By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
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 Lillian 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.”Geographic Reference
While diplomacy can often profit from ambiguity, Lillian 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, Lillian 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.Legal
Her diplomatic career almost ended before it began. Shocked at the squalid shoddiness of the first week of her induction academy, Lillian absconded to England, intent on other pursuits. Her father followed her there and extracted from Lillian a promise to try it out for one year. She lasted an additional 29, compiling along the way a record that made her “one of the best multi-lateral officers” in Nigeria’s foreign service.
Lillian was raised in a family with deep ties to law and diplomacy. They invested deeply in their daughters. Her younger sister is Nigeria’s current Minister of Foreign Affairs. She was preceded in that office by a man who was married to her elder sister. Another elder sister took a Ph.D. in international law only to have her life tragically cut short in an air crash.Geographic Reference
Lillian’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.
Lillian’s Dad was one of the politicians deposed in the Buhari Coup. One decade after that coup, Lillian was one of only 60 officers hired into Nigeria’s diplomatic service in 1993 during the regime of Ibrahim Babangida, the man who usurped Muhammadu Buhari. By the time she rose to become an Ambassador, Buhari was back in power, this time as a civilian. She retired as a career ambassador under him. She was his High Commissioner to Namibia and, before that, Head of Mission in Jamaica.
For Nigerian diplomats, the “fear of their children having free access to ganja” made Jamaica something of a hardship posting. Most diplomats avoided it. It was to be Lillian’s first posting as an Ambassador. There, she was to battle the three themes that appear to define diplomatic life in Nigeria.
One is bribes. The entire chain of Nigeria’s diplomatic representation and practice appears to be deeply steeped in it. It begins from the point of orientation at the Foreign Service Academy. Intakes routinely paid for their grades and many directing staff appeared happy to oblige. In Lillian’s set, the students who scored the highest marks in the course were not the ones who won the prizes for best performance. The latter apparently was a pay-as-you-go fare.
For the right amount, anything could be bought in the foreign service – cushy postings, ministerial propinquity, and longevity in the right locations. Under cover of diplomatic immunity, diplomats skimmed and scammed the country interminably. In London, for instance, many made enough money to invest in choice real estate. Others invested in women. One particular senior diplomat used the proceeds of his diplomatic scams to procure multiple women in different posts. He seems to have ended up in predictable penury.
The second is sex – a lot of it. It is both a commodity and currency of the diplomatic service. Posted to Vienna Austria as a senior officer, Lillian was instructed to call the Ambassador, a politician. When she did, the Ambassador in Vienna told her that what the post needed was a female officer who could ‘take care’ of his political friends and ‘entertain’ them; “in short, he was looking for a hooker at Government expense.” Lillian explained to him that she lacked the skills for his specification.
Her posting was withdrawn. The headquarters “pandered to his demand for a prostitute packaged as a diplomat and sent him an obliging female.”
Sometimes, these dalliances were themselves diplomatic incidents. In the mission in London, “Madam True Love” reportedly caught her man, a senior Nigerian diplomat, in the office in a perpendicular position inside another female competitor. It all ended rather messily. If it had been today, there’d be digital receipts and undiplomatic memes.Geographic Reference
Back at the headquarters, Lillian caught an ascetic-looking senior diplomat at his peep hole set up to observe female proprieties improperly.
The place bustled with prize-winning Lotharios with impressive cognomens. A ministerial honcho earned the name “Free Wily”. His bureaucratic side-kick was “Small Wily.” “Big Bum” was a married (male) operative in a European post who had a reputation for intimate lubrication with equal opportunities for both sexes. His alleged partners included a governor or two from Nigeria who visited regularly. “Lolita” was a native facilitator of intimate graces in Namibia. The fuller cast of characters reads like a roll call of distinguished deplorables: Chickenpox, The Bat, Shifty-eyed Perv, Jezebel the Delta Variant, Nivaquine Malaria Parasite, Smallpox Pancake, Chewing Gum Rat, and lots more.
Third, apparently, Nigeria’s diplomatic service has always been something of a Voodoo Olympiad. Few Nigerian diplomatic posts are complete without the obligatory attentions of a Babalawo or Brujo. At the mission in Jamaica, a senior staffer had them on retainer. In London, “everybody knew the days when ‘Big Bum’ had new instructions from his witchdoctor”; he’d show up accompanied by “the pungent stench of some cloyingly odious incense.”
In testament to the claim that Juju does not cross water, the prize winner, however, appears to be next door in Togo. It is the place where young diplomats are sent to find out whether they have the presence to imbibe or subdue it.
Togo was also the place where a Nigerian Ambassador proudly displayed in his office not a portrait of the Nigerian President but a photoshopped image of himself with the president of a super-power and his Foreign Secretary.
Diplomatic Bedlam is not all about mutants and several degrees of variants. It is also about humans. A decade after he had departed office from his second tour of duty as Nigeria’s president, Olusegun Obasanjo was invited to headline an event in Jamaica.
On vacation in Cuba from her post in Jamaica, Lillian’s landlady called to ask her whether she was attending the reception for her former president. It was the first time she’d heard about it. She had less than 24 hours to make it back to base from Cuba. President Obasanjo had not informed the High Commission and was surprised to find two separate reception parties at the airport, including one from Nigeria’s High Commission.
A mini-battle ensued on the tarmac as to who would convey the former president from the airport. Stepping into the path of President Obasanjo, Lillian motioned him to the car with Nigeria’s flag: “You are the former president of Nigeria; you do not have a choice.” The General ate humble pie and obeyed. Sometimes order finds a way to reassert itself, even amidst bedlam.Geographic Reference
Title: Diplomatic Bedlam: Interactions with Humans, Mutants, Variants & Quadruple Variants in the Diplomatic Service
Author: Ambassador Lillian Onoh
Publisher & year: Spines (Florida), 2026
Pages: 495
A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
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