Jaja Wachuku - First Foreign Affairs Minister

First Foreign Affairs Minister

From 1961 to 1965, Wachuku was the First substantive Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Commonwealth Relations, later called External Affairs. Before Wachuku's tenure, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, the then Prime Minister, doubled as Foreign Affairs advocate of Nigeria from 1960 to 1961 when he created an official Foreign Affairs and Commonwealth Relations ministerial position in favour of Mr. Wachuku as pioneer Minister.

On July 14, 1962, he was decorated with the insignia of the "Commander of the Order of the Niger Republic" in recognition of "services to the People of the Republic of Niger" by President Hamani Diori. As Foreign Affairs Minister, Jaja Wachuku organised the Afro/Asian group of States and worked to get Liberia voted into the United Nations Security Council, and Ethiopia into the Economic and Social Council. He also worked towards the amendment of the United Nations Charter - increasing the Security Council from eleven to fifteen - taking into account African nations.

It was concerning this period in Nigeria's history that Ambassador Owen W. Roberts, United States' 1964 to 1965 Political Officer in Lagos, Nigeria strikingly said:

"The Nigerians, whatever their tribe, are a very strong, very assertive group. Foreign Minister Jaja Wachuku was a surprise for many American diplomats because he considered himself as having a status equivalent to the British, French, German, or Russian Ministers. Wachuku demanded that much attention and respect. The Nigerians were, and have been, very independent. Senior U.S. echelons weren't used to dealing with Africans as assertive and as strong minded as the Nigerians were. I found this nice because the Nigerians were absolutely always open with you, and would hit you over the head with whatever the problem was. They were entitled to respect and helped gain it for Africans. Ambassador Matthews was not the kind of person to go in and tell Prime Minister Balewa or Foreign Minister Jaja Wachuku how to do things...."

Jaja Wachuku as Foreign Affairs Minister of Nigeria preferred quiet consultation, especially with the two major Anglo-American powers: Great Britain and the United States - in search of solutions to continental and international problems. For example, there was a lot of hue and cry as a result of the Rivonia Trial in South Africa in 1963 following the arrest of Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Denis Goldberg, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Lionel Bernstein and others. They and Nelson Mandela, who was serving term on his 1962 conviction, were charged with "sabotage and... conspiracy to overthrow the Government by revolution and by assisting an armed invasion of South Africa by foreign troops." These charges were treasonable and carried the death penalty. Jaja Wachuku quietly invited Lord Head, the British High Commissioner in Lagos and also United States' Ambassador Joseph Palmer II - and strongly urged them to intercede with their governments to prevail on the apartheid regime in South Africa - not to impose the death penalty on Nelson Mandela and others. Wachuku employed the same quiet diplomacy on the matter with U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk and British Foreign Secretary Lord Home. Subsequently, Lionel Bernstein was acquitted and Nelson Mandela and the rest were given life imprisonment terms.

Jaja Wachuku, like Hegel's historical individual, had the capacity to stand outside the confines of his time, place and intuiting history. He sought his vindication in historical reality. The Right Honourable Prime Minister Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa recognized and appreciated Wachuku's outstanding essence; and used to tell him that he was ten or more years ahead of his Government cabinet colleagues. Wachuku's uncanny historical intuition was evident from the start when, in 1947, he proclaimed Lagos an All-Nigerian city - long before that city became a federal territory. Wachuku also foresaw the danger of recognizing military coup as a way to change government: In Ethiopia, he strongly refused to accord recognition to the Nicolas Grunitzky Government in Togo after the January 13, 1963 first coup in that country. Jaja Wachuku believed that if that first African coup by the Togolese army was recognized as a way to change government, then, coup making would spread in Africa.

In Addis Ababa, during the Inaugural Conference of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia sat Wachuku down in the presence of Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa and begged Balewa to plead with his "Foreign Minister Jaja Wachuku" to accept that the Togolese Government be admitted to take part in that first OAU Conference. Wachuku jokingly reminded Emperor Haile Selassie and Prime Minister Balewa that he was only number three in the Nigerian Government, and that coup plotters go for numbers one and two - President or Head of State and Prime Minister. Jaja Wachuku added that by the time coup makers got to number three, he would be resting in his village.

At the end, Wachuku refused to change his diplomatic position of not allowing Togo to participate because the Togolese Government came to power by coup. Therefore, Togo became the only independent African country that was not represented at the Inaugural Conference of the OAU. History has already told us whether Wachuku was right or wrong. Even Kwame Nkrumah who was one of the most vocal supporters of the Togolese Government of coup makers, later fell victim of the coup contagion. As for Jaja Wachuku, he had resigned from the Nigerian Parliament and Government at midday of January 14, 1966 - twelve hours before the first Nigerian military coup of January 15, 1966 led by Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu.

In a public lecture titled "Nigeria: The Blackman's Burden" delivered on February 24, 2005 at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) - to mark the 28th Anniversary of the Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) and the 2005 Black History Month, it was also concerning Jaja Wachuku at the founding period in Nigeria's Foreign Policy that Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, 1985 to 1987 Nigerian External Affairs Minister, said:

"Karl Marx must have had Togo in mind when he wrote in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, "Hegel says somewhere that all great events and personalities in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce". In 1963, when President Sylvanus Olympio was assassinated, Jaja Wachuku, the Nigerian Foreign Minister in condemning the action added that for security reasons, Nigerian boundary was the Togo-Ghana boundary. He was roundly condemned. Looks like he was just speaking forty years out of turn. He would be pleased to know that Nigeria had caught up with him. And that should also be a lesson to those who think that Nigerian foreign policy started and ended up with them."

As Foreign Affairs Minister, Wachuku attended the Philadelphia third annual conference of the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) held in 1960. Concerning Jaja Wachuku at that AMSAC conference, The Cambridge History of Africa Volume 8 c. 1940-c. 1975 published by the Cambridge University Press, in page 107, said:

"Continuing interest among the black intelligentsia in African culture was signalled by the creation of the American Society of African Culture (AMSAC) in 1956, which restricted membership to persons of African descent... Its third annual conference, in Philadelphia in 1960, devoted itself to the discussion of `African Unities and Pan-Africanism', and can be regarded as an event in the history of the movement. Some of those present had strong links with the Pan-Africanist past, notably Rayford W. Logan, who had played an important part in the era of Pan-African congresses after the First World War; Jean Price-Mars, Haitian diplomat, philosopher of négritude, and President of the Société Africaine de Culture in Paris; and Jaja Wachuku, who had been at the 1945 Pan-African Congress, and who was in 1960 foreign Minister of Nigeria...."