The President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), Afam Osigwe, is unhappy with the Senate’s screening of ambassadorial nominees.
Osigwe spoke on Wednesday in an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today, faulting the lawmakers’ “bow and go” approach in the screening of the recently nominated envoys.
“The clearing process in the Senate left much to be desired. When most of them were asked to take a bow and go. And when we don’t know much about it, and those we know, and we thought there should have been some questioning about their views, their stance on so many issues — national unity and all that,” the NBA president said.
“They did not get asked those questions, and at some point, it became an altercation between some senators. Well, I don’t know what to expect from the ambassadorial appointees, and that’s why most times people go there, it’s just a political patronage thing.”
Tinubu, in late November, listed about 32 persons for screening as career and non-career ambassadors.
“In two separate letters to the Senate President, Godswill Akpabio, President Tinubu asked the Senate to consider and confirm expeditiously 15 nominees as career ambassadors and 17 nominees as non-career ambassadors,” presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, said in a statement issued on Saturday.
Some weeks later, some of the nominees were screened by the lawmakers, but Osigwe said they failed in quizzing them, a move he says does not bode well for the country.
He said the “Appointment of non-career ambassadors in Nigeria has become a huge joke.”
Osigwe faulted the country’s leaders for not appointing the right persons to ambassadorial roles.
“From the return to civil democracy in 1999 and long before that, we don’t seem to appoint the right calibre of people most times, and we don’t seem to remember that ambassadors are persons who should be just ambassadors — be able to attract trade, be able to find out and market the country within the time, and forge alliances for the government, and essentially tell you what the country is about and what businesses they can do with it,” he said on the current affairs show.
