The famous Andi Möller saying “Milan or Madrid, the main thing is Italy!” is already 30 years old, but is still often quoted. Probably because some people feel caught in the act, it’s a basic human trait to mess up geography from time to time. The Czech Republic/Chechnya, Austria/Australia, Iraq/Iran – you can get confused there.
Just a few days ago, US President Joe Biden got confused Colombia and Cambodia and is thus in a prominent presidential society. His predecessor Donald Trump joined a few years ago Baltic and Balkans confused and blamed Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania for the collapse of Yugoslavia. The two EU countries Slovenia and Slovakia, about which the Brussels satirical magazine, are even worse Le Chou recently joked, the “miser” and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte have decided that the extravagance of two countries that sound so similar can no longer be afforded. And the former mayor of Munich, Christian Ude from the SPD, who would have liked to have become Bavarian prime minister, may have lost crucial points in the state election campaign because he mixed up Upper and Lower Franconia.
To whom the latest case of geographic entanglement goes cannot be determined exactly. On Tuesday, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry’s Twitter account was suddenly marked “Nigerian government organization”. An employee of the platform was apparently quite wrong.
Perhaps the faux pas was due to the increased workload at the short message service, which Elon Musk had thinned out. In any case, the government in Oslo reacted sourly: “As much as we enjoy our excellent bilateral relations and the close alphabetical neighborhood with Nigeria, we would very much appreciate it if you could call us Norway,” the Foreign Ministry tweeted.
Incidentally, the neighborhood is not that close, Nigeria and Norway are separated in the alphabet by North Korea and North Macedonia. But how is Musk, who will soon be the only remaining Twitter employee, supposed to keep track of things? Alphabet, that’s Mark Zuckerberg’s damn competitor. Or?