Amb. Ijeoma Chinonyerem Obiezu had never held a federal appointment when she arrived in Dublin in 2021 as Nigeria’s Ambassador to Ireland. Her experience was political and local. She had been a community speaker, a ward representative, a local government chairman, deputy chairman of the Imo State Board of Internal Revenue and Special Assistant to Governor Rochas Okorocha.
Within a year of her arrival, she had brought Nigerian and Irish officials and businesses together at the Nigeria Ireland Trade and Investment Summit in Dublin. Speaking to PEG Dialogues for the One on One series, she puts that result down to something she believes political appointees bring to the job.
“It takes a political ambassador to make things happen, and I am happy to be proved wrong,”
she said.
“We have the boldness and we have the will.”
Nigeria, like most countries, sends a mix of career diplomats and political appointees abroad. Ambassador Obiezu says the system has always worked this way.
“From independence until today, Nigeria has never sent only career diplomats to represent it,”
she said, adding that political appointees have long served in the country’s most important missions.
Her argument is about motivation more than ability. In her view, a career officer can treat an ambassadorship as one more posting before returning to headquarters.
“A career ambassador can think, ‘When I finish here, I will go back to the office, and in a few years they will send me to another country. We have no office to go back to. We are there to prove ourselves and earn the next recommendation.”
She does not dismiss her career colleagues. Earlier in the interview, she spoke about how hard the 2023 recall was on them, since many reach the rank of ambassador only a few years before they retire.
The case for career diplomats is a strong one too. Years of training in protocol and negotiation, language skills and institutional memory are hard to replace, and many of Nigeria’s most respected envoys came up through the foreign service.
The Nigeria Ireland Trade and Investment Summit, held in Dublin in 2022 under the theme “Prospering Together Through Trade and Investment,” brought government officials and businesses from both countries into one room. Nigeria’s then Minister of State for Industry, Trade and Investment, Mariam Katagum, addressed the gathering.
By Ambassador Obiezu’s account, nothing like it had happened in years. She said the previous summit of its kind took place during Ambassador Kema Chikwe’s tenure, more than fifteen years earlier, with an earlier one in the Obasanjo era.
“By 2022, even career foreign service officers were asking how it could possibly work, given all the negative talk about the country. I pushed, and it happened. I surprised myself, but we did it.”
She describes the summit as the moment that gladdened her heart during her posting, and as proof that an ambassador’s personal drive can open doors that formal channels leave shut.
Ambassador Obiezu believes diplomacy no longer belongs only to ambassadors. She points to Nigerians in Ireland who serve as county councillors and hold senior positions in health, technology and government.
“Every Nigerian living abroad, however they got there, represents the country,” she said. “Diplomacy is everybody’s business.”
Her own public life is far from over. “I am still in politics,” she said. “I see the posting as a break.”
The full interview is available on PEG Dialogues and in the One on One series on PEG Pulse.
