For most Nigerians, the recent furore over President Umaru Yar'Adua's latest visit to Saudi Arabia speaks volumes about Nigeria's carelessness in virtually all matters that have to do with prioritisation of issues of national interest. The trip, according to many, is a miscalculation reserved only for leaders who are insensitive to their peoples' plight and well -being.

Yar'Adua was last week reported to have gone to the oil - rich Middle East country, where he and King Abdallah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia commissioned a University of Science and Technology named after the monarch in Jeddah on Thursday, September 24. Many Nigerians are obviously unhappy that the President was comfortable at such a ceremony, at a time when public tertiary institutions back home have remained shut for three months.

Since June, Nigeria's lecturers have kept away from the lecture rooms due to the lingering industrial action they have embarked upon to press home demands for better funding of these institutions and improved welfare for tertiary teachers. Those grieved by to the pathetic state of the country's educational sector have been reacting.

For instance, the Action Congress (AC), through its national publicity secretary, Lai Mohammed, called it a joke on President Yar'Adua. He said, "Whoever advised him to accept the invitation to be a special guest of honour at the opening of the new university in Saudi (Arabia) at this time has done him a great disservice."

To a Lagos -based activist lawyer, Chinua Asuzu, the trip portrays Yar'Adua as a tactless President. "For me the main blame on the education sector for now should go to the Minister of Education, Sam Egwu, who seems confused on the way out," the lawyer said. "But again, one is not sure if the President had not gone on the trip for medical reasons. Don't forget that his doctors are in that country. Yet, if you ask me, I think Yar'Adua should have been more concerned with the situation on our own campuses than celebrating abroad what he could not fix at home."

Unfortunately, this was not the first time the President was jetting out in a time of crisis. He did the same at the peak of violence raging in some Northern states two months ago, when bloodletting fuelled by an extremist Muslim sect known as Boko Haram was deepening. His destination then was Brazil.

Sadly, this attitude seems to be the signpost of Nigeria's leaders. In 1983, for example, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) had broken the news that the Nigerian External Telecommunications (NET) headquarters building in Lagos, the then national capital, was on fire. Inexplicably, President Shehu Shagari had pressed ahead with his trip to India.

Unlike the country's leaders, however, the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, cut short a similar visit to Italy for the G8 Summit following the outbreak of ethnic violence in the city of Urumgi in the country's Xinjiang Province on July 8.

Yar'Adua, born 58 years ago in Kastina, Kastina State, is the first Nigerian leader to have succeeded another democratically elected civilian leader, since independence, after winning a controversial poll in April, 2007. He was a lecturer in Chemistry before venturing into politics, where many had expected him to appreciate the dilemma in the education sector better than his predecessors.