Fed Govt to review foreign policy, says minister

By Vincent Ikuomola, Abuja

Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Ambassador Zubairu Dada has hinted of impending review of the country’s foreign policy.

This is as ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs Ambassador Ignatius Olisemeka warned that foreign policy should never be run on a charitable basis.

They spoke yesterday in Abuja at the maiden Annual Foreign Policy Public Lecture 2019 organised by the Association of Retired Career Ambassadors of Nigeria (ARCAN).

Dada said on assumption of office, President Muhammadu Buhari gave them a nine-point agenda to execute in the ministry. According to him, agenda includes the review of the country’s foreign policy.

He added that the directive to review the country’s foreign policy was as a result of global dynamism and the need for the country to change with time.

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Olisemeka, who was the guest speaker, noted that the country’s current foreign policy was too foreign and has not sufficiently stressed the complementarity of domestic and foreign policies.

The former minister under the Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar-led military administration, who termed the country’s foreign policy as “Africa as Centrepiece of Nigeria foreign policy”,  warned that foreign policy should never be run on a charitable basis, which has not yielded any tangible benefit to the country.

He cited the incessant killings and destruction of Nigerian businesses in South Africa and other places as an indicative of the weakness in the country’s past foreign policies.

He said: “One lesson that could be drawn from all of this is that foreign policy should never be run on a charitable basis. There must be a price-tag to every effort. That price, whether in goodwill, or in other terms, must be carefully calculated beforehand, demanded and fully exerted when the mission is over or when the time is ripe. It is not at all, as always been argued, a moral issue as to whether one should or not expect appreciation from another country for a good turn done. It is more basic than that. It is simply that one has the right to expect result from one’s own efforts. How that result is achieved is a matter of planning. There is no doubt that when policies are properly and carefully conceived and planned, reward is inevitable. On the other hand, thoughtlessly and carelessly conceived and executed programmes and engagements yield no result.

“This, explains why we could invest so much effort, so much energy and so many resources (as we did in Angola, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa) and reap nothing positive from such effort. The reoccurring spate of xenophobic attacks and killing of Nigerians in South Africa, are all indicative of the weakness in our perception of our real interests, weakness in planning, weakness in our approach and style in the Southern Africa liberation struggles. Simply put in one sentence: it was an abysmal weakness in our diplomacy.”

Olisemeka also posited that Nigeria was yet to conceive foreign policy as an instrument for national development.

He posited that the domestic and foreign policy are world apart, as they are oblivion of existence of one another.