Nigeria: Ibrahim Gambari, the Iconic Scholar-Diplomat, At 80

IF Nigeria, our country, were to have been a place where ideas rule – as they do in developed countries and many emerging markets – men like Professor Ibrahim Agboola Gambari CFR would be kings and not only princes, as he happens to be by bloodline.

Nevertheless, Nigeria should be grateful to Gambari, as he turns 80, for his proud, committed and impactful service to our country and the world rather than living on a sense of entitlement as a member of the traditional ruling family of the emirate of Ilorin in north-central Nigeria. Educated at King’s College, Lagos, the prestigious London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where he studied economics for his first degree, and the Ivy League Columbia University in the City of New York where he obtained master’s and doctorate degrees in political science, Gambari worked hard from early in his life.

The result is an inspirational level of global renown and influence in the area of foreign policy, international relations, and diplomacy. His storied career has been marked by historic roles at the center of several global events and trends. On top of this he combined, in the fashion of the late global statesman Henry Kissinger, being a major driver of theories and concepts of foreign policy that have had staying power, with being a real-world dealmaker at the highest levels of world politics.

Ibrahim Gambari is one of the few influential Nigerian scholars of foreign policy who recognize, and attach appropriate importance to, the fundamental connection between domestic conditions and foreign affairs. This has been the subject of at least two of several books he has authored. Why is this contribution by Gambari important? Because it is, in sum, the story of the rise and fall of Nigeria’s influence in world affairs in the country’s various epochs.

We played an outsized role, with commensurate influence, in achieving success in the global struggle to end Apartheid in South Africa. Ditto in the outcomes of the independence struggles of Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe, as well as the creation of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). But, buffeted by economic and security decline in recent decades, its polity more fractious and polarized, unable to grapple with the challenge of nationhood in an inclusive, transparent manner, weak governance in Nigeria has translated into increasingly weaker foreign policy and power projection in a changing world.

Today, the thousands of globally accomplished individual Nigerians in the Diaspora have become arguably more respected and renowned than the Nigerian state itself that is their fatherland. Why Nigerians thrive abroad more than at home is a subject for another day. But Gambari was ahead of his time in making the connection between home and abroad in world politics. Ironically perhaps, this scholar-diplomat’s “survival” for an unprecedented nine years as NIgeria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1990 to 1999, and even his rise to national prominence in the first place – first as DirectorGeneral of the Nigerian Institute for International Affairs in late 1983 during the presidency of Shehu Shagari, and barely three months later, his appointment as Foreign Minister of NIgeria in the Muhammadu Buhari-led military regime that overthrew Shagari – likely had something to with his domestic “political base” of princehood in an emirate of northern Nigeria.

This is not to say that Gambari was not qualified for his eminent roles. Far from it, he was more so than most, and with sterling credentials into the bargain. This, then, is perhaps simply one more validation of his postulations about the domestic roots of foreign policy! I first met Ibrahim Gambari on the streets of Manhattan in New York City in 1994. I was a 30-year old Political Affairs Officer in the UN Secretariat’s Headquarters. He was Nigeria’s Ambassador to the world body.

I walked up to him and introduced myself: “Good morning, Ambassador. I am Kingsley Moghalu, and I am in the DPKO [Department of Peacekeeping Operations]”, I said, as we shook hands. “Oh, it’s you!’ he beamed. I have heard a lot about you and your work from your bosses Kofi Annan, Iqbal Riza and others”, he said. “Come over and see me at the [Nigerian] Mission one of these days and let’s have lunch”. Over a subsequent lunch at a tony Chinese restaurant between East 45th Street and First Avenue, we developed a warm connection and became good friends.

Gambari has remained, ever since, a senior friend who would always speak up for me (often unsolicited) whenever he felt an appropriate opportunity for me presented itself. His remarkable career in global diplomacy has had many successes. It also has several wrinkles. During his stint as Foreign Minister in the Buhari military regime from January 1984 to August 1985, he articulated cardinal principles of Nigerian foreign policy, encapsulated in his “Concentric Circles of Foreign Policy” concept which prioritized, first, our neighbors in West Africa, then the African continent, and then the world at large.

