By Adagbo Onoja
Nigeria is not a merit-based system. The meritorious fellow is whoever the government of the day defines as such, irrespective of how distinguished the other guy is. Arthur Mbanefo, the Odu of Onitsha who died December 23rd, 2025 would be among the few who escaped this in one circumstance: his appointment as Nigeria’s Permanent Representative (PR) to the United Nations in New York between 1999 and 2003.
He brought so remarkable a commanding aristocratic carriage to the job that became his signifier and Nigeria’s too, warts and all. The merit in that was having somebody with a sense of self or carriage that corresponded with the Nigerian self-understanding as the giant. That is what made his a case of where Nigeria (or Obasanjo, his appointor) put merit first. It is not about whether his aristocratic bearing was good or bad. It was about the constitutive outcomes which it produced because, wherever his carriage derived from – his overwhelming physical stature or his traditional title or successful accounting career – it meant that, most times, he dispensed with having to be diplomatic.
Mbanefo, Lamido and Ben Gurirab of Namibia who chaired the General Assembly in the year 2000
In a diplomatic world where operatives are hyperactive about whatever they consider a slight on that concept called sovereignty, this had its own complications. Alhaji Sule Lamido, the then foreign affairs minister and with whom Mbanefo, unlike Prince Bola Ajibola, got on very well, advised him against talking to other PRs as if they were any less of the representatives of their own sovereigns. Mbanefo would explain why every such thing happened and it is doubtful if he ever changed course.
Obasanjo had three of them. They were Arthur Mbanefo in New York, Jubril Aminu in Washington DC and Bola Ajibola in the UK. Ajibola went to the same school with Obasanjo or was even his classmate, meaning he had the advantage of alternative access to the president. Either because of that or some other considerations, he didn’t enjoy that chummy relationship with the minister. Sometimes, the tiff would go as far as “we will cure you of that madness in your head”. Ajibola would tone down and the tiff would pass over. Although Prof Jubril Aminu never spared Lamido, it was more in the spirit of Barewa Old Boys’ psychology of ‘once the senior, always the senior’. Of course, all two being Fulani meant that Aminu wasn’t an opponent but just a senior critic. The Odu of Onitsha seemed to admire the minister, the most obvious explanation being Lamido’s roots in the Aminu Kano tradition.
This is the sort of inference one draws from an incident like this. At the 2000 meeting of the triad of African leaders (Obasanjo, Mbeki and Wade of Senegal) in Okinawa, Japan, the Nigerian ministerial delegation arrived to find the venue to be a wonderland hotel. It is called Ocean 45, an uncommonly functional and super beautiful hotel. It is not a replica of Hilton in Seoul or Geneva – the models of sheer luxury. It is simply in a class of its own. As is the protocol, everyone sees to the minister’s settling down before getting to his own room. In the process of settling down, the Odu of Onitsha caught the minister admiring the environ and ambience of the rooms to which he responded by landing an ideological shot on Lamido: how can a PRP man be lost in admiration of a majestic capitalist edifice? Lamido had no immediate reply and we all laughed. They always had one joke or another on each other.
Interestingly, the PR to the UN is entangled in much of Nigerian diplomacy, meaning that Mbanefo joined the minister’s original delegation from Abuja wherever in the world a particular event was taking place. He did along with his ubiquitous protocol chief and close adviser, Ambassador Tanko Suleiman, a career diplomat from Nasarawa State. Another career diplomat familiar with the duo once said whatever Suleiman told Mbanefo was as good as accepted. Both are late today. Under Lamido, the minister’s original delegation included the Director in the Minister’s Office occupied by Eineje Onobu and the Director of African Affairs in the ministry which was held by Femi George then. There were others but the two were the permanent features under Lamido who had his own ministerial aides.
Ambassadors Pieter Andries Vermeulen of the South African mission to the UN; Mbanefo; Ben Gurirab of Namibia and Abdalla Baali of the Algeria mission in New York when Mbanefo was Nigeria’s PR
It was in the Japan 2000 trip that I came to know Arthur Mbanefo. I had met him at several trips before, including when he took Lamido to the PR’s residence in New York but it was only in Okinawa I came to know that he was the same Mbanefo who chaired the states creation panel under Abacha. Before I knew it, the words had leapt out of my lips. I found myself murmuring to no one in particular something like, ‘oh, this is the Mbanefo who denied us Apa State’. But he heard me and reacted immediately. In a tone more of a command than anything else, he said I must see him in his room immediately we retired from our informal briefing session. We had all the time because the presidents hadn’t started arriving.
So, I went to see him in his room. He took me through history, real history of the (Apa) states creation politics. In the end, I didn’t know whether to apologise to him or not. I didn’t have to verbalise anything like an apology but he was not guilty in anyways. In fact, he was very much disposed to doing everything to please Dr. Edwin Ogbu, the diplomat’s diplomat who was the then Och’Idoma of Idoma. But our relationship was no longer a PR and an ever present ministerial aide. He and I had become an independent layer in the chain. I was heading straight into my wedding from that trip and I still remember every words of his own advice on where marital problems came from. It was one of those original African wisdom, condensed and delivered by an Mbanefo, a traditional title holder back in his own roots.
There is no time one met Mbanefo without hearing a refreshing ‘joke’. He would say that it seemed to him that those who run the show in the cuisine industry do not wish people to eat much of the main dish and that they do this with the appetiser and all those accoutrements such that most people are already okay or not capable of eating much of the main dish. To be with him is to laugh a lot.
His briefings were usually very strait to the point. No circumlocutions and all those diplomatic dressings by which unequal power relations were made to look consensual to those trained to see and operationalise it as such. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate niceties. I think he had such a forthright and a matter-of-fact view of things generally and about what Nigeria should accept or not accept.
To put it differently, it couldn’t have been that he had any animosity against being urbane. After all, most members of his generation who went to finishing schools at the secondary school level (most secondary schools in their time were also finishing schools) were groomed to be urbane. His own case looked like someone who understood the logic of some of these established practices. It remains to be seen whether he was foretelling the future in his disdain for some of these practices which have become so commonsensical that to disregard them is to look primitive.
Reflecting on him leads one inexorably to wondering whether he was manifesting his understanding of protocol as an instrument of conditioning and power? Was the Odu of Onitsha a case of the African protest against hegemony in what constitutes protocol in the world today?
One of the sessions of the Obasanjo/Mbeki/Wade moral warfare on G-8 leaders for debt cancellation and enhanced foreign direct investment before Obasanjo rebelled by saying he had spent time going round without getting any concessions more than ‘sweet words’
The French have successfully taken control of it but with substantial amendments or alternatives to French patterns by the Americans and the Russians. The Americans have a replica of almost every of the models, especially their more attractive no-to-hierarchy sitting arrangement. Either in defence of their own version or show of power, the Americans can be in breach of one protocol or the other. Obama, for example, broke many protocols, though most of it as part of mending injured nerves by Bush. Still, he generated an uproar in bending down for the Japanese emperor. Asia is a different kettle of fish since the meaning of most of the defining features such as the colors, cutlery and sitting arrangements are different for them. Beyond the big players, people who, for instance, do not endorse the unequal power relations embodied in the practice of fork and knives are now whispering against it and pushing new narratives for use of fingers in Europe. The gist today is how long it will take before the whispers turn into a campaign since Queen Elizabeth 11 whose twice yearly dinner (because it required time to plan as sitting arrangement alone could be a complicated dimension of it) kept much of the establishment culinary codes intact is no more. When all these are considered, players such as the late Odu of Onitsha would seem to have been sending a crucial message in his critical stance on some of the defining components of protocol in global politics. It would be interesting to hear or read aides of his who spent longer time with him speak to this issue.
There was always the spectacle about Nigerian foreign policy in New York that time. Adjoining each other basically, both the Nigerian House and the UN Hotel – the two action spaces for policy – are almost directly opposite the UN. What that meant is the ministerial delegation walking across to the UN each time it had an appearance. With their height, Lamido and Mbanefo could be something of a show stopping pair each time they walked across. In one instance, a woman stopped the minister to commend his dress as we exited the lift. Lamido returned the compliments but remarked how it would be interpreted as sexual harassment if it was him who complimented the woman. It was his own way of hitting at Western sense of sexual harassment.
Can we say that there is something irritating about diplomatic niceties to the African even as they observe it? Obasanjo may observe it but, most of the time, he either ignored it or observed it in his own way. He did that to Tony Blair in Egypt in 2000 by arguing that Western governments were accomplices of corruption in Africa because where he (Obasanjo) came from, the fellow who assisted a thief in carrying out such an act is also adjudged a thief. Thabo Mbeki once asked African foreign affairs ministers why he ever needed to observe protocol if there was something he wanted to do with his senior brother Obasanjo. He meant why he couldn’t just call Obasanjo and get it done. In many ways, the two didn’t observe protocol according to the codebook but Obasanjo and Mbeki would not be a good example since the two knew each other very well before becoming presidents. Under them, Nigeria and South Africa were great friends.
As at 2019, Mbanefo was not that optimistic about Nigeria. He said in a speech that Nigeria was no longer working. In the not so lengthy speech, Mbanefo said, inter alia: “Our political economy is hardly working; our education system is obviously not meeting its objectives; our healthcare delivery system is deplorable; our neglected water and food security threaten our future as a people; our physical infrastructure is broken; our ability energy sufficiently has overwhelmed our collective imagination. I can go on and on. In short Nigeria is not working. Period”
There is no knowing what his thoughts were on Nigeria at his point of death earlier this week. He is almost certain to be unhappy to see a regional hegemon struggling to establish its ranking order as Nigeria is doing now, something worse than Akinyemi’s rating of global reckoning with Nigeria in 2023 when he told Daily Trust that Nigeria is not taken seriously because it is incapable of locating her national interest. Hegemons do not normally put themselves where the mystique they enjoy can easily be disrupted by a single slap by a midget. That has just happened to Nigeria.
It can only lie in speculation now what the Odu of Onitsha would have done if he were president. He is dead and gone to where dead people go. But, in the most public office appointment Nigeria gave him as PR to the UN, he brought a uniqueness to it. Whatever the debate about that uniqueness, it will remain his marker.
May the late Odu of Onitsha find himself in the presence of God!
