Vice President, Sen Kashim Shettima arrived in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital on Monday, April 29, for the International Development Association (IDA21) Heads of State Summit, on a chartered commercial private jet.
Shettima travelled to the East African country for the event to represent his principal, President Bola Tinubu, who is attending a World Economic Forum (WEF) session in Saudi Arabia.
A viral video on social media showed the moment Shettima descended from the commercial plane as Kenyan and Nigerian officials warmly welcomed him.
The vice president resorted to flying commercially after his official aircraft, the Gulfstream G550 class, sent to relieve Tinubu’s faulty Boeing 737 jet, also developed mechanical complications, resulting in an oxygen leak that nearly left the president stranded in the Netherlands last Friday.
TORI had reported that President Tinubu had to take a charter jet from the Netherlands to Saudi Arabia to avoid missing the World Economic Forum in Riyadh.
It was reported that Tinubu and some of his aides left Rotterdam on a Falcon 8X 9H-GRC private jet for the summit scheduled for April 28-29.
The rest, including several ministers and other high-ranking administration officials, made the trip on separate support aircraft and commercial airlines.
The aircraft, a Gulfstream G550 class, was originally dedicated to Shettima, which was also used by former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo.
However, the president used it on his foreign trip because his dedicated carrier, the Boeing 737 business jet class operated by the Nigerian Air Force 001, has been under maintenance for several weeks.
On March 25, the plane was taken to a maintenance facility at EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse-Freiburg, a commercial administrative region jointly controlled by France, Germany, and Switzerland. As of Saturday night, it had not been returned to Nigeria.
However, Shettima’s Gulfstream plane, which has previously been repaired, is now waiting in Saudi Arabia to fly Tinubu back to Nigeria after the economic conference on April 29.
