A coalition of civil society groups on transparency and accountability has asked President Bola Tinubu to sack his foreign affairs minister, Yusuf Tuggar, over allegations of incompetence and corruption.
This is the third time the group will raise the alarm over Mr Tuggar’s conduct as the foreign affairs minister. The coalition, at a press conference in Abuja on Sunday, said the minister, a former ambassador to Germany in the immediate past administration of ex-President Muhammadu Buhari, was unfit for the position he currently holds.
Rather than concentrate on the job he was appointed for, the coalition alleged the minister is busy working on how to actualise his gubernatorial ambition in Bauchi State in 2027.
“We still insist that we can never get it right at the diplomatic level and global stage with a character like Yusuf Tuggar as Minister of Foreign Affairs. He remains the worst Foreign Affairs Minister anyone can remember in the Nigerian nascent history.
“We are not cursing our country, but we will continue to lose out at the global stage because there is nothing Tuggar has to offer except an alleged illegal and corrupt sourcing of funds for his gubernatorial ambition in Bauch State in 2027,” a part of the text read by the conveners of the coalition, Igwe Ude-Umanta and Danesi Momoh, read.
The coalition accused Mr Tuggar of deliberately misleading President Tinubu to prematurely terminate the appointment of ambassadors and high commissioners and recall them when there was no plan to replace them.
Apart from flouting procedural rules in the sudden recall of the ambassadors, the coalition said the action had stripped Nigeria diplomatically bare on the international stage.
It also alleged that the recall had placed the finances of the 109 foreign missions of the country in the hands of Mr Tuggar.
The federal government terminated the appointment of the ambassadors and high commissioners in September 2023, and nearly a year after the recall, no replacement has been named for them.
The lack of replacement for the diplomatic heads of the country’s foreign missions for almost a year, the group noted, is unprecedented in the country’s history.
Credit: premiumtimesng.com
