Africa: Nigeria and Ghana Name Ambassadors to Washington; Key U.S. Appointments Await Senate Action

19 April 2004
allAfrica.com

Washington, DC — Long vacancies in several key ambassadorial posts are about to be filled in both Washington and several African capitals.

Nigeria, which has not had a top-level envoy in Washington since August, is sending George Obiozor, a political appointee who has served as Nigeria's ambassador to Israel. President Bush's nominee as ambassador to Nigeria, John Campbell, moved closer to assuming that post with an appearance earlier this month before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His confirmation awaits a vote by the committee and the full Senate, probably sometime in May.

Campbell has been serving as deputy assistant secretary of State for Human Resources and was political counselor in Nigeria from 1988 to1990 and in South Africa from 1993 to 1996. Two other U.S. ambassadorial choices that also appeared before the Foreign Relations Committee on April 7 are Marc M. Wall (Chad), who has been director of the African Affairs Bureau's Economic Policy Staff, and Scott H. DeLisi (Eritrea), who has been director for Southern Africa. Roger Meece, who is serving as interim ambassador to Nigeria, has been named envoy to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa).

Meanwhile, Ghanaian President John Kufuor has selected as his ambassador to Washington Felix Boku, an experienced diplomat who served previously as ambassador in Switzerland, where he handled both bilateral and multilateral issues. He is expected to arrive in Washington in June. Isaac Aggrey has been acting Ghanaian ambassador since Alan Kyerematen left last year after being named by President John Kofuor as minister of Trade and Industry and the President's Special Initiatives.

Nigeria's Obiozor replaces a career diplomat, Augustine A. Agada, a former ambassador to Cameroon, who retired in August after serving first as the number two official in the Washington embassy and then as interim ambassador following the departure of Professor Jibril Muhammad Aminu early last year. Aminu now serves in the Nigerian Senate, following a successful campaign in the May 2003 election. Obiozor, who has a PhD from Columbia University in New York, is the author of several books published in the 1980s and early 1990s on U.S./Nigerian relations and foreign policy.

The U.S. Senate is also slated to hold hearings in the coming weeks for several other nominees for Africa-related policy positions. Constance Berry Newman, who has been tapped by President Bush as assistant secretary of State for African Affairs, and Jendayi Frazer, who the President named as his ambassador to South Africa are both moving through the cumbersome clearance process.

Newman is currently the head of the Africa Bureau at the U.S. Agency for International Development and Frazer is the senior director for Africa at the National Security Council, the White House body that coordinates foreign policy for the president. Changes at the top have left the Africa Bureau at the State Department operating with one less senior official than usual, following the departure last October of Assistant Secretary Walter Kansteiner, who resigned to return to the private sector. His former principal deputy, Charles Snyder, who has had a long career as an Africanist in the Department, has been serving as acting assistant secretary, working with two deputies, rather than the allotted three - Pamela Bridgewater and Don Yamamoto.

Snyder's future role after Newman is confirmed remains unclear, and Bridgewater, who is responsible for the volatile West Africa region as well as the Bureau's public outreach, will leave in August to become diplomat in residence at Howard University.

At the White House, no successor for Jendayi Frazer has been named. Frazer and Meece are two of eight newly appointed ambassadors to Africa posts going through Senate confirmation. Others include nominees for Sierra Leone (Thomas Neil Hull, III), Swaziland (Lewis William Lucke), Gambia (Joseph D. Stafford, III), Cote d'Ivoire (Aubrey Hooks) and Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea (R. Niels Marquardt).

Eight additional U.S. ambassadorial posts in Africa will be filled over the summer.

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