“Medical tourism by politicians is a form of corruption. It is taxpayer-funded escape from responsibility. It is the final insult to Nigerians who must queue at under-equipped clinics, only to be referred to hospitals that don’t have electricity”
When former President Muhammadu Buhari died in a London hospital on July 13, 2025, he joined a long, disgraceful list of prominent Nigerian leaders who breathed their last in foreign hospitals. It is the ninth high-profile case in recent memory—and another painful reminder of our ruling class’s hypocritical detachment from the broken systems they govern.
It is bad enough that Nigerian leaders routinely seek medical care abroad. It is far worse that even in death, they confirm what the rest of us already knew: that they never believed in the Nigeria they swore to serve.
Let’s be clear: Buhari’s demise in a plush London clinic, after allegedly battling leukaemia for years under cover of secrecy, is not just personal tragedy. It is political failure.
And it is not isolated.
Vice President Alex Ekwueme died in London in 2017. Biafran leader Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu—another nationalist icon—also died there. Oba Okunade Sijuwade, former Foreign Minister Adeniji, Islamic cleric Isyaku Rabiu, and several senators and public office holders—dead in London. We even buried Senator Ifeanyi Ubah who died in the UK just last year.
The UK has become the unofficial intensive care unit of Nigeria’s elite.
While over 200 million Nigerians suffer poor healthcare, with dilapidated hospitals, unpaid medical staff, and shameful maternal mortality rates, our rulers treat foreign hospitals as personal property. They abandon the same local health institutions they were elected to fix—only to run abroad when their own health fails.
How can a country spend over ₦13 trillion on healthcare budgets in the last decade and still have its presidents dying overseas?
Even religious leaders are now speaking out. Archbishop Alfred Adewale Martins of the Catholic Church called Buhari’s death in London “a national shame.” He is right. It is the ultimate admission of failure: that even the Commander-in-Chief could not trust his own nation’s hospitals to save him.
This is not just about bad optics—it is about betrayal. Betrayal of public trust. Betrayal of the Nigerian doctor. Betrayal of the Constitution, which mandates public officials to develop public infrastructure, not desert it.
Medical tourism by politicians is a form of corruption. It is taxpayer-funded escape from responsibility. It is the final insult to Nigerians who must queue at under-equipped clinics, only to be referred to hospitals that don’t have electricity, gloves, or even paracetamol.
And the irony? The same people who run to London for cancer treatment do not even fix the power supply needed to run radiotherapy machines at home.
Enough is enough.
It’s time Nigerians rise and demand accountability. No politician should be allowed to access public funds for medical tourism. If they cannot use the same hospitals the masses use, then they have no business running the country.
Let their health reflect the health of the nation.
We must stop glorifying the London Clinic as a symbol of elite privilege and start fixing the National Hospital Abuja, LUTH, UNTH, AKTH, and the many others in dire need of revival.
Let Buhari’s death abroad not become just another name in a long list. Let it be the last straw. A nation where leaders die in foreign hospitals is a nation that has already buried its conscience.
And we must resurrect it—urgently.
— Noel Chiagorom, Columnist.
