abdulraheem
Under the regime of general sani abacha, the Nigerian press found the gung-ho attitude of Chief Tom Ikimi, rather too offensive; he was not the type of foreign affairs minister, they felt represented the best of Nigeria. His gung-ho approach was promptly labeled as “AREA BOY DIPLOMACY”. Last week, I recollected the Ikimi era, when I read in one of the newspapers, that Doctor Amadu Ali was threatening to reject his ambassadorial posting to a “non-strategic” country, after he was allegedly rejected by south Africa as the new Nigerian High Commissioner to that most important African destination. There had been earlier reports that his postings to the USA and the Court of Saint James had also fallen through. These were diplomatic gossips that are not definitely confirmed, but it will not come as a surprise, if it is true really. The world is wary of ‘Garrison Diplomacy’ just as much as it rejected Garrison democracy, in its heydays. Doctor Amadu Ali represented the worst excesses of the highly discredited regime of General Olusegun Obasanjo. A man given to very impolitic outbursts, the PDP became a most authoritarian, vote-rigging contraption, under his watch. The party became a soul-less, apparatus dedicated to the stifling of inner-party life; a party constantly at war with itself and alienated from its membership. The Amadu Ali leadership’s raison d’etre was to enforce the whims of the monster dictator that installed it in power, against the rules of the party itself. Olusegun Obasanjo. Every step taken was to use the party to achieve the elongation of the tenure of the kleptocratic despot, and to achieve that, there was no law of party life they were not willing to bend. Col. Amadu Ali and his fellow travelers carried on like petty village tyrants working at the behest of a demented despot, and the over-zealous manner that they carried out all manners of systematic purges and suppression of dissent, did not endear them to the members of the PDP, the Nigerian people and the international community. Amadu Ali obviously did not reckon with the fact that the world took notice of his offensive statements and actions. In the new dispensation, he hoped to earn a diplomatic posting, away from the mess and pains he had caused many people in Nigeria. Fortunately, the world out there remembers, and the stories of the rejection of colonel Amadu Ali as an Ambassador in some of the most important diplomatic postings around the world, must be directly related to his career as the Garrison pro-consul of the PDP. Colonel Amadu Ali’s political career devalued democratic life in Nigeria far too much, for him to find an escape into the world of diplomacy. Even if he eventually gets his letter of credence accepted in South Africa or wherever, Colonel Amadu Ali cannot now run away from the awful record he accumulated in his service as a garrison ‘democrat’, working to help institute the dictatorship of his master, Olusegun Obasanjo. It is that record which is now haunting his transition to the world of garrison diplomacy. It will just not fly with the international community.
