Nigeria shuts down 3 embassies abroad due to insufficient funds

The Nigerian government has shut down three of its embassies abroad while downsizing another one as a result of insufficient funds.

The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, while speaking during a press conference on Tuesday, May 21, 2019, revealed that operations in Sri Lanka, Czech Republic and the Republic of Serbia have been shut down, while the embassy in Ukraine has been drastically downsized, Pulse NG reports.

He said:

“Every embassy has written to us about their huge financial demands and when we go to these embassies we see clearly very unattractive state that does not reflect well on the country.

“Very often the staff of the embassy really find things extremely difficult. Clearly, if we want to operate on the scale and scope in which we are at the moment with over a 100 missions around the world, we need to spend a lot more.

“What I am saying is that rather than having this terrible circle of inadequate funding for missions, headquarters and so forth we have to reduce the scope.

“We should have foreign missions that we can fund, we might not necessarily close the embassies per se, it might be reducing the number of staff in the embassies.”

80 of Nigeria’s embassies abroad were not captured for funding in the 2019 appropriation bill submitted to the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari.