The Appointment of Ambassadors: A Reflection on Ethics and Leadership
About six months ago, I had a conversation with an elderly supporter of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. He asked me to relax, saying, “Mr President will shock all of you over that. You know he likes to have quality men around him.” I did not argue further.
True to the old man’s prediction, President Tinubu shocked the entire nation on November 29, 2025, when he sent the list of his would-be ambassadors to the National Assembly for approval. Immediately I saw the list, I put a call across to my old friend. He picked, and before I could say anything, the politician said, “I know why you are calling me, Suyi. Òrò p’èsì je (proposition kills response). We will talk later.” We have not spoken since the telephone call.
When a man is accused of being light-fingered, the elders of my place caution that he should not be found in the dark playing with a kid (tí a bá pe ènìyàn l’ólè, kí ó mã fi omo ewúré s’eré l’ókùnkùn).
The saying speaks to the discretion of leaders and those in positions of authority. Those who are close to the president should tell him like our elders warn, that a man accused of gluttony should make conscious efforts to control his gastronomic tendencies. There is wisdom in that.
Tinubu is a ‘master strategist’, his fans don’t spare any opportunity to tell us that. But there is a huge attribute of the President that they fail to bring to the fore. Beyond his ‘strategies’ skewed as they come, the greatest hubris of President Tinubu is his insensitivity.
Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1755 – July 12, 1804) was the first Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, under President George Washington between 1789 and 1801. In 1791, Hamilton formed America’s political party, the Federalist Party.
He was a great political philosopher and an avant-garde. He had fears that the American Presidency might be occupied by the wrong person with the wrong attributes. Together with his fellow Federalists, he posited that the US electoral system must have some in-built self-cleansing devices that would ensure that no single umpire is subservient to the ruling party.
The aim, according to him, is to ensure that “the office of the president will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The in-built mechanism, he added, would ensure that “men with talents for low intrigue and little arts of popularity” would be eliminated from the exalted office of the US Presidency.
Should that happen, Hamilton posited that “history will teach us that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the great number have begun their career by playing an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.” And to escape the impending danger, Hamilton and his party proposed the insertion of Article II into the American Constitution on the Electoral College.
The Federalist Paper, on page 68, states: “The immediate election should be made by men MOST CAPABLE OF ANALYZING (emphasis mine) the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under the circumstances favourable to deliberation, and to a JUDICIOUS combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern them.” (See How Democracies Die, pages 39-40, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt).
The two authors argued eloquently that Hamilton’s Electoral College system, which was initially designed to be the “original gatekeeper” of American democracy, failed because of some flaws in the design. They submitted that the rise of political parties in the 1800s greatly affected the system such that “parties, then became the stewards of American democracy”, adding that because parties select the presidential candidates, they “have the ability… and the responsibility to keep dangerous figures out of the White House.” (Pg 41)
The US has, to a greater extent, however, remained the world’s template of how to run a democracy. However, we may argue that in recent times, especially with the coming of Donald Trump’s presidency, God’s Own Country has also demonstrated that the frailties of individuals could also be a threat to the long-cherished principles of American democracy.
The saving grace for America is the institutionalised system it operates. When it mattered most, the institutionalised principles of an independent judiciary and an impartial electoral umpire ensured that, regardless of how bad the occupant of the Oval Office turned out to be, the American system prevailed. This is what builds the confidence an average American has in the system and, by extension, in the country.
For as far as our voices could reach, we have shouted for the entire world to hear that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) under the leadership of the immediate past Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, would go down in history as the worst ever in Nigeria.
Nigerians were scandalised in no small measure that INEC officials uploaded the results for the Senate and the House of Representatives elections held on the same day and at the same time, on its results viewing platform. But when it was the turn of the presidential election, which also took place at the same time as the National Assembly elections, the platform failed, and Yakubu and his men had to do manual collation of the presidential election.
Of course, and as expected, the judiciary stepped in and stamped the perfidy by affirming the election of the incumbent President Tinubu to the embarrassment of logic, common sense and the obvious infractions on the part of INEC and the glaring violent violation of the provisions of the electoral laws on the position of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
As usual, Nigerians sought solace in their innate resilience and put the 2023 elections behind them. The ultimate hope was that when he finally bowed out of INEC, having served his constitutional two terms, Professor Yakubu would retire to his Bauchi home.
How do we reconcile the unblushing inclusion of Professor Yakubu’s name in the ambassadorial list President Tinubu submitted to the National Assembly? How do we explain to the comity of sane nations of the world that the leader of the umpire we accused of bias is now a beneficiary of the largesse of the very man we all queried for his accession to the presidency? How would the international community rate us? How do we convince them that we are not the “disgraced country” President Trump called us?
The Indian author, Arjun Appadorai (1902-1990), writing under the sub-topic, Politics and Ethics, in his “The Substance of Politics”, says “Ethics… deals with the rightness and wrongness of a man’s conduct and ideas towards which man is working”, adding that among other things ethics “concerns itself” with: “what is the basis of moral obligation? What do we mean by right action? How do we distinguish a right action from a wrong one? (Pg 9)
He further posits, stating: “If, as Lord Acton said, the great question for politics is to discover not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe, the connection between ethics and Politics is clear, for on every political issue the question may be raised whether it is right or wrong” (pp. 9–10).
So, how right or wrong is Tinubu’s appointment of Professor Yakubu as an ambassador? What does the President intend to achieve? A compensation for ‘a job well done’ or just crass impunity because Tinubu knows that Nigerians are already devastated by the shenanigans in government circles?
And just as Appadorai adds, “…If we agree that what is morally wrong can never be politically right,” we are tempted to re-echo the Indian’s postulation that “Politics is conditioned by ethics.” (Pg10). It is the ethics, nay the morality, of an unbiased entity that INEC ought to represent, that Yakubu threw to the whirlwind when he held sway as the Chairman of the electoral body.
It would have been more than enough if Nigerians woke up to contend with the inclusion of the most blathering characters in the ambassadorial list. We would have been satisfied that since fools also grow old; it is not totally out of place for the President to have added Reno Omokri to the list.
Nigerians, home and in the Diaspora, would not have minded that the same Omokri, who on December 23, 2022, posted that: “Electing a man like Tinubu, who obviously shows signs of either drug or old age induced dementia, will have a very negative effect on our economy. He will not be able to supervise his own government. At Federal Executive Council meetings, he would be shouting bulaba” but now sees a transformed Tinubu as “The President”, who “has taught me the meaning of forgiveness and has helped me better understand what patriotism entails. In short, Christlikeness is demonstrated in him. He is the right man, at the right time, for the right job, and deserves the right hand of fellowship from all Nigeria”, curiously made the list!
This is just as we would all have forgiven the Delta man, who once vowed that “it would never happen” that he should work with Tinubu because, like he stated: “….I told the person, it cannot happen, I can’t do it. It is just against my principles. People can do that. It is not just in my DNA. I can’t do it. It’s not going to happen. It is never going to happen,” now jumping because a transmogrified Tinubu appointed him an ambassador.
But having Professor Yakubu as an ambassador, less than six months after he left the INEC job as Chairman, threw ethics to the dustbin of thoughtlessness and amounts to nothing but the carte blanche that has become the hallmark of the Tinubu presidency! It is bad enough that this administration has rendered Nigerians politically impotent. It is worse if the president flashes that on our faces at any given opportunity. This impunity stinks to high heaven!
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