THE EMERGENCE OF ROGUE DIPLOMACY: BELLO TURGI MAY BE NIGERIAN ENVOY TO AFGHANISTAN
THE EMERGENCE OF ROGUE DIPLOMACY: BELLO TURGI MAY BE NIGERIAN ENVOY TO AFGHANISTAN.
The latest ambassadorial list released by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu did not come to me as a surprise. You cannot dispense what you do not possess. The quality of nominees merely mirrors the quality of the government itself. When the well of leadership is polluted, the stream of diplomacy cannot flow clean.
What we are witnessing is the full-blown rise of rogue diplomacy, a diplomatic architecture populated by characters whose reputations wobble under the weight of corruption trials, moral stains, and dubious antecedents. It is as though the selection process was designed to harvest society’s ethical outcasts, from fraudulent former ministers to professors who perfected the science of electoral subversion.
Given this trajectory, one would not be astonished if the next list features Bello Turgi as Nigeria’s envoy to Afghanistan; Bakura Doro, Boko Haram’s own cleric, representing us in Qatar; or Abu Musab al-Barwani dispatched to Syria. Since this government has grown increasingly soft on terrorists, their financiers, and their enablers, even encouraging “negotiations” through sub-national leaders, cultural associations like the ACF, and selected Islamic clerics, the slope toward absurdity is already greased.
If foreign policy is the mirror through which nations view one another, then Nigeria’s reflection today is that of a cracked mirror showing a fractured identity. The image of any country is sculpted by the caliber of its envoys, yet we now seem content to send into the world ambassadors whose shadows loom larger than their credentials.
And as for Professor Mahmood Yakubu, the celebrated architect of “technical glitches” and silent coronations, perhaps his next deployment should indeed be to the Vatican, where he could tutor the College of Cardinals on how to rig a papal conclave with divine efficiency.
Nigeria has not only stumbled into failure; it has descended into a full-blown kakistocracy, government by the worst, selected by the compromised, and celebrated by the shameless.
Solomon Dalung LLM, LLB, LB
Igbarman Otarok & Garkuwa Arewa
Voice of Silent Majority
igbarman@gmail.com
