Azima steers the nation straight into another avoidable humiliation

Ill-conceived maneuvers shaped by partisan motives instead of genuine civic concern have long characterized the trajectory of Aishath Azima Shakoor’s public and legal life. Her prior stewardship of maritime frontiers and external diplomatic affairs, marked by critical miscalculations, has repeatedly inflicted enduring harm on the state.

The public is now watching the total collapse of her inaugural mission as chief of the state’s dedicated territorial dispute agency, a debacle that has once again exposed the nation to deep global ridicule.

Back in April, President Dr. Mohamed Muizzu formed a dedicated bureau intended to settle disagreements surrounding the southern oceanic frontier and preserve domestic lands, placing the ex-Attorney General at its helm. This outfit was tasked specifically with dealing with overseas entities to settle border disagreements, pinpoint exact geographical coordinates, and draw official perimeter charts. However, everything attempted under her command from the moment she took the reins has ended in unmitigated collapse.

The administration may thunder from stages that it will never concede a single sliver of sovereign area, but the aftermath of the head of state reaching out via letter to the British Prime Minister tells a far more pathetic story. In under a single day following the dispatch of that message, the British government subtly rebuffed the state, signaling that the subject was none of its business and recommending that the country step back from the entire affair. Such a brush-off lays bare the utter frailty of the administration’s external diplomacy and its total lack of a coordinated blueprint.

She has previously remarked that external relations have degraded into theatrical stage speeches, compromising genuine domestic priorities in the process. She once insisted that skilled, well-trained figures ought to be positioned inside planning chambers to defend domestic entitlements globally, yet the unraveling of this very initiative under her personal command brings her abilities under scrutiny yet again. Nor is this latest misadventure an isolated blunder, as one of the worst marks on her legal and state record continues to be the dismantling of the GMR contract.

Throughout the presidency of Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom, while occupying the post of Attorney General, she generated the formal counsel asserting that the agreement with GMR was fundamentally invalid from the start, pushing the conflict all the way to legal arbitration in Singapore. Throughout that period, she made sweeping promises that the public coffers would never be forced to disburse a solitary coin in damages to the corporation, even if the proceedings took place in Singapore. That advice, instead, plunged the country into a mountain of liabilities, saddling everyday taxpayers with an unpayable fiscal nightmare.

Arbitrators in Singapore eventually decreed that the state had to hand over USD 270 million in settlement payouts to the company. Observers still argue that as the official overseeing legal affairs and serving as Attorney General during that debacle, she ought to shoulder full blame for the permanent financial ruin visited upon the domestic economy.

The clumsy actions advanced by the current regime over the Chagos dispute, combined with the catastrophic blunders surrounding the airport concession cancellation, offer unmistakable proof of the chronic breakdown of her legal and public maneuvers. Stepping into prestigious state offices under the pretext of defending collective welfare, her persistent deficiency in tactical vision only continues to inflict damaging blows on the country and its citizens.