President of the African School of Governance (ASG), Prof. Kingsley Moghalu says President Bola Tinubu has not shown serious and responsible governance by waiting until barely a year to the end of his administration to announce the appointment of ambassadors.
The ex-deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) made this assertion in a Facebook update on Monday following a newspaper report that the authorities of several countries have expressed unease about the prospect of receiving new ambassadors from Nigeria virtually one year to the end of tenure of President Tinubu.
While bemoaning the delay in the nomination of Nigeria’s prospective envoys, he explained that the standard practice is that the receiving countries would have to issue a formal “agreement” – a formal decision by the receiving country to accept credentials from the individual named as Ambassador.
According to him, the process of diplomats being welcomed by host countries takes several weeks to months at the earliest to be completed, resulting in a further extension of the time it would take the new ambassadors to get to work.
Moghalu said, “Even if not publicly stated, receiving countries will whisper their unease through various channels. For Nigeria to be in such a situation is bad for the image of our country, once regarded as a medium power in world politics and the undisputed numero uno in Africa.
“Our political leaders, most of them not famous for deep thinking or particularly knowledgeable about governance and diplomatic practices, and existing as we do in our own parallel universe in Nigeria in which we assume the rest of the world functions the way we do or don’t , are not sensitive enough to these kinds of things.
“The result is that our country loses out both on substance (e.g. the diplomatic lacuna in strategic capitals like Washington DC which contributed without question to the US military intervention against terrorists in Nigeria), and brand-wise.”
TopSociety reports that Moghalu argued that if President Tinubu was not ready to appoint Ambassadors in a timely manner, he should have allowed those appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari to remain at post for his first term of office.
By recalling the ambassadors in 2023 without replacing them immediately, “Tinubu left a dangerous lacuna that no leader conversant in statecraft should expose his or her country to,” he said, adding that “We have all seen that there are limits to the prioritisation of political buccaneering over hands-on governance and statecraft.”
The Board member of the International Security Conference on Africa (ISCA) observed that while the ambassadorial list has some decent people, the calibre and quality of several ambassadorial nominees range from the pedestrian to the ridiculous.
“This politicisation of governance, in which political considerations are the overriding motive behind most decisions by a government, has led to the death of merit in the governance of Nigeria. We all are the losers,” he said.
