A dearth of diplomacy and the decay of the Nigerian diplomat

Ademola Araoye

Ademola Araoye

Ademola Araoye
Ademola Araoye
Ademola Araoye

With foreign policy, it was easy to let sleeping dogs lie. Foreign policy is considered arcane and too far removed from the daily struggle of the individual. It therefor does not warrant more than a just cursory interest. Questions that often arise do not seem immediately germane even to the national struggle. The impact of foreign policy outcomes is not so obviously appreciated in even such life threatening convulsions as Boko Haram. If the Nigerian Army had done its job meritoriously in the first instance, neither would a beleaguered President Goodluck Jonathanhave gone to France, nor would President Muhammadu Buhari have proceeded to Paris so shortly after his inauguration into office. And the MTN affair, that brought President Jacob Zuma, came to Nigeria at a most inconvenient time for him, buffeted by many challenges at home. Strangely, rather than focus on extricating the MTN and the jittery community of South Africancorporate bodies owning over 120 enterprisesfrom potential sanctions by the Nigerian regulators of international businesses, Buhari and Zuma outdid themselves by signing a historic accord that begins serious bilateral collaboration in the defence sector. For some, it is the first and singular most constructive and transformative engagement between Abuja and Pretoria in the post settlement era in Southern Africa. That the consequences of Nigeria’s fiasco in the Ivorian crisis would remain with us in a long time to come and keep West Africans effectively divided and contained in the hegemonic pre carres is not a reality that keeps the average citizen awake all night. Indeed, in truth, foreign policy may sound so elitist, it touches the life of the ordinary citizen in many more ways than he can imagine.

Meanwhile, the South Africa/Nigerian defense accord has greater import than the upteemth 2063 Agenda of the African Union- a delegitimized body perpetually under the thumb of a continental coalition of largely discredited self-serving life-long monstrous traducers of African peoples across the many useless and unviable little fiefdoms that litter the continental political firmament.That agenda is a reproduction of the many versions of strategic templates that began with the Lagos Plan of Action in 1980. They are not meant to be implemented. Just like the early youthful leaders of Africa beholden to foreign powers that derailed the move towards a federated African state in 1963, in another fifty years the mainly despicable contemporary authors of the plan would be long dead to account for anything. Instead, should the joint bilateral offensive of South Africa and Nigeria work out, it should be beginnings of a new positive and constructive era in inter African relations. The pair, if they get into a lucky run of just a generation of good governance, should provide leadership as a nucleus of a new radical and transformative front that should challenge the construction of the African status quo, in terms the normative underpinnings and values on which inter African relations are anchored. Yet, these are not related to everyday existential struggles of Africans. A good Nigeria and South Africa would have to demand the reorientation of continental values and the impose the centrality of public continental good as against the current continental public loot as the norm. This applies to many of those who sit behind Africa’s many 56 useless flags in Addis Ababa and New York, representing themselves and their kleptomaniac families.

In this situation, foreign policy remains elusively arcane and the structures and institutions dedicated to the pursuit of foreign policy can go into decay, since that realm does not elicit critical public scrutiny. The show of shame at last week’s Senate confirmation hearing of Ambassadorial nominees issued from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reflected this decay. For many keen observers of Nigeria’s foreign and security policy formulation, especially the long descent of the foreign policy establishment into the very ghettoes of professionalism, it came as no surprise that the bunch of officers from the Ministry presented confirmed what was already well known. The Nigeria foreign policy system; structures and institutions, including in the Presidency, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its other intelligence affiliatesas well as the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs all need a radical restructuring. The objective would be to realign normative values underpinning Nigerian policy making and formulations in the context of evolved and emerging complexities in the sub-region, at the continental and global levels. The landscape has been radically altered by the unwavering consolidation of dominant and global elite hegemonic forces in West and Central Africa, dramatic transformations of the continental strategic landscape since the end of Apartheid and post settlement in Southern Africa, the realignment at multiple levels, in terms of crude power calculus in Europe and involving emergent elite forces in Asia, ideational and religio-civilizational conflicts, of dominant forces in the global system. On this canvass, amateurish approaches to policy is at the continued peril of the Nigerian state, especially given the state of uncertainties and flux of the Nigerian state itself. The cast of dramatic persona portrayed in the Senate Ambassadorial confirmation hearings do not seem equipped to meet contemporary challenges of Nigeria and Africa in today’s world.Also, the perfunctory approach of the confirmation process betrayed a lack rigor and did not demonstrate an appreciation of the seriousness of the whole enterprise of deep substantive engagement of contemporary Ambassadors and envoys in a diverse field of subjects that would be expected of a Nigerian Ambassador of today. The suspicion is that less than twenty percent of those who are paraded as Nigeria’s diplomats today, should ideally have nothing to do with a serious foreign Ministry. This is coming from someone who has his roots in the Nigerian Foreign Service and seen the operations of our Ministry from the inside and the internal operation procedures of our chanceries abroad from the inside. The picture is just not salutary. It was not always like this. The political class, from the Shehu Shagari administration, began the process of the decay of the Nigerian Foreign Ministry. Olusegun Obasanjo left a fairly robust Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the nation could be proud of when he left office on 1 October, 1979. The process of unravelling the Ministry began immediately after the Shehu Shagari administration took over. I witnessed the beginning of the decline of the Nigerian diplomat. I would deploy my personal odyssey to highlight the dolorous trajectory of the Ministry.

I credit my recruitment into the Foreign Service to the first foray of Olusegun Obasanjo as a military dictator in Nigeria’s public life. With acrimonious fights among the big families and names in the social and political register to fill the only 19 vacancies available in the Nigerian Foreign Service in mid-1978, my understanding is that Obasanjo had insisted that the Federal Civil Service Commission adhere strictly to the outcome of the interviews conducted across the nation and to respect the federal character in appointments into the then very competitive Ministry of External Affairs. I was one of the privileged nineteen appointees into the Foreign Service published in the national dailies about May 1979, as our fifth batch of National Youth Service Corpers rounded off our service year. However, with the military administration gone on 1 October, 1979, and the attendant dissipation of the discipline that guided recruitment of my set of 19, by December, 1979, the roll of new appointments into the service had swollen to over a hundred entrees. In subsequent years as the civilian class consolidated its hold on the public space, there seemed to be no rationale for recruitment of staff to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Foreign Service became a dumping ground as a quid pro quo for a great assortment of transacted political patronage. In many instances, appointments to the Ministry simply expressed the leverage of the mostly self-serving and irresponsible political actors to circumvent any institutional protocols to safeguard the integrity of the recruitment process or the continued functional credibility of public institutions, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Some of these wards of the preeminent of the political class, in most cases with significant intellectual deficiencies and with remarkable doubtful comportments, arrived in the Ministry clutching mere notes of introduction as cousins, nieces and, some averred, mistresses of the big names from various constituencies in the political calendar and the Almanacs of that administration. These political tradesmen also influenced the postings of their wards and cronies to the juiciest posts, especially to the High Commission in London. In one year, over three hundred new entrants, at all levels, were recruited. In the face of these aggravations, many young officers with promise and therefore credible alternative options outside the Ministry and in fact outside the country, began to leave the service. In the ensuing terrible drain of intellectual capital to which the Nigerian state had made great investment, bad money had chased away good money. I still recall that the best of our set of nineteen, in my evaluation, one Ms. Ukeje, was the first to defect from the Ministry. We had barely known each other. We lost two of our mates in tragic circumstances. Robert Adapoyi died in a 1979 tragic air crash of a Nigerian delegation to Sao Tome and Principe barely months of our inauguration into service. One of our own was shot dead in the mid-90s in Belgrade by a distraught Yugoslav who entered the Consulate to avenge his financial loss to a Nigerian fraudster whom, he alleged, had duped him. According to information that I received, since I had left the service at that point in time, his assassin’s goal was to kill the first Nigerian official he set his eyes on. One of us, a lady, defected when posted to Austria. In the untenable and suffocating environment of the Ministry, about ten of my set, including me, finally sought our fortunes and plied our careers elsewhere. We, so to say, achieved significant successes. As far as I know, just one of the original set, a dogged one that I respect, made it to an appointment as Ambassador. Of course, the system managed to retain quite a few brilliant officers who have shown resilience and persevered. The continued presence of that fewunder great odds among the hordes of political hangers on has enabled the Ministry to dubiously sustain the myth of its institutional formidability. Yet, given their antecedence, the hordes are better placed and do not shy from exploiting their political links to advance their careers at the expense of the endangered good officers. But the Ministry’s claim to having the best corps of officers in the federal civil service had been seriously deprecated.

The Foreign Service had largely been rendered junk. This unfortunate state of affairs has been reflected in the embarrassing dearth of quality in policy making process as old and experienced hands gave way to that generation of mostly politically driven discounted political appointees now at the helms of affairs in the Ministry. The rot in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is compounded by the peculiar Nigerian context, the federal character policy has in practice enthroned mediocrity as a euphemistic national mantra. It needn’t have been that way. For example, those in the know suggest that despite the defense put up by the Ministry and the Office of Secretary to the Federal Government, the political backers of one of the woeful performers at the Senate hearing had indeed supplanted the nomination of a more senior and better qualified officer from her state. As often in Nigeria, politics trumped competence. The question is, apart from dressing nicely, what level of performance at the substantive level, do you expect of Ambassadors of this caliber? The almost nil intellectual capital brought to office is a good predictor of the potential performance. As highlighted in the first paragraph there are significant, almost historic challenges, before every Nigeria envoy. The ones we see and interact with don’t make the cut. But it is not only with the Foreign Ministry. The problems are systemic. In this instance, since in the final analysis, the Presidency is responsible for foreign policy, a few observations in the regard are imperative.

The subject has been explored in the context of a recent intervention on Nigeria/South African problematic relations. The integration of common and inclusive African imperatives as the crucial foundations of a reconstructed and cultivated Africanist orientations and protocols of inter-state relations between Nigeria and South Africa, and in fact among all progressive elements on the continent, has long been overdue. Characterized by a lack of a rational, optimal strategic and synergic interaction for now, relations between South Africa and Nigeria falls far short of the basic minimum required to meet their common historic obligations.The interrogations affirmed that the normative groundings of the foreign and security policies of post-Apartheid South Africa and the Federal Republic of Nigeria are respectively ahistorical and therefore problematic. In the grand sweep of human affairs, in particular in relation to the fate of black humanity, the only legitimate raison d’etre of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and post-Apartheid Republic of South Africa is their shared destiny as the only credible nucleus of a vanguard of an African force or a continental alliance for holistic emancipation of black humanity. Between the two, they possess and complement each other, with roughly 21 per cent of the continent’s population, the basic minimum demographic threshold, common sentiments around the peculiar histories of their shared humanity, depth of political consciousness, the two biggest economies of the continent, technological and crude power requisites of a credible African force necessary for the consolidation of the disparate assets of the continent for meaningful change of the circumstances of Africa and black humanity. Behind Egypt (.3056) and Algeria (.4514), Nigeria (.7856) and South Africa (.8252) are placed third and fourth respectively in the rankings of African firepower. Their axiomatic and sacrosanct responsibility flowing from their preeminence essentially translates into leading, jointly and in a seamless manner, collaborative efforts of a coalition of progressive forces on the continent to change in a comprehensive manner the millennial existential realities of Africa and its peoples; political, cultural, economic and social. This mandate may also include realigning the distorted spirituality of Africans. When Nigeria and South Africa cooperate, they are more likely to deliver continental public goods, including economic development, peace and security. These together should meet the critical requirements for the pursuit of the emancipation of Africa and indeed black humanity. That is the quintessential historic challenge that has eluded policy formulation in these dominant two sub units of the African continental nationality. That is why relations between the two is always adrift in the pursuit of ephemeral objectives.

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Independence deepened Africa’s woes. The 1963 reactionary rejection of a visionary initiative to repudiate a balkanized Africa instituted by European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884 has proven to be a tragic antecedence of the curse of the African state system. The infamous compromise leading to the establishment of a loose organization in the Organization of African Unity consolidated the designs of imperial powers to ring fence a divided Africa in the service of their respective imperial interests. The decision has since haunted Africa. The Casablanca bloc, led by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, advanced the cause of a federation of all African countries. Other members of the bloc included Algeria, Guinea, Morocco, Egypt, Mali and Libya. Founded in 1961, its members were described as “progressive states”. The Monrovia bloc, led by the likes of Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, felt that unity should be achieved gradually through economic cooperation. This was a strategic decision to reject the unity of Africans and for the myopic leaders to protect their new privileged lives as heads of state. These men did not, at the instigation of their controllers in France and the United States, support the notion of an African federation. Other conservative states unenthusiastic about an African federation in 1963 were Nigeria, Liberia, and Ethiopia. The conservative bloc included most of the former French colonies. Since then Africa’s geo-political structure has not significantly been altered neither in response to the evolution of the global states-system nor in reaction to the glaring fact of the inadequacy of current configuration to advance Africa’s interests, especially honing it institutionally to enhance its own penetration and value extraction capacity. The African deleterious mindset is as firmly entrenched as in 1963.

Against this background, in the least, the historic obligations for South African and Nigerian policy is to impose and assure the emancipatory centrality of Africa in African affairs. This has proven elusive also because of divergent internal conjunctions expressed in sharp contrasts in the domestic political and economic environments that have impacted their foreign policy decisions and outcomes respectively. Despite mutually strenuous convictions of the immense value of attaining a harmonized and integrated operative understandings with each other, the preeminent salience of the formal policy of Afrocentricity and associated geo-regionally delineated concentricity that had guided a confident post-civil war Nigeria’s foreign policy in the golden era of the 1970s effectively fizzled out with the end of the Cold War. Some have codified that there has been a significant decline in the quality and efficacy of Nigeria’s foreign policy ever since the precipitous and continuing spiraling of the country’s economic crisis.

Some of the challenges identified in this connection include the unhealthy politicization of the Foreign Service, demoralization of the professional diplomatic cadres and poor funding of the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Questions have also been raised about the capacity and competence of more recent Foreign Ministers. To this may be added the questionable quality of expertise immediately available to the President, since advisory roles on arcane and technical subjects are often doled out as political patronage to undeserving political apparatchiks. The intellectual capital and ideo-philosophical appreciations brought to office these presidential appointees are very low and often completely non-existent. These all have diminished the analytical, ideational or conceptual underpinnings of Nigerian foreign and security policy. In its place and in response to and addressing pressing domestic agendas, has arisen such non-concepts as Economic diplomacy, Democracy police, Citizen centered diplomacy and a host of very limiting, limited and disaggregated thematic ballyhoos bereft of any sterling or substantive import for what before now had been Nigeria’s dynamic, proactive and robust Afrocentric policy. Incidentally, the former golden ages were driven by renowned intellectuals who served as Ministers of Foreign affairs.

Given the undercurrents of the world system and the main currents of global developments, including the very evolution and transformations of the states-systems and global society, the two states exist for no other cause other than to lead the movement for a renaissant African continent. Yet, the basic understandings emanating from the lessons of Africa from antiquity to contemporary times and as well reflected in the challenging tangential location of Africa in world affairs, has eluded policy makers in Abuja and Pretoria. Instead relations between South Africa and Nigeria have been built around conventional axioms, understandings and theoretical and conceptual frameworks that govern the inter-state system that are however, in the light of the millennial deficits of Africa, dubious as the basis of the much needed constructive, transcendental, transformatory and progressive interaction between the two leading African states.

In the face of this embarrassing dearth of the appreciation of the fundamental and transcendental challenges of the continent and the historic mandate of the two states, relations between Nigeria and South Africa have largely deviated from the meeting obligations defined by the peculiarities of Africa’s tortuous history and its travails with the hegemonic external world. The elemental nature of the current Nigeria and South Africa interactions as states and nations represent a great abdication of their shared natural destiny as the historic nucleus of a vanguard for holistic emancipation of black humanity. In its stead are policies in pursuit of mere vacuous ephemerals that have no real salience for changing in the long term the fundamental realities of Africa nor a structural realignment of global relations of black humanity with the dominant external order. Without the courage to adopt revolutionary tenets required to extricate Africa from its contrived stupor, Nigeria and South Africa are caught perpetuating an ancient web of Africa’s penchant for self-immolation. Indeed, the contextual strategic landscape and the continental order are daunting. Africa was broken at the nebulous independence of its riled political spaces that were configured to fail.

Contemporary policy setbacks reflect a weakened salience of critical and coherent interrogations of the conceptual pivots of Nigeria’s foreign policy. It illustrates a dearth or, worse still, a creeping repudiation of the compelling appreciations and the rationale of the dominant interpretive determinants of the historicity of black humanity and its ancestral location in Africa, the abandonment of authenticated historic impulses in favor of the ascendance of pragmatic political immediacy over long validated crucial integrationist impulses of Nigeria’s policy. In these circumstances, nationalist scapegoating has become a favored past time to rationalize chronic policy deficits. Nigeria has to transcend these challenges. A first step to begin to restructure the structures and institutions of foreign policy. The first ports of call should be the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Presidency. The elephant in the room, some might add, is the almost desiccated Nigerian Institute of International Affairs that has remained in an embarrassing season of drought for a very long time.

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