From Dili To Bissau And Lagos: Badejo’s Timor-Leste Award And The Power Of Unseen Diplomacy

By Anuoluwapo Deborah Babawale

The survival of a nation extends far beyond the medals and applause at high-level ceremonies. Instead, it takes people who sit in windowless rooms negotiating with hostile military juntas. They get no applause, but if they make one clerical error, the peace treaty collapses.

Recently, President José Ramos-Horta of Timor-Leste conferred the prestigious Medal of the Order of Timor-Leste on Nigerian scholar-diplomat and Founder of Yintab Strategy Consults, Professor Babafemi A. Badejo. Yet, amidst the diplomatic fanfare, the moment that struck me most was Prof. Badejo’s acceptance speech. Rather than claiming sole credit, he dedicated the medal to “every quiet peace support operation official and mediator, every civil society worker, and every ordinary citizen who does the unglamorous work of holding a country together while nobody is watching or applauding.

“High-profile presidential summits and UN speeches are just 10 per cent of the iceberg visible above the water. The “unglamorous work” Prof. Badejo highlighted is the 90 per cent beneath the surface holding everything up.This is the true baseline of peace. It is the quiet resilience of the market woman who ensures food keeps moving despite a coup, the teachers who open classrooms amidst political unrest, and the ordinary citizens who line up in the scorching sun or pouring rain, risking everything to vote democracy back into existence.

Alongside them is an invisible army of peacebuilders: grassroots mediators de-escalating community tensions before a shot is fired, local early warning monitors tracking threat indicators in fragile rural zones, and technical advisors staying up past midnight to turn political grievances into workable constitutional frameworks.

Together, they hold nations together while global superpowers look the other way.This philosophy of quiet, foundational institution-building defined the mission that earned Prof. Badejo his honour in Timor-Leste. From January 2013 to June 2014, following a disruptive military coup in Guinea-Bissau, Prof. Badejo served as Chief of Staff to Mr Ramos-Horta, then Special Representative of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Together, they rebuilt the fractured working relationship between the United Nations and ECOWAS and helped restore constitutional order through transparent elections in 2014, a process to which Timor-Leste contributed over US$8 million.

Working alongside a Timorese technical team, they designed the Governance Efficacy Amelioration Programme (GEAP), a blueprint recognised by UN Security Council Resolution 2157. While the 2014 election was the visible milestone everyone celebrated, the underground technical work of building institutional reforms like GEAP, so the government could actually function, was the unseen labour that prevented an immediate relapse into crisis.

Rather than chasing quick fixes, Prof. Badejo’s career has consistently connected peace, human rights, humanitarianism, and development, seen across his foundational role in the 2000 Djibouti Initiative for Somalia, the African Union Humanitarian Agency (AUHA) framework, and his Situational Quadruple Nexus (SQN) model.The significance of this award also extends far across the continental stage. Here we have an Asian president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Timor-Leste, a small nation that survived its own conflict, honouring a Nigerian professor for helping fix governance in a West African Lusophone nation. This is South-South cooperation in its purest form: Global South nations stepping up to solve each other’s crises without waiting for Western powers.

With West Africa currently grappling with a resurgence of unconstitutional changes of government, militia violence, and shrinking civic space, this recognition is a timely wake-up call for African leaders. Instead of waiting for a foreign “messiah” to rescue our institutions, we must look inward and pool our own capabilities. As Prof. Badejo rightly noted, “small” Timor-Leste committed $8 million and technical expertise to help stabilise Guinea-Bissau.

When developing nations merge their financial resources, technical intellect, and grassroots resilience, the transformation we desire becomes possible.Closer to home, this honour spotlights Nigerian excellence on the global diplomatic stage. While Nigeria frequently dominates international headlines for its own domestic security and governance struggles, Nigerians like Prof. Badejo have spent decades designing peace and governance architectures across Somalia, Liberia, Darfur, and Guinea-Bissau. This award is undeniable proof that Nigeria possesses the intellectual and diplomatic capital to solve complex governance crises, raising the question of how much more we could achieve if we fully harnessed that same institutional expertise at home.

The image of Prof. Badejo holding up that medal for the “unseen peacebuilders” sends a powerful message: quiet labour for peace matters, even when no cameras are rolling. Africa will only secure lasting stability when we stop obsessing over ceremonial summits and start valuing and investing in the quiet, unglamorous work of institution-building, civil society, and everyday citizens working hand in hand to build our nations.

Anuoluwapo Deborah Babawale is a political scientist and governance researcher specialising in security architectures and conflict early warning mechanisms.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree with First Class Honours and a Master’s degree with a distinction in Political Science from Redeemer’s University.

Her work combines qualitative fieldwork and data analysis to advance, gender-responsive security frameworks for conflict-affected communities.

She can be reached at [email protected]