THE diplomatic mission’s thrusts of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and powerhouse, had been penetrating and eventful. It had endured and metamorphosed on the international relations rungs, sometimes undulating, but motivational enough to have spurred (continue to goad) African countries and black nations of the world, who perceive the country’s pivotal role, in the somewhat undulating turfs of diplomatic relations, where Nigeria continually pursues a ‘common African interest’.
Nigeria had recurrently played the ‘big brother’, since 1961, a year after her independence from the Great Britain, when her Foreign Affairs ministry, was ‘truly’ established for the fledgling country. Jaja Nwachukwu, a lawyer, politician and first speaker of the House of Representatives, got appointed as her first-ever Minister of Foreign Affairs and Commonwealth Relations.
Although the fiery Ghanaian and consummate pan-Africanist, Kwame Nkrumah, was then known as championing the cause of Africans, Nigeria had altered that, with Nnamdi Azikiwe (the Zik of Africa), who became the country’s president.
With President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on the saddle since about a year, there had been differing reactions to the non-appointment of envoys into vacant offices in her 109 worldwide diplomatic missions, comprising 76 embassies, 22 high commissions and 11 consulates. An embassy is a cluster of government bureaucrats, supervised by an ambassador, who represents his home-government in a foreign country. A high commission, headed by a high commissioner, is a diplomatic mission set up by a Commonwealth country in another Commonwealth country, while a consulate is an office block that supports an embassy in outside country.
Still on President Tinubu’s delay to fill the vacant positions caused by his withdrawal of former ambassadors, critics are angst that the world definitely sees Abuja as unable to run its missions, due to indecision, inertia, human and financial resource’s lack. They also believe that it portrays the country as feeble – incapable of protecting and tracking national interests abroad, making indigenes to suffer, especially when they are in need of their government outside of Nigeria. They as well argue that the country ignores to her detriment, the abundant prospects to influence useful decisions and wade off the usual threats in world polity. According to them, running embassies or diplomatic missions with knowledgeable and industrious ambassadors cannot be discretionary or sidestepped, and jettison national interests, negotiations, reporting and bilateral friendships that are key to everyday diplomatic relations.
Tactful global relations, when it evolves between nations of the world, are most ideal and evidently the wheel of progress, which inspires benign co-existence amongst nations, towards global peace and stability. Although diplomatic relations is age-long and has indefinite provenance, nevertheless, we are informed that the word ‘Diplomacy’, originated from Greece, but developed, globally, as Modern Diplomacy.
Most remarkably, the Diplomatic World Institute (DWI), a pioneered global organisation, which promotes diplomacy, readily cites an extra-terrestrial narrative that the genesis of diplomacy goes back to God, who sent from Heaven to Earth the Angels of God, as the first ‘Diplomats’. The ‘celestial argument’ also elongates it that man is a ‘diplomat by nature’. DWI added that in 31st December, 1919, the government of the Republic of Finland, by a note, had gotten the recognition of Czechoslovakia in April, 1920, with the country opening a consulate in September, 1923 in Helsinki, the Finnish capital city.
Irrefutably, the globally famous National Museums of Scotland, as well as numerous other verified independent sources, consolidated that the Portuguese, as far back as the 16th century, established important trade and diplomatic relations between Lisbon and Benin City (capital of the present-day Edo State of Nigeria), where both exchanged ambassadors.
So therefore, the practical tools of diplomacy – communication, meetings and formal agreements, trade and investment, military cooperation, assistance and aid, and others, wouldn’t all along be alien to the country.
According to the Vienna Convention, the exchange of diplomatic officers is relevant for facilitating alliances between states. Ambassadors or envoys as stand-in and trustees of a state in a host country (not as spies), have mutual forbearance, that information is convenient for both sides, which earn them the honours, appreciation and lawful influences, usually given to the country’s leader whom they symbolise. Flaws on the rules often result to ruined or non-existing bonds.
Desirably, the alibi for the delay in the appointments of envoys by the federal government would be perceived by many as fortunately. That sometimes, when a state does not promptly appoint diplomats into its vacant positions in foreign countries, it is understood not to be as a result of resentments. There would be the lame-duck excuse that the full-time administrative staff of the missions is capable of carrying on with the duties originally performed by the ambassadors or envoys, over such periods of unfilled vacancies or total absence of top diplomatic officers.
The pacifists would call it deft and strategic diplomatic reform moves, taking a precedent that the President Tinubu’s government is an adherent to reforms, hence the diagnosis to rejig a more realistic diplomatic policy and deeds.
Originally, the past three decades or thereabout, the world had had lulls in global diplomatic relationships, due to the globalisation fad, which Nigeria strives to surmount, being a chief architect and chief negotiator of peace for Africa and black nations. Also presently, a balkanized world of insidious conflicts, political and socio-economic differences, amongst blocks of nations, might have called for circumspection.
For a President Tinubu’s administration that must be habituated to thrifty governance, saving money in the running of the country’s foreign missions is imperative. And the prudential use of generated revenues from visa issuances and subvention to the missions should be a new order.
President Tinubu mustn’t go the long ritual of his predecessor, playing the delay game with ambassadorial appointments.
Tony Erha, a journalist and activist, writes from Abuja
