President Tinubu’s planned trip to the US has been canceled; a presidency source says the G-20 summit in South Africa is now the “viable opportunity” for talks with Donald Trump.
Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s reported trip to the United States to address diplomatic friction with the Donald Trump administration has been aborted, according to SaharaReporters reporting on Monday morning.
Top sources informed the newspaper that while “conversations between the US and Nigeria are ongoing,” a “face-to-face meeting is not yet on the cards.”
”Rather there is an invitation on the cards for Tinubu to attend the G-20 summit on November 20 in Durban, South Africa where a likely meeting between Tinubu and Trump is a possibility,” a presidency source noted.
This shift comes after the President’s Media Aide, Daniel Bwala, previously asserted that Tinubu and Trump were expected to meet soon, sharing a “common vision in combating terrorism and protecting humanity from violent extremism.”
Bwala’s earlier statement followed President Trump’s designation of Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” and his warning that the U.S. military may intervene if the “killing of Christians” in the country does not cease, threatening to go “guns-a-blazing.”
The Nigerian Presidency, however, issued a statement on Saturday denying “such genocide,” with Tinubu stressing that Nigeria’s constitution “enshrines the protection of religious rights” and that the “characterisation of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality.”
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