FG Shutdown 3 Foreign Missions Over Insufficient Funds

The Federal Government, says  due to insufficient funds, has to shut down three foreign missions and further downsized another because of funding.

The 3 foreign missions affected by FG clampdown are those in Sri Lanka, Czech Republic and Republic of Serbia. The foreign mission in Ukraine was drastically downsized. Rhis was disclosed Nigeria’s foreign affairs Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama.
 He said reduction of Nigeria’s foreign missions remained one of the agenda of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, added that the closure of the missions was occasioned by inability of the ministry to maintain them due to insufficient funds. Nigeria before now had 119 foreign missions.

“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,” he said.

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.

“Because what we found out is that it is more expensive to close the embassies than operating them,” he added.