My Canberra Travelogue

Prof Paul A. Iji

In my fairly long time outside Nigeria, I have heard many horror stories about Nigerian missions and their staff.?I have had a fairly long engagement with the missions myself, mostly on behalf of other people.?In my student days at Adelaide, the Nigerian community was very vibrant and we hosted the Nigerian High Commissioner to Canberra at the time, His Excellency, Mr Oboh, a few times.?

In subsequent years, I engaged with the missions in South Africa and Australia, mainly in my role as a community leader.?Personally, I had never felt the need to renew my passport, if it expired, before returning to Nigeria.?I have usually renewed at Abuja, using a relative who is in the security services, call it longleg (in Nigerian lingo) or whatever but it saved a lot of my time and energy.?You may wonder how I could get into the country on an expired passport.?Well, the Geneva Convention or one of these global laws permits citizens to enter their own country if they could show any proof of citizenship.?Those who are current with the news would have heard the same from Ms Abike Dabiri-Erewa, the Chairperson and CEO of the Nigerians in Diaspora Commission.?So, I would normally travel on the Australian passport until my final flight into Nigeria.

The Nigerian mission at Canberra, Australia, may be one of the exceptional ones, with far fewer horror stories than missions in Europe and North America.?I have met three Nigerian High Commissioners appointed to Australia.?As I indicated, I met Mr Oboh a couple of times in the 1990s.?More recently, I met HE Mr Bello Kazaure, the High Commissioner before the incumbent, HE Mr Anderson Madubike.???

The commonality in these interactions is that I met Messrs Kazaure and Madubike during my current work in Fiji.?High Commissioners appointed to Australia cover New Zealand and some of the Pacific islands, including Fiji.

Let me digress here to say that Nigeria does not appear to be as keen on its relationship with Oceania as it is with say Europe and North America.?This is entirely a personal observation, having been to other regions and seen how much activity the mission undertakes in Oceania.?The main reason for this low engagement with Oceania may be distance, Nigeria being separated from Oceania by not less than 20000 km.?However, given the power of technology in the modern era, Nigeria could engage more strongly with Oceania.?

As a community, there are thousands of Nigerians in Australia and a few hundreds in New Zealand and the rest of the Pacific.?One would be correct to say that we are getting close to the third generation of Nigerians in Oceania, particularly Australia.?As it is in other parts of the world, the community is vibrant, with hundreds of medical doctors, academics, engineers, and other professionals.?Oceania faces a lot of natural disasters, ranging from bushfires to drought, floods, cyclones and earthquakes.?Nigerians residing in the region have lived through these events and are experienced but more than anything else, Nigerian professionals in Oceania are highly experienced in their skill areas.?Most are trained in Australia, a country that is renowned for mining as well as agricultural and health technology.?

How does Australia manage to remain at the forefront of agricultural production, despite being the driest continent??The region faces the El Nino-El Nina phenomenon on a cyclic basis; years of drought and fires, followed by heavy rains and flooding.?Australia is one country that can have fire disasters and floods in the same year!?Yet, the country stays above the flames and water, to export massive amounts of wheat, beef, lamb, wine, barley, fruit, and almost everything you can name.?I think this is one country that Nigeria needs to learn from.?In the area of mining, petroleum is probably the only mineral that Australia does not have in substantial amounts.?It has an abundance of natural gas, coal, uranium, iron, bauxite and gold, and taps these with a high level of technology that Nigeria can adopt.?

I have focussed on Australia because it is the regional leader.?New Zealand is strong in agriculture.?In the Pacific islands, we share some cultural similarities with Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu, Tuvalu and Kiribati.?Nigeria possesses strength in agriculture and education that it can share with these relatives from centuries back.?The main point in my digression is that the Nigerian mission in Canberra ought to be stronger than it currently is, in terms of human and financial resources.?Nigerians in the region but outside Australia would like the staff of the mission to visit them more than they currently do.?Nigerians in these far-flung places travel to Australia to renew or obtain new passports.?Those of them who do not hold Australian or New Zealand passports face a lot of challenges to get this done.?

