It was common practice for chargé d’affaire of an American Embassy to dine influential journalists of the host country the hope of influencing them. Invitations to visit USA or Fulbright scholarships were some of the carrots dangled in front journalists.
What can one make of the diplomatically flippant tweet aimed the new Somali MPs? “We look forward to meeting #Somalia’s new Members of Parliament after they are sworn-in on April 14 at a time convenient to them” tweeted the US Embassy in Mogadishu.
This is an insult to the very idea of sovereignty, an attitude one can expect of Biden’s administration that prides itself on multilateral approach to global challenges. It is has long been an open secret that at the heart of patronizing and paternalistic attitude of the democratic administrations is a hard-to-detect racist outlook. What democratic values can America impart if its diplomats in Mogadishu tell, in a tweet, the young Somalis that an embassy in Halane compound dictates to new MPs?
Nothing is more dangerous than a racist superpower that sees African MPs as new Uncle Toms. Whatever happened to diplomatic niceties?, The Biden administration prefers the pretence of a busybody globocop eager to flex its diplomatic muscles at the wrong time and for the wrong purpose.
America is testing the efficiency of tweet-powered diplomacy in Somalia. That does not bode well for the relations between USA and Africa. If a foreign embassy can resort to a disrespectful diplomatic language to address a country’s lawmakers, what we see is a divide and rule tactics that will only earn America fewer friends in Africa.