But the regime he served also launched a botched attempt to kidnap Umaru Dikko, an influential minister in the Shagari government and the former elected President’s consigliere, on the streets of London, the United Kingdom capital. The crate into which Dikko was bundled, drugged and unconscious, and was to have been flown out of Stansted Airport as “diplomatic cargo” to Nigeria but for eagle-eyed British customs inspectors, was addressed to a certain Foreign Minister named Ibrahim Gambari!! At the UN as Nigeria’s Ambassador, Gambari was influential and well-liked by his colleagues.

He recorded solid achievements as Chairman of the UN Special Committee Against Apartheid. He stood up for the victims of the Rwandan genocide which occurred while Nigeria was a rotating member of the Security Council, arguing forcefully along with Czech Republic Ambassador Corel Kovanda and Australian Ambassador Colin Keating that the ethnic massacre of the Tutsi in Rwanda was genocide and should be called by its name.

This was at a time when the United States had blocked a forceful UN military intervention to stop the genocide and did not want to get involved after its own disastrous peacekeeping outing in Somalia a year prior in 1993 when US soldiers were killed in humiliating circumstances by forces loyal to the warlord Mohammed Farah Aideed. Interestingly, the genocidal Rwandan government was at the same time also serving in a rotating seat on the Security Council, with its Ambassador denying with a straight face that genocide was taking place!

As a Desk Officer for Somalia, Rwanda, and Angola in the UN Secretariat Headquarters, I often observed and reported on meetings of the Security Council for my superiors, and frequently encountered Gambari in the Council Chamber. But the termination of Nigeria’s democratic transition in 1993, and the human rights violations by the regime of Gen. Sani Abacha, progressively strained Gambari’s tenure as Nigeria’s envoy as western powers opposed the Abacha regime and the government Gambari represented became a pariah state.

The execution of Ken SaroWiwa was a low ebb for him and for Nigeria in the so-called “international community”. All that sustained the super-diplomat was the personal goodwill he enjoyed among his colleagues, which flowed from his affable personality. The situation invoked a popular definition of an ambassador as “a good man sent abroad to lie for his country”. Nevertheless, Gambari maintained a very cordial personal relationship with the United States Ambassador to the UN at the time, and later Secretary of State, the former professor and foreign policy scholar at Georgetown University Madeleine Albright – a relationship that began at Columbia University where they were both doctoral students in the early seventies.

She and he were also to play a key role in mobilizing support for the election of Ghana’s Kofi Annan as UN Secretary-General in 1996 after Washington vetoed the re-election candidacy of Egypt’s Boutros Boutros Ghali for a second term in office. In between the overthrow of the Buhari regime by Gen. Ibrahim Babangida’s palace coup in 1985, and his return to diplomacy as UN Ambassador in 1990, Gambari retreated to his first love – academia. In self-exile, he taught for several years as a Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and at Howard University, all in Washington DC.

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Many of his students, colleagues and mentees were to later become prominent U.S, Ambassadors and influential foreign policy actors. Post-1999, after Olusegun Obasanjo was elected president and appointed the distinguished corporate guru and chartered accountant Arthur Mbanefo as Nigeria’s UN Ambassador, Gambari crossed over to the UN Secretariat, appointed as UnderSecretary-General by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He was later to serve as Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, a rare distinction for an African, and mediated numerous crises in Angola, Cyprus, and Myanmar among others.

Ibrahim Gambari’s impact in world politics is evidenced by, among others, recognitions such as the conferment on him by President Jacob Zuma of the Order of the Companions of Oliver Tambo, the highest honor South Africa can confer on a non-citizen, and the Campaign Against Genocide Medal conferred on him by Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame. Gambari has also served Nigeria in important positions at home. He was a member of the National Conference convened by President Goodluck Jonathan in 2014, and he is the ProChancellor of Kwara State University.

He was appointed by President Muhammadu Buhari as Chief of Staff to the President in 2019, in Buhari’s second term in office. That far more people remember Gambari’s contributions in his external-facing roles than this key one at home is perhaps an indication of broader assessments of the impact of successive governments in Nigeria by citizens and foreigners alike. It is fitting that Gambari has “retired” to fulltime work leading his influential think tank, the Savannah Centre for Diplomacy, Democracy and Development in Abuja. Eighty cheers to an outstanding scholar statesman.

Moghalu, a former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, is the President of the African School of Governance, a pan-African graduate-school university of public policy headquartered in Kigali, Rwanda.

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