Australia’s Travel Advisory On Visiting Nigeria: Why Can’t The Foreign Affairs Ministry Act As Dignified Like Tinubu?
The Oasis Reporters
January 3, 2024
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade issued a travel advisory to it’s citizens as regards visiting Nigeria, a normal cautionary exercise that nations regularly give and anger went into the driving seat.
The continent of Australia that is located as far away as the Southern Hemisphere and also in the Eastern Hemisphere, issued a security alert and travel advisory on Nigeria that is in both the northern and the eastern hemispheres.
It was a gloomy picture about security threats from religious extremists, urging it’s citizens to be mindful of visiting the country.
The advisory raised a few eyebrows and that was all.
Rather than ignore it, the seemingly overzealous and angry Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nigeria issued a retort, urging it’s citizens to be wary of Australia due to its issues with anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, discrimination and verbal abuse.
As far as the ministry of foreign affairs is concerned, they’ve hit back at the fellow Commonwealth country that does not have a cost of living crisis like Nigeria. The historic universities in that country continue to attract scholars from all over the world, including Nigeria.
If anything, there are many Nigerians from certain locations who have been chased out of their communities into IDP camps while their homes have been taken over by terrorists who also graze their livestock on people’s farms.
That is not to mention the issues of kidnappings for ransom that is yet to see any decisive solution.
Why couldn’t the ministry of foreign affairs pretend not to have seen the advisory by rejecting the temptation of such a response ?
And acted in a statesmanlike manner like former president Muhammadu Buhari did to all the media torments that he faced from Reno Omokri, a renowned and self styled Buhari tormentor ?
For 8 years, the Buhari team ignored Omokri.
The same Omokri jumped onto the same wagon to torment President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Omokri was in the forefront of protests that disrupted the president’s visit in the UK. The verbal abuses on Tinubu were widely read.
Suddenly, the same Reno Omokri started speaking only the good of Tinubu, and everyone chuckled at the roundabout turn of the activist. Everyone knew that a pocketful conversion had taken place at the rock. The activist became born again and everyone wondered at the amount of holy oil that may have been poured to baptize the critic.
That shows classic diplomacy at work, not the tit-for-tat diplomatic retorts of inexperience, over an advisory that should have been forgotten within days.
How many Australians visit Nigeria anyway?
But Nigerian economic refugees and other forms of migrants are all over the place in Australia.
The best response would have been to invite the Australian High Commissioner to come and cut the ribbon on the power plants which would add 5,000MW as a modest addition to help light up Nigeria.
That would have been a better diplomatic foxtrot, not this tit-for-tat that ends up humiliating those who know the truth about the realities on ground.
Greg Abolo
