The last has not been heard about which Nigerian career diplomat wrote or did not write a memoir. The latest to be sent to Intervention is Ambassador Olu Sanu’s Audacity On The Bound: A Diplomatic Odyssey.
The text message from the sender who is himself a retired ambassador said the message was being sent with excerpts from the book but no such excerpt came along.
Interestingly, Ambassador Olu Sanu who is a pioneer Foreign Service Officer, died on March 20th, 2022 at the age of 90, according to the source’s message.
What is thus clear is that career diplomats have been writing, Amb MK Ibrahim’s 400 page plus presented on March 19th, 2022 being only the latest of such reflection.
The problem might thus be that Nigeria has no synthesis of the totality of what they have been communicating vis-à-vis the updating of foreign policy based on such insider accounts. If people read those books at all, they read them passively without any collective re-interpretation of them. That attitude speaks to a level of collective consciousness about cultural products which do not have any fixed meaning outside of social consensus about their content.
Meanwhile, it is the same content that are read and re-interpreted by other think tankers and critics and used to draw up hegemonic policies on Nigeria only for local champions and inward looking ideological essentialists to start alleging foreign control by CIA, Pentagon, Downing Street and all that. Of course, that is what those agencies exist to do. It is up to Nigeria to secure itself from such hegemonic casts.
It is an attitude in need of radical rupturing. Where might that come from in Nigeria? That’s the puzzle.