Timor-Leste President Honors Nigerian Prof Badejo for Global Peacebuilding Work
Timor-Leste President and Nobel laureate José Ramos-Horta awarded Nigerian scholar-diplomat Professor Babafemi Badejo the Medal of the Order of Timor-Leste at a ceremony in New York on September 22, 2024. The honour recognizes Badejo's decades designing peace and governance architectures across Somalia, Liberia, Darfur, and Guinea-Bissau.
As Ramos-Horta's chief of staff from 2013-2014, Badejo helped rebuild the UN-ECOWAS relationship and restore constitutional order in Guinea-Bissau after a military coup, culminating in transparent 2014 elections. Timor-Leste contributed $8 million and technical expertise to the stabilization, including the Governance Efficacy Amelioration Programme (GEAP) later endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2157.
The award spotlights a striking paradox: while Nigeria dominates headlines for domestic security struggles, Nigerians like Badejo have quietly solved complex governance crises abroad. His acceptance speech dedicated the medal to "every quiet peace support official and ordinary citizen holding a country together while nobody watches"—the 90% of peacebuilding beneath ceremonial summits.
This is South-South cooperation in action: a small Asian nation that survived conflict helping stabilize a West African Lusophone counterpart. With West Africa facing renewed coups and shrinking civic space, the message is clear—Africa must stop waiting for external rescuers and invest in its own institutional expertise.
How can Nigeria deploy its proven peacebuilding capital to fix governance at home instead of exporting it?