Iron axe called viceroys’ list

By Kunle Somorin

There was a time – now embalmed in the sepulchre of national amnesia – when the word ‘diplomat’ evoked a statesman, not a showman. He was a figure of quiet gravitas, fluent in the dialects of discretion, clothed not merely in tailored suits or babariga but in the invisible regalia of statecraft. He did not arrive at foreign missions with a convoy of sycophants or a playlist of Fuji, Apala or Afro‑Calypso beats. He arrived with poise, with purpose, and with the solemnity befitting one entrusted with the delicate choreography of international relations.

That era, like so many noble things in Nigeria, has been buried beneath the rubble of political expediency and the glittering debris of notoriety. We now live in a time when the fear, whispered long before the list appeared, was that our next envoys would be less stewards of foreign policy than survivors of domestic scandal – negotiators of tantrums rather than treaties; not career envoys but career entertainers – or worse, political jobbers – blocking ambassadorial driveways with convoys and insisting on singing the national anthem in Fuji tempo, preferably off‑key and on Instagram Live.

The ambassadorial list took too long in coming. In September 2023, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu recalled Nigerian ambassadors from foreign missions, citing the need to ‘restructure’ the Foreign Service. Over a hundred posts were affected; for an extended stretch, many missions operated without substantive heads.

The official explanation was reform; the unofficial reality looked like inertia – bureaucratic paralysis dressed up as strategic foresight. In the vacuum, rumour replaced policy. Most devastating was the framing of the nation’s seemingly intractable security challenge as ‘Christian genocide’, which drew a threat of military action from President Donald Trump.

The ruling party’s machinery appeared to audition a new class of envoys, not chiefly from the ranks of seasoned diplomats, but from the gallery of notoriety. The submission of nominees in tranches to the National Assembly was meant to signal deliberation; instead, it suggested hesitation – whispers of bargaining, of loyalty rewarded, of competence sidelined. Leaderless embassies became hollowed chapels of neglect. Citizens abroad felt unprotected, trade negotiations drifted into pending trays, and Nigeria’s voice in international fora grew faint, like a chorus forgotten by its own orchestra.

We have, by slow degrees, cultivated a creed of convenient absolution. A political slogan, uttered in a moment of candour, hardened into a philosophy: once you join the right party, your past sins are forgiven. It did not sound like a slip; it sounded like a manifesto. And so public misconduct has, in the rumour mills, been transfigured into a résumé.

When, as widely reported, a music icon and the President’s unofficial griot, King Wasiu Ayinde Marshall, disrupted a flight and assaulted airport personnel, there was little sign of censure. Instead, public commentary joked – all too plausibly – that he has been appointed Ambassador for Airport Decorum, as though irony were now a policy instrument.

When reports surfaced of another passenger, Comfort Emmason, assaulting airline crew in a fit of airborne entitlement, the rumour mill promptly imagined a fast track to prominence. The logic is as circular as it is cynical: those who misbehave most publicly are somehow best suited to instruct the rest of us. It is the equivalent of appointing a pyromaniac as Fire Marshal or a kleptomaniac as Chief Auditor. We are told to suspend disbelief, then asked to applaud.

The theatre widened with names bandied about before the National Assembly: while the first three might be called statesmen in their own right, there followed a mixed procession of career diplomats and politicians, decampees and acolytes of power. The ambassadorial list emerged as a curious cocktail of 65 career diplomats and politicians – among them PDP defectors, former governors like Okezie Ikpeazu, Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi and Senator Jimoh Ibrahim, alongside turncoat critics such as Reno Omokri, Femi Fani‑Kayode and Professor Mahmud Yakubu.

Each name is less a credential than a controversy: Ibrahim, critics say, confuses commerce with diplomacy; Omokri mistakes hashtags for treaties; with Fani‑Kayode, we risk turning negotiations into tirades; while Yakubu still carries the burden of contested elections into fragile diplomatic terrain. Their appointment, cynics argue, signals not competence but compensation – rewarding loyalty and notoriety rather than merit and integrity.

Yet this is only half the tale. Many on the list – especially career officers – have acquitted themselves with quiet honour in difficult theatres. They are the men and women who extract visas from reluctant bureaucracies, negotiate market access for our goods, translate the prickly grammar of multilateral committees into practical gains, and hold vigil for stranded Nigerians in far‑off airports while the rest of us sleep.

They do not trend; they toil. They do not hold press conferences; they hold their nerve. But they are too often asked to carry, on stooped shoulders, a system that dismisses discretion as timidity and sells showmanship as competence. Nigeria can do better – for them, and through them. But not while a few unprincipled and unstable characters remain on the list.

