The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Geoffrey Onyeama, yesterday, during a news conference to mark the one year anniversary of President Mohammadu Buhari’s administration, said that the Federal Government had begun the process of appointing a new set of ambassadors to represent Nigeria in various countries of the world.
Twenty-six non-career ambassadors and ambassadors extraordinary and those presiding on tour of duty abroad were recalled in June 2015. They were among the 93 envoys posted out in 2012. The minister explained that the reason for the delay in their appointment was that the current administration wanted to do a thorough job to ensure that very competent hands were sent out.
“It is a work in progress; it is being done and may be in short time we will have the list of ambassadors going to various countries. Sometimes, it is on the approach of getting the best hands. So we want to be very clear of the ones we send out to represent the country; we want to be sure we have representations that will reflect the real vision of this government,”
“So far, what we have done is to set up inter-ministerial committee and identified all the follow up actions and set up timeline for them. There is also a very concrete follow up mechanism put in place to actualize the agreements’’ he said.
The minister added that the government had identified with the ministries, departments and agencies that would be responsible for different aspects of what was required in the agreement.
NAN
Ambassadors were civil servants of level 16 upward up to 1998 ; not politicians