After about three years in Nigeria as the Consul-General of the US Consulate General, Lagos, Jeffrey J. Hawkins moves on to assume the position of the US Ambassador to the Central African Republic. In this interview, he tells DGossip247 about his experience and what he will miss about Nigeria.
After almost three years in Nigeria and now moving on to a higher responsibility, you must have stories to tell about Nigeria. Tell us about your experience working in Nigeria?
I arrived a little less than three years ago, in September 2012, and because I cover southern Nigeria, I had the opportunity to travel all over the southern part of the country. We cover 17 states and I have been to every one of them, many of them multiple times. And so, at least for the part of the country we covered, I feel I have a good sense of those places.
What having a good sense for the place means is understanding the richness and diversity of the states. Understanding the incredible natural and human resource wealth that this country has and how much depth there is here. Understanding things like the depth of faith in Nigeria and the sense to which Nigerians are a religious and focused people, understanding the entrepreneurial spirit of the people of this country and giving a sense of all of the tremendous amount of work that gets done here at the basic level and the tremendous business leaders in Nigeria. It’s just been a remarkable experience and I’m so honoured to have served here.
You must have had your fair share of challenges working in Nigeria. What were the major ones you had to grapple with?
Challenges are everywhere and I don’t focus too much on that. Instead, what I want to talk about is how great the opportunities were. I have worked in other places where maybe, the affinity is not quite as deep, and where we were in a position often, as diplomats, having to sell US position or culture, or sort of prove to the host nation that cooperation with us is a good thing and that has never been the case here.
The opportunities have been tremendous. Americans and Nigerians are very similar in some very deep ways. We share language, we have so many Nigerians that are so deeply familiar with the United States, we have so many Nigerian that have been so successful in US and we have so many shared interests – government to government and people to people.
Forget the challenges – okay, electricity is not as good as it should be, the traffic sucks, that’s all there, but I have served in other places where we had those same challenges but we didn’t have the opportunities that we have here. And so that is what has defined this assignment for me.
Having been in Nigeria for quite a while, what impression of Nigeria are you going with?
Here is a country that has got weight. The thing that keeps coming back to the world is weight. It’s like some really big planet, or a really big sun that has gravity to it. The economy is so big and the talent pool is so big that it can do things in Africa that other places I’ve worked haven’t.
Not like it’s a contest but my last African assignment was in Angola and they have about exactly the same oil production as Nigeria so if that were the measure of things, we’d put all of them in the same place but Angola has a 10th of the people and its economy is nowhere near where Nigeria is.
And in some ways, it doesn’t have the same diversity that Nigeria has. And so Nigeria is so much weightier. There is so much more that can be done. Its presence is felt so widely in the region and a particular concern for me as an American diplomat is that its presence is felt very much in Washington.
So in terms of the amount of attention that my boss and those in the State Department and in the Whitehouse pay to Africa, a lot of that attention is to Nigeria, and so for example, that President Buhari is going to the White House next month is a function of that weight and of that importance.
You have talked about the opportunities in Nigeria and how weighty the country is, but in spite of all that, the country is still lagging behind and is not faring well in the comity of nations. What in your opinion can be done to make Nigeria as great as it ought to be?
The key issue for me is unity and the sense that I think Nigerians struggle with putting aside local, ethnic and religious differences and seeing themselves as Nigerians. The Nigerian project like the American project is work in progress and this country has gone through and survived some real challenges, particularly the civil war in the 60s. Nigerians were fighting each other but were able to come together the same way that we were after the civil war and repair things and move forward. One of my favourite institutions in Nigeria is the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC).
This idea that you will send young Nigerians all over the country and they will get to know regions that they wouldn’t know otherwise is a great one. I have heard so many great stories from young Nigerians about their experiences with that. Somebody from Lagos was telling me last night that he has done some service in Katsina and that kind of blew my mind. That is a part of the country that they hardly knew anything about, they’d never even been to Abuja before and all of a sudden they were in this remote part of their own country.
And so building those national institutions with a sense of national identity and the patriotism that goes with that is a very good idea. So if you really believe in Nigeria, you are not going to steal Nigerian resources for your own personal enrichment, you are going to use the resources to develop the country and all the things that go with that national identity. That’s the real challenge I see, otherwise everything is there for this country. It’s got the size, the people and the resources that all it needs is to harness them.
Talking about the NYSC, there is a call by many for the scraping of the programme because of the Boko Haram crisis that has led to the death of many youth corps members in the north. Do you subscribe to that?
No. I think that will be having Boko Haram win. I am not making decisions about the national youth service corps but again I see this as a really viable institution. Of course the ‘corpers’ should be protected and kept safe when they do their work. But this idea of mixing people from different regions together and having them serve people from different regions seems to me to be a wonderful idea and I will be very disappointed if that didn’t continue.
On the Boko Haram crisis, what do you think can be done to arrest the situation and restore normalcy to the north east?
I’m not an expert in Boko Haram’s ideological or historical origins, although it does seem to me that the group has changed and metastasised a great deal. Even in the short time that I’ve been here, we have seen different Boko Harams coming to the fore. Partly it’s regrettable but partly, it’s a bit in the international environment also.
There are all these organisations, whether on the African continent we talk about al- Shabaab or ISIS that have managed to really twist some fundamental Islamic principles into something that I can’t believe is the original intent of this faith. And that has a certain attraction and I don’t know what we can do to change that.
But in Nigeria, there are a few things we can do to weaken Boko Haram. Part of that is security approach and combating them on the battle field as Nigeria is doing and law enforcement approach – hunting down bomb makers and arresting and prosecuting them.
But some of it is a much wider engagement with the people in the north east and making sure that those people feel like the government cares about them and is trying to take care of them and as much as possible, providing economic opportunities for them. Those are some ways but not a profound statement on my part, but they are pretty basic but I do think that’s the way forward and will go a long way.
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