Nigeria’s ponderous diplomatic operations

The news broke last week that staff of our embassy in Washington DC, United States, have embarked on strike or a sit-in depending on the version of the story one read, to demand for their five months salaries, which have not been paid. Expectedly, our foreign affairs ministry under Geoffrey Jideofor Kwusike Onyeama, denied there was a strike. In typical diplomatese, its spokesperson, Clement Aduku, denied the closure of the embassy but admitted that some junior staff are truly owed salaries.

The statement issued in Abuja said a lot about us as a country. Routinely and across the land, both government and private establishments owe salaries without compunction. Probably, states that pay workers’ salaries promptly might be up to 10 among the 36, and the federal government is not exempted as well. But this is not about salaries, as important as they are. It is about how we are a pretentious country especially in relation to our diplomatic operations. Our embassies are always in the news for a myriad of bad stuff, ranging from salary arrears to inability to pay rents or school fees of diplomats’ children and below par maintenance of our buildings especially those that belong to us.

Last November while at New York to cover the American presidential elections, I decided to visit the Nigeria House, which houses our consulate at 828 2nd Ave. My friend and host was not enthusiastic about going to a place many Nigerians residing in New York have come to associate with inefficiency and sloppiness, but when I reminded him that my last visit there was as a graduate student in 2004 when I needed to renew my passport as I always resisted the urge to go there anytime I was in New York, he agreed. A further fillip came when his son needed our flag for a school project and having combed many places in the city without success, we headed there, a bad choice as we later discovered. The usual rowdy crowd was still there in front of the consulate, mostly Nigerians applying for passports all lamenting the routine tale of neglect and inefficiency we have come to accept as normal. We did not bother to ask for the flag again as we just mingled and spoke with a man selling Nigerian food from his van in front of the consulate.

It was not worth a story from my perspective as I remembered that as at that time, we did not even have a substantive ambassador in the United States. I think somebody must have been posted now and also to our UN Mission. Early in the life of the Buhari administration, our president embarked on visits to some countries seeking support for the new government. He secured some business deals in the process but follow up was prevented due to the lack of ambassadors in these countries to tie the loose ends of such deals. It took nearly two years of the administration to submit names of ambassador designates to the senate for screening and also to post them to their duty posts. In the process, some of those screened among the career ambassadors have come to the end of their careers on account of age. And while we love to pillory the senate for its tardiness, most times deservedly, we must ask questions also of how the foreign affairs ministry has been spending or maybe spent the extra budgetary allocation the senators approved to enable it take care of a shortfall in the ministry allocations to missions in 2016. What happened to the money? Released, withheld, or misappropriated? Further, are we putting our best materials forward in the selection and posting exercise of ambassadors?

When Mr. Onyeama was named in November 2015 as our topmost envoy, this column endorsed his appointment considering his background. Lawyer, polyglot, urbane, his work experience also put him in good stead for the job. One does not become deputy director-general of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) for fun, we thought. His time, however, has been a letdown. From the needless tiff with another appointee of the same government, he serves as minister over an issue he was negligent to slowness in responding to xenophobic attacks on Nigerians in South Africa that he flagrantly denied, he has not been a bright spot in this government. Granted some of the problems we face in our diplomatic operations predated his time, he does not seem interested in solving them. We can only hope he has not forgotten why he was appointed originally. By the way, must we keep embassies that we cannot maintain?