Is Tinubu above the law?

President Bola Tinubu left Abuja for London on August 30, this time for a three week “working vacation.” Vice President Kashim Shettima was in Angola at the time, representing him at an African Union summit. Two of Nigeria’s most powerful officials, outside the country simultaneously, and no letter to the National Assembly. That is the story in one sentence. Everything else is commentary.

Section 145 of the 1999 Constitution is not ambiguous. It says that whenever the president transmits a written declaration to the Senate President and the Speaker that he is proceeding on vacation or is otherwise unable to discharge his duties, the vice president shall perform those functions as acting president until the president transmits a written declaration to the contrary. It is a simple mechanism. Buhari used it routinely. Tinubu, since May 2023, has not used it once.

Should this surprise anyone who watched Tinubu govern Lagos? It should not. Ask Kofoworola Bucknor-Akerele, his first deputy governor, who resigned in 2002 after concluding that he had no intention of sharing authority with her. She has said, in more than one interview since, that he wanted control of the party machinery and would not be checked by anyone, including the woman elected to stand beside him. That is not gossip. That is a documented pattern stretching back a quarter of a century, and it did not end when he moved from Alausa to Aso Rock.

So when Bayo Onanuga, the president’s spokesman, announces a vacation and says nothing about who is minding the republic, is that an oversight? Is it discretion? Or is it a governing philosophy, one in which power is personal property rather than a public trust that can be lent, even briefly, to the man a duly elected president chose as his own running mate?

Section 145 is not an isolated lapse. It fits a wider pattern under this administration: appointments made with little regard for constitutional procedure, contracts awarded with little regard for due process. The question this raises is larger than one clause of the constitution. Why should a president continue to behave as though he is above the law, not through one dramatic act, but through a steady accumulation of small refusals to be bound by the rules everyone else must observe?

Consider what the president is actually saying, by his silence on Section 145. He is saying that Shettima, the man he handpicked and is running with again for a second term, cannot be trusted to sign a file for three weeks. He is saying that a written declaration to the Senate President, a two paragraph formality that Buhari managed without incident, is somehow beneath this vacation or beyond it. Which is it? Nigerians deserve an answer, not a press statement that talks about London hotels and says nothing about Section 145.

Compare this to Buhari, whatever else one thinks of his presidency. Buhari transmitted power to Osinbajo for medical trips, Hajj travel, and routine absences, several times across eight years. Nobody confused Osinbajo for a co-president. Those handovers were unremarkable precisely because they were lawful and expected. That is what a functioning transfer mechanism looks like. It disappears into the routine of governance. It does not become news.

Under Tinubu, the absence of a handover has become news, again and again, because the presidency keeps declining to explain it. Atiku Abubakar called the situation a “disturbing vacuum of political leadership,” and for once the opposition’s criticism understates the problem rather than exaggerating it. This is not simply about who answers the phone if a crisis erupts while both men are abroad. This is about whether the officeholder respects the document that put him there, in the small matters as much as the large ones.

Here is the deeper question the political class in Abuja seems unwilling to ask aloud. If a president will not formally hand over power for three weeks of voluntary leave, what confidence should anyone have that he observes the constitution where fewer people are watching, in a procurement file or an appointment letter? A president who treats even the voluntary use of Section 145 as optional is telling the country something about how seriously he takes the rest of the document.

Shettima, for his part, has said nothing publicly to challenge this arrangement. That silence has its own history. Deputies who challenge Tinubu do not stay deputies for long, as Bucknor-Akerele’s experience in Lagos made plain over twenty years ago. This is the same governing instinct wearing a different title.

Constitutional democracy does not survive on grand declarations. It survives on small, boring compliances: the letter to the Senate President, the properly bid contract, the appointment made through the channel the law prescribes. When those compliances are skipped, quietly and repeatedly, the document begins to matter less than the man. That is precisely the drift Nigeria’s Fourth Republic was designed to prevent, and precisely the drift this presidency keeps normalising by omission.

An ordinary voter in Kano or Bauchi or Port Harcourt does not read Section 145 before breakfast. But that voter understands, instinctively, what it means when the man at the top will not let go of the wheel even for three weeks, even for his own chosen deputy, even when the law asks so little of him. It means the presidency is drifting from an office bound by rules toward a position held by one man’s discretion. The National Assembly has the power to demand better. Nigerians should demand that it use it, before discretion hardens into precedent, and precedent hardens into something considerably harder to undo.

Toro is Editor-at-Large, Media Trust