A former Deputy Chairman of the Nigerian Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs Shehu Sani has said about 60 per cent of Nigerian embassies are rented and accused diplomatic staff of defrauding the country through rent payment.
Sani made this known during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja, while speaking on the dilapidated state of Nigerian embassies abroad and its economic consequences on the country.
The senator, who formerly represented Kaduna Central, observed although some Nigerian embassies existed as far back as 1960, most of them were still rented, thereby causing a lot of embarrassment to the country.
READ ALSO:
Again, Emirates suspends Nigerian flights over diplomatic row
Nigerians tie assault on diplomat in Indonesia to country’s image problem
“I found out that we have been renting about 60 per cent of Nigerian embassies abroad, and we are still unable to buy a house in those countries. From my observation, diplomatic staff have been fleecing this country in the name of paying rents; they prefer Nigeria to keep renting houses, rather than buying a building as an embassy.
“In the past, everything about the embassy is in the foreign affairs ministry, but during the era of Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Ambassadors go to the Minister of Finance for them to be funded. As such, it left the foreign affairs ministry with little or no choice on the embassy other than posting of diplomatic staff,” the former lawmaker said.
He insisted on the need to buy more diplomatic houses and take stock of repairs of dilapidated Nigerian embassy buildings abroad as part of measures to solve the problem.
“Everything about the embassy should go back to the foreign affairs ministry. We should have targets, every year, we should buy 10 buildings so that in five to six years, we are no more renting. There are some buildings that we may not need. We have to trade them off and put those ones away,” he added.
Sani’s position corroborates the concerns raised by the House of Representatives last December that foreign service officers preferred to rent houses than stay in the missions- owned property due to their dilapidated state.
The House also revealed that over 70 per cent of Nigeria’s foreign missions across the world had, for several years, received zero allocation in their capital budget and decried the indiscriminate postings of foreign service officers above the approved ceiling of the president, which had led to overstaffing and wastage of resources.
Worried by the unpleasant news about underfunding from Nigerian missions abroad and to eliminate any bureaucratic bottlenecks, the House, through the insertion of Clause 11 into the 2022 Appropriation Act, granted express power to missions to expend funds allocated to them under Capital Components without the need to seek approval of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
However, there have been calls for an amendment of the Appropriation Act and last Wednesday, the Federal Executive Council (FEC) agreed that that the clause should be repealed. The Minister of Finance Zainab Ahmed, while addressing State House correspondents, said the clause contravened provisions of the Fiscal Responsibility and Finance Act 2021.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Geoffrey Onyeama, who oversees Nigeria Missions, has repeatedly called for increased funding to enable the country measure up to its diplomatic obligations.