Nigeria’s toothless diplomacy

…also published in Daily Trust

It’s a pity that the name “Nigeria” trends mostly in negative contexts thanks to its particularly bizarre instances of leadership failure, and the wrongdoings of some of its citizens engaged in various acts of crime in different countries around the world.

This explains the country’s particularly damaging notoriety among nations and indeed explains why foreign governments and international diplomatic bodies hardly take it seriously. It equally explains why the few international corporations that take the risk of doing business in the country practically operate on their own terms capitalizing on the country’s lack of or limited alternatives; as they also largely operate as accomplices to corrupt government officials in the systematic thievery of the country’s resources.

  

Consequently, Nigerians have been unfairly stereotyped the world over. The principle of the presumption of the innocence of a person until proved otherwise is applied the other way round when the person involved happens to be a Nigerian who is hardly given even the benefit of the doubt.

Instances of prejudiced treatment against Nigerians in other countries range from subtle to blatant, depending on the situation, the person(s) involved and other circumstances. It isn’t uncommon, for instance, to witness an incident in any foreign airport whereby a traveller(s) is singled out for in-depth security checks in the full glare of hundreds of other travellers, simply because he holds a Nigerian passport, which sadly is already barely respected by foreign immigration officials especially when it contains no visa of any other influential or respectable country.

Anyway, having had to live with the “stigma” of being Nigerians, many innocent travelling and hardworking foreign-based Nigerians struggle harder than necessary to win the benefit of the doubt, which they then painstakingly nurture with compromises and even sacrifices to win trust over time. After all, there are indeed many Nigerians abroad who constitute serious social nuisance and security threat to their respective host countries, which provides the security personnel out there with the pretext to indiscriminately harass Nigerians, and indeed provokes indiscriminate mob actions against them from the locals, as it recently occurred in South Africa.

Now, though Nigerians have rightly criticized successive federal governments’ failure to address and arrest Nigeria’s persistently diminishing worth in the eyes of the world and its implications on the dignity and interest of its citizens, not many Nigerians realize that successive governments, particularly over the past two decades, have been simply constrained by self-inflicted helplessness to address the situation.

As most of Nigeria’s instances of decline, Nigeria’s robust, dynamic and effective post-independence diplomacy began to decline following the 1966 failed military coup attempt, which sowed the seeds of the subsequent three-year-long civil war in the country. However, since the decline of Nigeria’s influence and, by implication, its diplomacy, the situation ironically only began to degenerate into absolute hopelessness following the country’s hugely celebrated return to democracy in 1999. And since then Nigerians have always been left extremely disappointed when a situation arises that requires urgent and resolute diplomatic measures and effective public relations to address.

Over the period in question, in particular, successive Nigerian governments have been too simplistic, if not clueless, in their diplomatic approaches. With no clearly defined foreign policy, their approach to diplomacy has been too literal; they have operated apparently under the assumption that diplomacy is all about persuasion achieved through mere diplomatic sweet-talking and official visits.

Their approach to diplomacy has always suggested inexcusable cluelessness of the simple fact that that the real business of diplomacy is, in reality, practised contrary to what the relevant theories contained in academic books teach. They have acted as though oblivious of the fact that in diplomacy nothing is given or achieved for free, hence a country’s ability to get what it wants or secure its interest in a bilateral or multilateral engagement depends on its ability to deploy and leverage whatever coercive or persuasive tools it possesses to extort compromises and concessions from the party(ies), and/or entice them with tempting incentives. 

Worse still, successive federal governments over the period in question particularly have equally mismanaged, neglected or squandered the tools and potential that this government or any government in the foreseeable future for that matter can leverage to reposition the country’s diplomacy.

In the oil sector, for instance, where Nigeria’s most important natural resources are managed, and which is supposed to represent the country’s most vital tool to leverage in its diplomatic engagements, the federal government barely maintains control on the operations of its multinational partners, because the joint venture agreements were apparently deliberately formulated to ensure just that, of course with the connivance of their Nigerian accomplices among some political officeholders and civil servants who have always been compromised with massive inducements.

Likewise, in its diplomatic pursuits, the federal government is too constrained to leverage the huge foreign investments in the country’s other strategic economic sectors e.g. communications and aviation, due to similar acts of corruption involving some powerful government officials.  

Of course, in the face of government’s failure to leverage its existing resources in this regard, one wouldn’t even expect it to leverage the country’s strategic potential in other fields.   

As long as things continue this way, Nigeria’s diplomacy will certainly remain toothless hence ineffective in the face of the growing measures from other countries that jeopardize Nigeria’s interest, and indeed in the face of the growing practices of prejudiced treatment and harassment against innocent Nigerians around the world.