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Nigeria’s lack of senior diplomatic presence in Washington under President Bola Tinubu, and an absence of lobbyist support, has left it vulnerable to US President Donald Trump’s threat of military action over alleged Christian persecution in Africa’s most populous country.
Abuja is scrambling to appoint an ambassador to the US after two years without one. The move is part of a broader push by Abuja to appoint ambassadors to missions abroad this month. Regulatory filings examined by Semafor showed the Nigerian government has had little to no lobbyist representation in Washington since Tinubu took office in 2023. Instead, Nigeria has been outspent in Washington by Biafra separatist groups who, according to filings, have focused on raising the issue of “Christian killings” on Capitol Hill to chime with a long-running narrative of conservative Christian circles.
One long-time Washington lawyer who has worked with African governments described Nigeria’s lack of senior representation or lobbyists in Trump’s first year as “shocking.”
Cameron Hudson, a former White House Africa director, said that lobbyists could have given the Tinubu administration a better read of the situation in Washington. “This is not an era to be casual about your diplomacy in Washington,” he said.
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Tinubu recalled all of Nigeria’s ambassadors months after taking office in 2023, and those posts — including at key security and trade partner countries like the US and UK — have remained vacant. Nigeria has instead relied on career civil servants at more than 100 foreign embassies and consulates to manage diplomatic affairs, an approach Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar defended in an interview with Semafor in October. “It’s not the case that all ambassadors need to be political appointees,” he said.
The strategy had raised concerns about Nigeria’s foreign policy architecture in wider circles, but had not prompted an altered approach from the government until Trump threatened to review US assistance to Nigeria. Tuggar’s office did not respond to Semafor’s request for comment on the reported move to appoint ambassadors. A list of potential candidates has been resurrected, a person close to the Nigerian presidency told Semafor, adding that “lobbying is happening” for plum posts.
Ebenezer Obadare, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, said Nigeria’s institutional failings at home had exacerbated the situation on the global stage. “Having an ambassador in Washington may not have forestalled the Trump verbal onslaught on Nigeria, but full diplomatic presence would have helped the country anticipate the Country of Particular Concern designation and develop a game plan,” said Obadare.
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Separatists from Nigeria’s southeast region have harked back to the country’s civil war era breakaway territory, which was called Biafra, and invested in lobbyists in Washington to push their cause on Capitol Hill and with the media.
One filing showed the “Biafra Republic Government In-Exile,” which is headed by a Finland-based activist, paid Washington lobbyist Moran Global Strategies $10,000 a month over the last year. The communications showed that while they have championed their separatists as a persecuted Igbo ethnic group, they have also made a point of claiming that they are being persecuted because of their Christian religion. In one letter to Hill staffers the group claims that “Nigeria’s persecution of Christians continues to worsen.”
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- Trump’s surprise threat to Nigeria is causing “whiplash” in the Pentagon amid a flurry of reworked priorities, Reuters reported.