https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfarzCr_KYE


Mary Beth Leonard is the current U.S. ambassador to Nigeria assuming office on December 24th, 2019. She has been 33 years in the U.S. State Department. She served as economic and consular officer in Yaounde, Cameroon, when Namibia and Togo. She's also served as deputy chief mission in Bamako, Mali, and ambassador to the Republic of Mali. She served as a director for West African Affairs at the U.S. Department of State, was appointed representative of the United States of America to the African Union by former Presidents Barack Obama and was appointed U.S. ambassador to Nigeria on August 1st, 2013, presented her credentials to President Muhammadu Buhari on December 24th, 2019.

And in my interview with her, she talks about her perception of the country and her work in the country during the covid-19 pandemic Nigeria, US relations and immigration under the new U.S. administration of President Joe Biden.

Ambassador, thank you for joining us. My pleasure. It's a pleasure having you here. And I know you I understand you've been in the country for more than six months now, even though many Nigerians haven't seen you really out there. But you have been around you have gone around the country as much as you can now, despite the restrictions and so on. How are you finding your stay so far? I love Nigeria. I think it's a fabulous place.

If you're Marybeth Leonard and you've done your entire diplomatic career in Africa, the idea that by the third time you get to be an ambassador, you get to come to Nigeria, the the really the really big giant on the continent, it's just so exciting. You just can't overstate how important Nigeria is in terms of the size of its economy and its population and its dynamism and its regional role. I wish by now I had seen more of Nigeria instead of the walls inside my house, however charming those walls might be.

So I think in the in the coming months, we'll be able to do I'm looking forward to being able to travel more across the country. So far, I've been to Lagos a few times and before the pandemic really broke out, I was in Kaduna. I think if it had not been pandemic times, I probably would have been to 10 states in Nigeria by now. So I'm really looking forward to getting out and and meeting people, seeing seeing different places.

But interestingly enough, your appointment, as you said, came during the time of the pandemic. So how would you then describe, you know, the information sharing between Nigeria and the US knowing how rapidly this coronavirus is changing and you have different mutations of the virus now in various variants of the virus? How how do you see Niger and the US working side by side trying to help people understand what's going on?

Well, you use the right words. The Nigerian the United States have been working side by side on covid-19 from the very early part, very early days of this pandemic. And that was actually based on an incredibly long and robust cooperation in health between the United States and Nigeria. We are the leading provider of medical care for HIV AIDS patients. Under the program, we were really stuck into the polio vaccinations. We had long been a force for health in Nigeria and many of those same investments we were able to help Nigeria build on in terms of the logistics of moving samples from place to place, building on the backbone of the laboratories that we had helped establish with with the president's program for AIDS Relief.

PETTYFER In fact, there were probably sixty two or sixty three people from my embassy, people who work for USAID, for the Centers for Disease Control and for the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research, who are working alongside their colleagues in the Ministry of Health with the presidential task force and in in in various laboratories to think about how to address the testing aspect of the pandemic as we were in that phase. And now that we're moving towards the vaccination phase with the happy arrival of vaccines into Nigeria for the first time, we'll be looking at the logistics and constraints and opportunities and how it is that you make the vaccine available.

So we've spent so far some seventy two million dollars on that effort. I would say that the biggest news on US efforts against covid-19 is the new Biden administration's emphasis on reentering the multilateral arena to be really a leader and a catalyst in global and global health. Certainly we were very active through all the activities that I described to you over the first 14 months. The difference now, as I think the the renewed commitment to multilateralism, you saw that on the first or the second day of his administration, President Biden had the United States rejoin the World Health Organization.

And we have committed not only to the logistics of the response to that, to contributing quite a large sum of money, to making sure that vaccines can make it to every corner of the world.

And speaking of vaccines, we put some of the world leaders talk about developed countries contributing to vaccines in poorer countries, and they're saying that many developed countries acquired more vaccines that they needed and the rest of it should be given to poorer countries. Does the US think so? Yeah.

So I think the question the question is, while there may be individual countries that have gotten more vaccine than they currently need, the larger story is of the need for the vaccine outstripping the supply that is coming online. Certainly there are new vaccines being discovered and that is increasing the availability. The question is, as I said before, for the Biden administration is how do you get that vaccine to every corner of the earth that needs it? One of the answers to that is the United States is four billion dollar contribution to Kovács, the global the Global Alliance for Vaccine Initiatives, mechanism for distributing vaccine around the world.

So what we've done with that four billion dollars that was appropriate or what we are doing with that. Four billion dollars that was appropriated by the US Congress in December is to decide to give two billion dollars of that immediately and then hold off additional tranches of it until we see other partners step up with more financial resources to support the amount of money that it's going to take to get vaccine everywhere. What can you expect under the Bush administration?

So I hope that you notice that one of the first speeches that President Biden made it early in his administration was to the African Union summit in February, where he talked about a renewed spirit of partnership and engagement. And I think the idea is looking towards the strengths and the opportunities and the optimism in order to engage in really robust partnerships. You've seen a very early recommitment to multilateralism, not only through rejoining the show, but through US support for the Nigerian candidate for the for the World Trade Organization.

And I think that this is an administration that doesn't necessarily think that multilateral institutions are perfect, but believe and indeed some of them are not, but believes that it's important to be a part of that conversation and a part of those institutions in order to bring about those reforms to the goals that we all have, which is for a safe, secure, prosperous, healthy world. So I think that's a lot of what you can expect to see in the in the in the in the coming weeks and months.

And I think that makes for a really good moment for Nigeria, too. When you look at you think about how many prominent Nigerians are in important positions in international organizations. Right. The deputy secretary general of the United Nations, the head of the the World Trade Organization, the EU's permanent representative in New York, who sort of works to Marshal Africa voices. There is also a Nigerian, as is the president of the African Development Bank. And who am I missing?

I am missing.

There have also been some people of Nigerian descent in the Biden administration and in the deputy secretary for the Treasury there everywhere. So I think at a moment where the United States is really looking towards a renewed multilateralism, the fact that there are so many prominent Nigerians in these roles is is really important. I know. I cannot believe that the one I forgot. Oh, my goodness. I was the ambassador to the African Union. This man was my neighbor in Addis Ababa is the new political and peace and security affairs commissioner at the African Union.

So you've got a really formidable array of talent in key security and economic international institutions to help be a partner with the United States as it goes towards that new spirit of multilateralism. What about from the coronaviruses? So we have seen the president, Joe Biden, talk a lot about immigration. He signed a few executive orders on the first day of his administration. And immigration is really important to Nigeria, considering the Trump administration also focused on immigration. We know how important that is to America.

Where is Nigeria then in America's foreign policy? On immigration? On immigration, what?

You're correct that the new president made a couple of decisions on immigration in the very first days, notably to reverse bans on certain kinds of immigration, among which Nigeria had had had fallen on the immigrant visa fund. So that has been reversed. And Nigerians are again eligible for all categories of immigrant visas that it's very important for Nigeria. The most significant Nigerian diaspora population in the world is in the United States. They are also among the best educated immigrants in the United States.

It's a really powerful and significant community. So we're very glad to see that that reversal, as I suppose I really hope that Nigeria is to the premise of the visa bans or that that whole exercise in the beginning was about asking Nigeria to make certain reforms and information sharing and identity and.


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