It is a strange thing to wake up in a country and feel like everyone in charge has travelled.
Not metaphorically. Physically.
You scan the news and realise that a good number of the people who are supposed to be holding the centre together are somewhere else entirely, dressed for ceremony, shaking hands, attending a royal visit at Buckingham Palace under the watch of Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
And you begin to ask a simple question, almost casually at first. Who exactly is left in town?
Because this is not just about one trip. Leaders travel. Diplomacy is part of the job. No one is arguing that Nigeria should retreat into itself.
But there are moments when presence becomes more than protocol. Moments when where you are matters as much as what you say. Moments when a country, stretched thin by too many pressures at once, needs to feel that those in charge are not far away.
This feels like one of those moments.
The Minister of Defence is there. At a time when in parts of the North East, people still rebuild lives interrupted without warning. In the North West, entire communities have learned to live carefully, measuring safety in silence, in instinct, in the uneasy calm that comes before uncertainty returns. These are not distant headlines. They are ongoing realities.
And yet, the country’s chief custodian of security is present at a ceremony.
You pause and ask, not angrily but plainly. What could not wait?
Then you look at the economic front.
The Minister of Finance is there. The Minister of State for Finance is there too, still settling into the office, still finding footing in a system already under strain. Both away while the cost of living continues its quiet climb, while markets rewrite prices between morning and evening, while families sit at tables doing new arithmetic with old incomes.
And again, the question returns. Who is left in town?
Because governance is not theory. It is not something that exists only in policy documents and press releases. It is presence. It is proximity. It is the assurance that when things shift suddenly, when pressure builds, when decisions need to be made in real time, the people entrusted with that responsibility are within reach.
And then the list stretches.
Senior aides. Policy advisers. Political appointees whose roles do not demand attendance at a royal visit but who are there nonetheless. Layers of protocol, communication teams, extended entourages. The kind of presence that, in another context, might pass without notice, but in this moment begins to feel like something else entirely.
Not necessity.
But excess.
And slowly, what looked like a routine trip begins to take on a different shape.
Not just a delegation.
But a thinning out.
A quiet dispersal of attention at a time when attention feels like one of the few things the country cannot afford to lose.
Somewhere in the North East, a farmer decides not to return to his land this season because the risk has become a calculation he can no longer win. Somewhere in the North West, a mother teaches her children to recognise the difference between ordinary noise and the kind that means they should stay very still. These are not dramatic scenes. They are everyday adjustments, repeated until they become normal.
This is the country that stayed behind.
Buckingham Palace is many things. It is history. It is prestige. It is ceremony refined over centuries. But it is not urgency. It is not the restless energy of a nation trying to steady itself. It is not the quiet tension that now sits beneath ordinary life.
And yet that is where they went. In numbers.
That is what lingers. Not the trip itself, but its weight. The sense that too many people who should have been here chose, or were allowed, to be elsewhere at the same time.
One imagines the offices back home. Not entirely empty, but not quite full either. Decisions slowed. Urgency diluted. The subtle but real distance that grows when leadership is no longer physically or psychologically present.
Of course, a country does not stop because its officials travel. Systems remain. Structures endure.
But systems do not reassure people.
Presence does.
And in this moment, presence travelled.
There is always an official explanation for these things. There is always a schedule, a justification, a carefully arranged list of engagements that make the trip appear necessary, even important.
But outside of that explanation, there is perception.
And perception, in a country already carrying so much, is not a small thing.
It is the difference between feeling seen and feeling abandoned.
So the question remains, no longer casual, no longer rhetorical.
Who is left in town?
Who is close enough to feel the weight of things as they are, not as briefings, not as summaries, but as something immediate and pressing?
Because leadership is not only tested by decisions.
It is tested by presence.
By the simple, unspoken assurance that when it matters, you are here.
And in this moment, that assurance felt thin.
When Nigerians looked for leadership, they did not find it missing.
They found it elsewhere.
Stephanie Shaakaa
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