyalty is part of why Nigeria remains so insecure. The security architecture, which is based on professionals doing the work of professionals, has been replaced with professionals doing political bootlicking.

But perhaps this is why Nigeria does not work? Key government chieftains are, in practice, gathered in Abuja to please and praise the president rather than being in their offices or out in the field, doggedly working for the Nigerian people. If the National Security Adviser, the Minister of Defence, the Chief of Defence Staff, the Chief of Army Staff, the Chief of Naval Staff, the Chief of Air Staff, and the Inspector-General of Police must gather at the airport simply because the president is going on a flight, who is in the trenches? And why do their subordinates—in or out of Abuja—have any urgency about the 24-hour task ahead of them? Who is out there that the terrorists are afraid of?

Let us remember that in the administration before this—Muhammadu Buhari’s—the practice was the same. Like Tinubu, Buhari appeared to resent the notion of medical care in his own country (or providing it for Nigerians), even ignoring the State House Medical Centre next door.

The former president’s notion of security was a meeting of his “security chiefs.” Repeatedly surrounding himself with them in Aso Rock was his idea of combating Boko Haram.

Because he failed so disastrously and left Nigeria in a far worse situation but enjoys portraying himself as a statesman, I have often had to respond to his propaganda, including in two “Farewell to the General” articles in May 2023; “What Buhari seeks is peace, not rest” (July 2023); “Buhari still hungers for attention,” (September 2023); “Resisting Revisionist History” (December 2024); and “Go away, Muhammadu Buhari” (February 2025).

Last week, Buhari re-emerged, wielding his “integrity” flag and claiming“personal example of not accumulating wealth” and having supposedly departed “with the same physical assets he had before his presidency.”

There are two problems. The first is that Buhari counts poorly. While he only counts five homes, he has never answered the question about “the sprawling Asokoro lakeside mansion located at Number 9, Udo Udoma Street, Asokoro, Abuja,” that Abuja’s Breaking Times reported just days after he took the presidency.

The story curiously disappeared from the newspaper’s website thereafter.

And Buhari also does not list or count any home built for him by the federal government to which he is entitled by law.

Under Nigeria’s “Remuneration Of Former Presidents And Heads Of State (And Other Ancillary Matters) Act,” every former leader receives, among others, “a well-furnished five-bedroom house” anywhere he chooses in Nigeria.

And yet, we now learn that his Kaduna home was “demolished and thereafter rebuilt”—perhaps illegally—by the federal government.  Clearly, Buhari cannot count this property as one of the five he acknowledged since 2015, and yet he is not saying that it was built for him by the government in 2023.

The second problem is that apart from his perennial self-congratulations, nobody knows how wealthy Buhari really is.  He never held himself accountable, and nobody saw the declaration of assets he promised.

Even his cattle, contrary to science, grow fewer annually.

The truth is that Buhari made Nigeria far more corrupt than his predecessors because of the daily, sectoral and routine corruption he nurtured as president, a lot of it documented in the mass media.

That included the office of the Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, whom he authorised to sell billions of dollars in federal assets Buhari never accounted for.

First Lady Aisha Buhari, a woman without a salary, lived in Dubai for six months between 2020 and 2021 as if it were another Nigerian state capital.  Maybe she paid for it with her Aso Rock housekeeping allowance.

It is remarkable that Buhari is now advising leaders to grant some kind of priority to the welfare of the people, but he ought to be saying it directly to Tinubu.

Remember that Buhari, five years ago, declaredthat their APC would lift 10 million Nigerians out of poverty in 10 years, a deceit nobody now addresses.

And then, of course—because the subject has returned—was Buhari’s enthronement of nepotism, which he does not recognise as corruption.

Tinubu, in his two years, has become recognised as an even worse nepotist than Buhari, but it was a practice that Buhari loved during his eight years in office.

A friend who visited him in his hotel in New York during a UN General Assembly told me how stunned he was that nobody around Buhari in the hotel spoke English!

But for Tinubu, it is not about whether he has appointed fewer non-Yorubas; it is that for the most important and strategic positions, the evidence is clear as to how his mind works.

This is the ‘Loyalty Line’ mindset. When loyalty is the underlying emotion, you do not demand or prioritise strategic brilliance, thinking, or accomplishment, let alone measurement or accountability.

That is the formula for traveling in circles: achieving motion but not progress. Our problem is that, in effect, we nurture people who nurture our insecurity.

Nigeria cannot make any progress with her leaders sojourning abroad, loaded with excuses, or by government apparatchiks gathering in Abuja in a vast orchestrated pretense of governance.  We need committed officials who, taking advantage of widely-available domestic and expertise, can fashion and implement a strong strategy to free Nigeria from the grip of insecurity.

What we currently have is a painful political pantomime that is hard to watch.

Punch