The deeper crisis is not merely who is posted; it is what our diplomacy has become. The debate over Nigeria’s ‘quietened diplomacy’ – a diplomacy that whispers when it should speak, that treads water when it should wade into currents – negates our role and status as the largest Black nation on earth. That phrase must be more than a boast; it must be a burden. Demography confers expectation. Diaspora communities look to Abuja for defence and dignity. African partners expect steadiness, not oscillation. Global powers listen for coherence: can this nation of immense potential speak with a voice that matches its weight? A quietened diplomacy is not prudence; it is abdication disguised as caution. Silence is not strategy; it is surrender by another name.

The costs are measurable. In economic diplomacy, silence is a forfeiture. The African Continental Free Trade Area will not sell itself to us; we must court it, shape it, and litigate in its chambers when necessary. Investors do not merely read our indices; they read our envoys. Delays in appointments, the glare of notoriety, or the fog of mixed messages erode confidence. In regional security, quiet becomes complicity.

As the Sahel bleeds and the Gulf of Guinea frets between piracy and patrols, Nigeria’s absence from the design of solutions invites external actors to set the agenda at our expense. In diaspora affairs, quiet becomes abandonment. When Nigerians are in distress abroad, they deserve consular care that is prompt, visible, and competent; the absence of it chips away at trust. In multilateral arenas, quiet amounts to invisibility. The world’s rules are written by those who show up – early, prepared, and persistent. Committee rooms reward patience and presence; they punish flair without follow‑through.

It was not always so. Nigeria once swung an iron axe in the diplomacy of consequence. Our best traditions were forged in an iron furnace of purpose, not in a golden hall of vanity. From Jaja Wachuku’s early stewardship at the United Nations and our moral clarity against colonialism to the Murtala–Obasanjo activism that made Lagos a capital of anti‑apartheid solidarity, Nigeria built a reputation for principled leadership.

We midwifed ECOWAS and led ECOMOG stabilisation in Liberia and Sierra Leone when others hesitated. We took our pain to law in the Bakassi dispute and honoured the judgement – expensive, humbling, but dignified. Our multilateral presence has been embodied by figures whose names require no embroidery: Emeka Anyaoku at the Commonwealth, Amina J. Mohammed at the United Nations, Ngozi Okonjo‑Iweala at the World Trade Organization, Ibrahim Gambari in peace and security, Joy Ogwu at the Security Council. These are chapters, not footnotes, in the story of a country that once understood the difference between a microphone and a mandate.

But let us not miss the argument. Ambassadors are the president’s viceroys, his alter ego, and his recording consciousness. They speak for and with him on his policy thrusts and his intentions for the people whose mandate he holds. They do not and MUST not be misconstrued to be our finest and best. No.

It is here that the fable speaks. In one of Aesop’s lesser‑known but luminously instructive fables, a humble farmer loses his iron axe in a forest well. Distraught, he kneels and prays – not for wealth, not for power, but for the return of what he made with his own hands. Moved by his sincerity, Hermes, the messenger of the gods, appears and offers him three axes: one of gold, one of silver, and one of iron.

The farmer examines them. The golden axe dazzles with opulence, the silver gleams with elegance, but the iron axe – rough, worn, and unremarkable – is the one he forged in his furnace, shaped by his sweat, and wielded with purpose. He chooses the iron axe, declaring, ‘This is mine. I made it. It is not as beautiful, but it is true.’ Hermes, pleased by the farmer’s honesty and self‑awareness, rewards him with all three.

The moral is familiar: integrity is rewarded; what we build ourselves surpasses the allure of what is merely offered. Beneath the moral lies a deeper metaphysic. The farmer’s choice is not only ethical; it is existential. He chooses the instrument that embodies his labour, identity, and agency. He rejects the seductive but alien implements of power. He chooses what is his, not what glitters.

Another tale whispers from the margins of old kingdoms: a lion, weary of the burdens of rule, appoints the hyena as his emissary to the forest. The hyena, ever eager to please, dances and cackles across the canopy, spreading confusion where clarity is needed and fear where friendship is sought. The animals, once respectful of the lion’s court, begin to laugh behind his back.

The lion, mistaking antics for diplomacy, trades respect for entertainment and dignity for derision. When the forest erupts in chaos and alliances turn to ash, he realises too late that he has sent mirth to do the work of meaning. Nigeria, in its current trajectory, risks becoming that lion. The world is not a forest of fools; it is a theatre of interests. Missteps are not forgiven; they are exploited.

None of this negates the president’s prerogative. In our constitutional order, the choice of ambassadors is, in the first instance, the president’s to make. He may weigh politics, reward loyalty, balance geography, and correct the ledger of favours owed. But prerogative is not plenary. It is bounded by process and tempered by prudence. Names proceed to security screening; the Department of State Services performs its vetting; the National Assembly conducts its advice and consent ritual.

