Title: Diplomatic Baggage (Mossad & Nigeria:

          The Dikko Story)

Author: Kayode Soyinka

Publisher: Newswatch Books Limited, Lagos (1994)

Pages: 286

Price: £12.00

Diplomatic Baggage is the riveting story of the attempted kidnap of a former Nigerian minister Umaru Dikko from his London home. The story, as told by the author Kayode Soyinka, a London based Nigerian journalist and publisher, reads in part like a Le Carre thriller, with the involvement of at least two secret services. It is also a sober but intriguing account of Umaru Dikko’s legal battles for asylum in the United Kingdom, a shrewd analysis of Nigerian politics, exclusive interviews with Dikko himself, and, like all good stories, has a bizarre denouement.

About the Author

Kayode Soyinka, publisher of the London based Africa Today, was for more than 17 years a foreign correspondent in London, working for such Nigerian publications as Sketch, Concord and Newswatch, Nigeria’s premier news magazine, whose London Bureau Chief he was for more than 10 years.

On October 19, 1986, he survived the letter-bomb blast in Lagos that killed the seasoned Nigerian journalist and the pioneer editor-in-chief of Newswatch Dele Giwa. Soyinka, who is a 21^st Century Trust Fellow, is a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Royal African Society and the Round Table Moot. He wrote this book while at Wolfson College, Cambridge University, as a Visiting Scholar.