But back to my travelogue.?I visited Canberra this month, January 2023.?Although the primary objective was to renew our Nigerian passports, it was also a sightseeing holiday.?I last passed through Canberra more than 25 years ago and my family had never been there.?So, having completed the online application forms, we set out for Canberra.?As it was more of a holiday visit, we decided to take the Countrylink train ride from Armidale to Sydney, observing the historic farming country of northern New South Wales.?We spent two nights in Sydney, and decided to drive to Canberra by road.?It was a pleasure taking in the 280 km long dual-carriage highway to Canberra.?It reminded me of Abuja-Kaduna-Kano in Nigeria’s good times when the roads were better maintained.?Not a single pothole anywhere and it was a breeze, doing 110 kph on cruise control for most parts of the journey.?The beauty of driving in Australia is the low population density.?With a land mass the size of West Africa, Australia has only 25 million people, about the population of Ghana.?So, one can imagine if only Ghanaians occupied West Africa!?Nigeria’s population is something that needs to be controlled but I have written a lot about this already.?A good start is for us to get accurate statistics on our population and its growth.

We drove straight to the Nigerian High Commission (NHC) on Guilfoyle Road in the Yarralumla suburb of Canberra.?Yarralumla hosts a good number of diplomatic missions in Canberra, so the NHC has good company.?We were politely informed by the security at the gate that the reception was full because the central immigration server was down.?The security man also advised us not to park in the sun but to go under the trees across the road.?I was impressed by the attitude of the security man, whom I later found out was originally from Tonga, a small Pacific island nation with some of the biggest individuals on earth.?The security man was moderate in size, which made it difficult for me to associate him with Tonga in the first place although I suspected that he was of Pacific origin.?

We were later ushered into the NHC and attended to, again quite politely.?It had nothing to do with my status.?For one, I had never met the first two staff who attended to us.?I had brief interactions with them before while advocating for community members in Fiji.?However, they extended the same courtesy to everyone that was there before us, in order of arrival, the usual Nigerian long-leg syndrome was completely absent.?They promised to get our passports ready to collect before we leave Canberra two days later but asked us to supply a reply-paid envelope in case that became impossible.

The highlight of our visit was a dinner with the High Commissioner, Mr Madubike, the following evening.?He sent a diplomatic car to pick us from our hotel.?Such humility from a Nigerian Ambassador!?It was our first ride in a Nigerian diplomatic car.?As he did during his visit to Fiji, Mr Madubike spoke enthusiastically about his vision for Nigeria-Oceania relations; motivated my children on careers, and prayed for peace to return to Nigeria.?The meal was pounded yam with egusi/vegetable soup.?It was a memorable evening for all.?We were joined by a NIDO officer and another officer from the NHC.?

We idled away most of the next day but went back to the NHC to submit our pre-paid envelope, for the delivery of our new passports.?To our surprise, the passports were ready and we collected and left.?We spent the rest of the day at the Parliament House of Australia and saw the chambers of the House of Representatives and the Senate, along with the portraits of past Prime Ministers of Australia on the walls of the massive edifice.

Sadly, it was time to leave Canberra, which we did the following morning.?Aaron did the driving from Canberra to Newcastle, about 440 km.?He got off at Newcastle to attend a week-long programme at his local church at the University of Newcastle.?I took over driving from Newcastle to the mining town of Muswellbrook before Moses rounded off the trip to Armidale.?Newcastle to Armidale is another 330 km or thereabout but such distances are considered to be short in Australia.?The roads are good and fast, so it is easy for one to be on cruise control for most of the trip.?

I thank HE, Mr Madubike and his excellent team.?I look forward to visiting Canberra again and also look forward to welcoming the NHC staff to Fiji until I return to Australia, or Nigeria.

On a final note: I urge Nigerians to put ethnicity and religion aside in February and vote wisely.?Nigeria needs to move forward, and at this moment, only one candidate can take the country on that journey.?His name is Peter Obi.

Prof Paul A. Iji is the Dean, College of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Fiji National University; Author of Writing and publishing your research (hard and Kindle editions) and A guide for young Africans growing up overseas. CreateSpace/Amazon. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the views of his employers.?Please feel free to share. ?