Nigeria: In Defence of Campbell

Daily Trust

20 May 2011’

Nigeria: In Defence of Campbell

Adamu Adamu

opinion

Former United States of America Ambassador to Nigeria, John Campbell has been denied visa to visit Nigeria due to what Foreign Ministry officials described as incomplete requirement reasons. A spokesman for the Nigeria's Ministry of Foreign Affairssaid that the mission in Washington, D.C. refused former ambassador John Campbell a visa to Nigeria, because he "did not meet the visa requirements."

Campbell was billed to attend a meeting of the governing board of the American University of Nigeria, of which he is a member. His visa application was said to have been subjected to unnecessary, frustrating delays until it was too late for him to make it to the occasion. Campbell served as U.S. ambassador to Nigeria from May 20, 2004, to Nov. 1, 2007 and is currently a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a private think tank in New York that seeks to influence US foreign policy.

Ambassador Campbell has written extensively and authoritatively on Nigeria, and his latest book, Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink has drawn criticisms from officialdom in Nigeria, with newspapers reporting Professor Ibidapo Adebowale Adefuye, Nigeria's envoy to the US, threatening that Campbell's visa would not be reviewed when it expired. If nothing, at least Nigerians could beat their chest that their diplomatic missions do keep their promises!

But refusing to grant a visa to a visiting scholar doesn't look like the most intelligent way of helping to solve Nigeria's myriad of real problems, the most important and intractable of which Campbell has spent the best of the last two decades highlighting. There has been no issue raised by Campbell that does not cry for immediate attention, and his predictions are not categorical imperatives that must happen; but they are always logical conclusions from the data and analysis he has presented. Campbell's prognoses on Nigeria have always been trenchant and hard-hitting and lethally accurate, he being merely a mirror and Nigerians ostriches with their heads in the sands in a vain bid to avoid seeing the national warts that the former ambassador reflected back to them.

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. . . . Campbell gives a lucid, perceptive survey of the hardships and perils Nigeria faces." It is not nice to read this of oneself, but it certainly isn't untrue.

Have Nigerians themselves not spoken of the country's failed state status? Doesn't the country have huge petroleum reserves in the midst of dire poverty? Is the government not weak, and the election not rigged? Do our plutocrats not regard the country as a prebendal offering? Is corruption in the country not endemic? Have there not been bloody sectarian clashes between Christians and Muslims? Is the oil not a curse to the nation? Has it not led to the neglect of industrial development and agriculture? Is there no insurgency in the Niger Delta, and, to a lesser degree throughout the country--an insurgency fueled by the unmanaged oil curse? Indeed, when was Nigeria not dancing on the brink?