Ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bolaji Akinyemi tells President Tinubu to ‘Avoid confrontation with Trump’

Former Foreign Affairs Minister Bolaji Akinyemi has urged President Bola Tinubu to steer clear of any confrontations with Donald Trump, the newly inaugurated 47th President of the United States.

While speaking on Channels TV, Akinyemi said;

“If I were President Tinubu, I would try to steer clear of antagonising him because there is nothing a bully likes better than taking on people who are not strong enough to resist him. You know there is that African proverb that if you are not strong enough to take on a bully and you take him on, you are just even going to suffer more for it.

That’s the advice I will give President Tinubu: try and avoid having a confrontation with him even if that means that he does things that annoy or does things that step on the interests of Nigeria. There are ways in which you could address his reaction without confrontation,” he said.

Akinyemi, a former Director General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), faulted Trump’s inaugural speech as uninspiring, “shocking, and depressing.”

The octogenarian said rather than rallying the world for peace, Trump took time to threaten the rest of the world with a bouquet of hostile policies including tacking back Panama Canal, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, tariff wars, and others.

Akinyemi remarked that the US president will “quickly discover that policies and jingoism come with consequences,” suggesting that the world is “in for a challenging four years” under Trump’s leadership.

The former Nigerian Minister of External Affairs noted that Nigeria is no longer a priority for the 78-year-old president, indicating that Africa’s most populous country should not anticipate any remarkable changes during the Trump administration.

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