Senate raises alarm over cost of Buhari’s foreign medical trips

The Senate, on Thursday, sounded an alarm over President Muhammadu Buhari’s medical trips outside Nigeria.

The upper chamber said the situation in which even the medical facility located in the Presidential Villa had been abandoned by the Presidency because of the preference for treatment in foreign countries is completely unacceptable.

The Senate said the foreign trips for medical treatment must be stopped to ensure that proper attention was accorded to the State House Clinic.

The position of the Senate was made known at a budget defence session between the Senate Committee on Federal Character and Intergovernmental Affairs with the State House Permanent Secretary, Tijani Umar.

Umar had presented a budget of N19.7 billion for 2021, out of which N1.3bn was proposed for the State House Clinic.

Reacting to the proposal, the Chairman of the Senate panel, Senator Danjuma La’ah, said the committee would approve the budget for the State House Clinic but insisted that the president and other top officials of his government should no longer be flown abroad for medical treatment.

The committee made it clear that “the president cannot be travelling or be taken out of the country anytime he falls sick.

“He must be attended to in our hospitals here in Nigeria. We must ensure our hospital are fully equipped to world-class standards so that no matter the issue of emergency, our hospitals should be endowed with that capacity to attend to them before flying out of the need arises.”

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