And beyond our shores, an older sovereignty waits with quill in hand. No ambassador assumes office until the receiving nation grants agrément – an acceptance often signalled quietly, sometimes withheld loudly. The pageantry of letters of credence that follow is not mere choreography; it is recognition that the envoy is acceptable to the court to which he is sent. A host can decline, delay, or later declare persona non grata. Thus, the final say, in form and substance, does not belong to the appointing hand but to the receiving hearth. This is the ancient etiquette of equality among states: even giants must knock.

What then should Nigeria project when it knocks? Not volume for its own sake, but voice with direction. Our status as the largest Black nation on earth must be a responsibility, not a slogan. It must show in the constancy of our positions on coups and constitutional order in West Africa; in the steadiness of our hand in ECOWAS; in the clarity of our stance on energy transition, where gas diplomacy must be argued with fluency in climate finance and the candour to admit that development and decarbonisation are not mutually exclusive hymns; in the seriousness with which we treat the African Continental Free Trade Area – as a living market to be cultivated by competent commercial sections in our embassies, not as a talking point to be applauded at summits.

It must show in consular modernisation – digital queues instead of campsite massacres of time; hotlines answered at midnight; a crisis‑response doctrine that moves faster than a news cycle and lasts longer than a viral clip. It must show in multilateral persistence: resolutions won in cold committee rooms because our envoys did the work before the meeting, not the performance at the microphone.

There is still time, and there is still talent. The Nigerian Foreign Service is not a museum; it is a workshop. Within it, experience and excellence remain. What is required is a coherent philosophy of appointments: merit as baseline, discretion as condition, integrity as non‑negotiable. Political nominees are not proscribed; some will serve brilliantly. But notoriety cannot be rehabilitated by a title; volume cannot substitute for judgement. Diplomacy is not an arena for pyrotechnics; it is a discipline, a vocation, a calling.

As Harold Nicolson wrote, it is the visible expression of a nation’s character abroad. If we trivialise it, we trivialise ourselves. If we politicise it beyond recognition, we reduce foreign policy to a carnival of indiscretion. Talleyrand taught that speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts; the diplomat must therefore master restraint. Edmund Burke warned that the greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse; the abuse here lies not in the act of appointment but in the quality of those appointed.

Let us be frank without being fatalistic. The list is not irredeemable. Many nominees – career and political – will rise to the dignity of their posts and honour their oath in lands where Nigeria is known first by the civility of her representatives. But the reputational wager is perilous when unprincipled and unstable characters are placed in roles where the nation’s face is the envoy’s face, and the envoy’s slip is the nation’s stumble. Quietened diplomacy and flamboyant appointments are a ruinous duet: the one erases us; the other caricatures us. Together they tell a story unworthy of our people.

The work ahead is neither mystical nor impossible. We can rebuild the pipeline that produces diplomats who are multilingual in policy – able to argue for Nigerian gas in Brussels, for Nigerian film in Los Angeles, for Nigerian cocoa in Geneva, for Nigerian shipping lanes in the Gulf of Guinea; who understand that to be African and modern is not a paradox but a platform; who carry, in their briefcases, not the golden trinkets of notoriety but the annotated files of negotiated wins.

We can end prolonged vacancies and stop‑gap theatrics; we can fund missions predictably and evaluate them soberly; we can make consular protection a promise kept, not a prayer whispered. We can insist that every mission carry a three‑year strategy with measurable outcomes: deals facilitated, standards harmonised, citizens assisted, committees chaired.

We can return to the habit of presence – arriving early to meetings that matter, staying long enough to shape the commas in communiqués, and following through when the cameras go home. We can treat cultural diplomacy as policy, not pageantry: if Nollywood and Afrobeats carry our soft power, our embassies must carry the scaffolding – visas, venues, partnerships, and protection.

To do these things is to pick up the iron axe. It is to remember that nationhood, like diplomacy, is craft before it is chorus. The golden axe of patronage dazzles; the silver axe of notoriety gleams. But they are alien instruments – seductive and hollow. The iron axe of integrity, though rough and unremarkable, is the instrument of national self‑respect.

It is what we made with our own hands: our diplomatic corps, our institutional muscle memory, our habit of principled presence in the world. It is the tool with which we hammered our finest achievements and the only one with which we can build again.

Until then, let us not be surprised when our passports are treated with suspicion, our citizens with indifference, and our nation with condescension. Let us not feign outrage when our diplomats are ignored, our treaties sidelined, and our interests undermined. Let us not pretend that the world is unfair when we have made ourselves unserious. In the end, the diplomat is not just a representative; he is a reflection. And when we send clowns to the world stage, we should not be surprised when the world laughs.

Kunle Somorin is former Chief Press Secretary of Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State

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