Adekunle Adekoya
9 November 2008
(Page 2 of 2)
There is the problem of inadequate funding for our missions abroad to the extent that many of them can hardly live up to the billing of a mission, and are thus hampered in executing their schedules....
You are right in that but I think the solution is probably to reduce the number of missions. You know I served in some kind of advisory position during the Obasanjo regime. Then he created what he called Presidential Advisory Council on Foreign Relations; I was a member of that council and we recommended to him the pruning down of the number of missions abroad, reducing the number of staff in each of the missions so that whatever resources we have can be well managed. There's also the problem of corruption in some of the missions.
You know there are political appointees in many of these missions. Politicians don't seem to be bound by civil service rules - how to spend money, how to manage money and one of the things that happened during the Obasanjo regime was that while we were recommending to him to prune down foreign missions and he seems to have accepted, he also expanded it at the same time. He created more; like the ones in Hungary and Singapore. Singapore from Malaysia is only one hour by air; so what was the point of having a new mission in Singapore since the mission in Malaysia can conveniently cover Singapore?
If you have this same money being shared out by several missions, you know you are going to have problem; so the solution is to prune down. I was ambassador in Germany from 1991-1995. This problem we had then, so this is a problem that has a long gestation period. It's been on for almost 20 years and, during the Obasanjo regime, I remember that, after giving the foreign missions their normal budget, there's another $100 million to pay up the debt of those missions, but as they were being paid up, new debts kept coming in and also there was this problem of corruption.
The way to tackle it is to critically look at the missions and see which ones you can remove. I actually prepared a paper for the president one this particular thing. Let me give you an example, we have missions in Havana (Cuba), Trinidad & Tobago, Jamaica, Venezuela, Brazil, you look at the missions we have in all those islands, they are all in the same basin, just one hour or so from each other. In the US, apart from having the embassy in Washington, of course, there's nothing you can do about the permanent mission, it's a separate mission, we have a consulate-general in New York, another in Atlanta. We closed the one in San Francisco and had the one in Atlanta. These things can be rationalised.
If we look at even small Switzerland, we have a mission in Bern, which is to be in control of Switzerland, then we have another one in Geneva. Is it not possible to cover the one in Bern from Berlin? Why do we need to have a mission in Vienna, another one in Hungary?
We can reduce the missions and still be effective. As I told you, we have one in Malaysia, we now have another one in Singapore. They are just too many in the same area, we have to tailor our resources for the purpose we want to achieve. Of course, I know civil servants will want us to have a thousand missions so they can be posted all over the world but the money is not there.
Coming back to the issue of politicians and political appointment in the diplomatic service, how do you think those ones have fared in the execution of foreign policy objectives in the missions to which they are posted compared to career diplomats?
It depends on the quality of the politician. If you appoint a quality politician, if he knows what to do, he can be more effective than a career man. A career man is limited by deference to protocol, to civil service rules; he's afraid to state his mind or state the position.
If Nigerians are being killed for example in France, a typical professional diplomat will not come out with frankness to say this is wrong; he will start finding excuses like, maybe the Nigerians themselves are not behaving properly, whereas a politician will speak out his mind and call it racism if he thinks it is racism. It depends on the quality of the politician. But there are some cases in which people, who have never held a passport in their lives, who've never been out of Nigeria, who've never been to Benin Republic or Ghana, suddenly find themselves being appointed ambassador.
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