Unlike other years, President Muhammadu Buhari who turned 79 years on Friday, December 17, celebrated his birthday outside Nigeria, precisely in distant Istanbul, Turkey.

In his statement on Friday, Garba Shehu, a presidential media aide, disclosed that the president cut a birthday cake that was molded in green-white-green to start the day.

Shehu said President Buhari afterward went straight to chair a planning meeting with officials in his delegation and thereafter drove to the Dolmabahce Palace for a meeting with his Turkish counterpart, Tayyip Recep Erdogan.

Revealing further, the media aide said Buhari responded to the tribute to him rendered by the leader of the delegates who accompanied him, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, by saying he will put in his best for Nigeria until the last day when in 2023 he hands over to a successor and returns to his farm to tender crops and livestock.

Buhari was quoted to have said:

“I thought that being away from Abuja I will escape these things. The Guards Brigade had written to tell me what they wanted to do on this day. Now here you are doing this far away from home.
“I look forward to the year 2023 when I finish, to go home to take charge of my farm. Between now and that time, I will do the best that is possible to advance the interest of the nation and its people, and carry out my duties as prescribed by the Constitution.”

Shehu added that just when the president stepped out of his suite moving to the meeting room, he met a surprise lineup of the Nigerian delegation with a cake decorated in Nigeria’s national colours.

Photos of the lovely cakes are seen below in the Facebook post shared by Femi Adesina, another media aide to the president: