Our dysfunctional diplomats

One is not sure which of the two gaffes witnessed last week in our country was the worse in our diplomatic affairs history. First was the visit of the United States chief diplomat, John Kerry, and the meeting our ministry of foreign affairs had with ambassadors and heads of mission in Abuja on Friday. For an envoy of a lame duck government to be allowed to ride roughshod over us, a supposedly independent nation, like Mr. Kerry did on his parachute mission few days ago, shows that we have diplomats who are not versed in diplomatic protocols or who have simply forgotten what their duties are regarding foreign relations.

Truly, such absent mindedness in our foreign relations did not start with the Muhammadu Buhari government as we have always suffered an inferiority complex while dealing with other countries particularly United States and some European countries. This is not the first time that Kerry would behave like a headmaster that whenever he parades the classrooms corridors, all pupils must behave as he did it too in January last year. That was when he met with former President Goodluck Jonathan and candidate Buhari. I wrote a piece then querying why Jonathan agreed to meet with him in Lagos and not Abuja, the seat of our government. Television footage of the encounters shocked me too because we saw Kerry patting our president on the back and Jonathan kept on smiling and you wonder whether he was properly briefed. Even if you are an envoy of your country’s president, you are not the president and cannot be treated as such. Immediately after that encounter, Kerry left Nigeria.

That culture of bullying continued last week when Kerry was in town as he went straight to Sokoto without seeing president Buhari first. Very embarrassing and one wonders who signed off on such breach of protocol. I made enquiries to confirm if such breach has now become the norm in diplomacy and all who spoke to me, retired and serving diplomats, said no. So how come that under the watch of people in the foreign affairs ministry we allowed such to happen? Fine, the US major focus is now on the war on terror and every ally in that war is needed but how does a guest meet with others in his host country without talking to the host first? It is even possible that the sultan has had a change of heart and is now on the people’s side concerning the battle against Boko Haram that the United States consider him an ally as his first public comment on the terror group in July 2011 was actually a condemnation of the military crackdown on the group. “We cannot solve violence with violence,” Mohamed Sa’ad Abubakar told a meeting of religious leaders as reported here http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-14342863

While I cannot confirm whether foreign affairs ministry officials in Sokoto received Kerry, he went ahead to meet with the 19 governors of northern states without meeting with any governor from the south. This, at a time when our fault lines are deepening and suspicion perhaps the highest, suggest insensitivity and absolute disregard for other peoples’ feelings. These, however, pale into insignificance when after meeting Buhari, Kerry left without briefing the media. Could you imagine somebody visiting Barrack Obama at the White House without a briefing by the American president’s media aides even if the visitor left without saying a word? Unfortunately, journalists covering Aso Villa did not see this as newsworthy enough to dig deeper and find out at whose request such happened in a democracy. Even if Kerry had something to hide, is Nigeria hiding stuff from her citizens as well? Do this not feed into the word among diplomatic circles in Abuja that Nigeria has become the 51^st state of the US under this present government?

I nearly somersaulted listening to Ambassador Olusola Enikanolaye when he warned ambassadors against violating the diplomatic channel between them and Nigeria. The permanent secretary of foreign affairs ministry goofed further when he said, “I am aware that we need to put our house in order in the ministry. And this is what we are already doing by ensuring that we respond quickly, proactively to your requests to your note verbal. Once we do this, there will be no reason for you to go above us to get things done.” Would this not have been better done discreetly rather than dancing naked in the public? Does Mr. Enikanolaye now think that this would get the much-needed respect from the envoys after he admitted that they ought to put their house in order? How much of diplomatic work actually do the foreign affairs ministry engages in these days? Is there no institutional memory left in that ministry on how to do things properly?

We might not be where we ought to be as a nation, but we need not lose self-respect in our march to development.