President Buhari and foreign minister Geoffrey OnyeamaMinister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, has announced that the nation’s foreign missions in Sri Lanka, Czech Republic and Republic of Serbia have been closed, while the mission in Ukraine was drastically downsized due to lack of funds.
The minister, who spoke today, Tuesday, about the activities of the ministry in the last three years, said that before the closure Nigeria had 119 foreign missions, adding that the reduction of Nigeria’s foreign missions remains one of the agenda of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration.
Geoffrey Onyeama explained that the closure of the missions was occasioned by inability of the ministry to maintain them due to insufficient funds.
“Every embassy has written to us about their huge financial demands and when we go to these embassies we see clearly very unattractive state that does not reflect well on the country.
“Very often the staff of the embassy really find things extremely difficult.
“Clearly, if we want to operate on the scale and scope in which we are at the moment with over a 100 missions around the world, we need to spend a lot more.”
The minister said that though Nigeria has spent a lot, it is not enough, compared to what other countries around the world spend.
“What I am saying is that rather than having this terrible circle of inadequate funding for missions, headquarters and so forth we have to reduce the scope.
“We should have foreign missions that we can fund, we might not necessarily close the embassies per se, it might be reducing the number of staff in the embassies.
“Because what we found out is that it is more expensive to close the embassies than operating them.”
