Chidi Anselm Odinkalu writes that democracy without voters is the origin of Nigeria’s insecurity crisis. Lilian’s story is a three-decade long reel of the kind of interminable coincidence that is not unusual in Nigerian public life. In 1983, the civilian administration of President Shehu Shagari recruited over 300 new officers into Nigeria’s diplomatic service. While they were still to complete their orientation, Muhammadu Buhari, a soldier, overthrew the regime on the last day of 1983.
Sir Henry Wotton, the Renaissance-era politician and diplomat from Kent in England is credited with the line that an ambassador is “an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” What he did not quite capture was what the situation was at home from where the ambassador acquired the habit of dissembling. In her just-published memoir, retired career diplomat, Ambassador Lilian Onoh, fills that gap or, at least, the Nigerian version.
In the pantheon of diplomatic memoirs out of Nigeria there’s been nothing quite like this. Her title, Diplomatic Bedlam, is a giveaway. Her sub-title makes clear that this is a story of “interactions with humans, mutants, variants and quadruple variants.” While diplomacy can often profit from ambiguity, Lilian Onoh trades in clarity. She is not one of those diplomats given to professional or practised memory loss. Instead, she prefers total recall.
Her narration is refreshingly irreverent, with a touch of occasional risqué. Her wit is acid. As her text makes clear, Lilian Onoh was a reluctant diplomat. Her father, a successful lawyer and politician, had wanted her to follow him into the vocation of the law. The closest she came to that was taking courses in international and non-proliferation law on her way to a degree in politics and international studies.