1 week ago
32
When Bolaji Akinyemi took over the reins of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the early years of Ibrahim Babangida’s regime (1985-87), the understanding of Nigeria’s foreign policy from the perspective of three concentric circles was well established. Akinyemi tried to project Nigeria’s power a step further.
Trained as a Realist at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and at the University of Oxford, he had a vision of Nigeria as a great power and seemed determined to push it. As Director General of the NIIA, during the radicalisation of Nigeria’s foreign policy under Murtala Mohammed, he organised a major conference of Nigerian scholars in 1976 to discuss Nigeria’s place in the world.
Confident that Nigeria was already a regional West African power and a force to be reckoned with in Africa, Akinyemi sought, when he became foreign minister in 1985, to project Nigeria’s power further in the wider world by advocating a ‘concert of global medium powers’, including countries as diverse as Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Zimbabwe, Brazil, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Senegal, Sweden, Switzerland, Venezuela, and Yugoslavia. This resulted in The Lagos Forum in 1987 or conference of medium powers drawn from across four major regions of the world.
SPONSOR AD
During his tenure, he also launched the Nigerian Technical Aid Corps to provide African, Caribbean and Pacific countries with technical support in various fields, including education, medicine, engineering, agriculture, technology, law, architecture, and artisanship. Nigeria’s Africa-centred activist foreign policy earned it a de facto permanent seat on the African Union’s Peace and Security Council, which was established in 2004; and, with Egypt, is the only African country that has been elected five times as a non-permanent member on the UN Security Council.
Nigeria’s projection of big power status or regional hegemony came to a head in the 1990s during the brutal dictatorship of Sani Abacha, who decided to intervene militarily in Liberia and Sierra Leone to prevent those countries from sliding into protracted anarchy. Those interventions were a burden on the Nigerian treasury, but they underscored Nigeria’s big power status in the region and provided the internationally despised Abacha regime a bargaining chip in dealing with the West and criticism of his regime. They also set the stage for a radical transformation of ECOWAS from an organisation that was concerned only with economic integration into one that also prioritises regional peace and security.
The outcomes of most of these initiatives were far less impressive than what was expected. But I raise them to demonstrate the vision that earlier thinkers and actors in the foreign policy field had about Nigeria’s significance in Africa and the world, as well as the need to act strategically when conducting foreign policy.
There is a fairly broad consensus among observers of Nigeria’s foreign policy that Nigeria has, over the past 15 or so years, lost its mojo in African and wider world politics. This has been traced to its economic difficulties, long-running multiple insecurities, troubled or dysfunctional politics, lack of faith in the federal state, and election of leaders with limited interest in, or knowledge about, foreign policy. A state of inertia or lack of strategic direction has set in as the country grapples with its internal problems.
France’s Africa policy
Much has been written on France’s Africa policy, which, especially in recent times, largely focuses on the neocolonial relations it established with its ex-colonies in the domains of the economy, defence, bureaucracy and culture. France’s economic relations with its ex-colonies are governed by a monetary regime that ties the currencies of those countries (the CFA francs issued by the West and Central Francophone African central banks) initially to the French franc and subsequently to the euro.
The Franco-African monetary regime also required the banks of the two currency blocs to deposit their reserves in the French treasury, and, for a very long time, had a French government representative on the boards of those banks. These arrangements have allowed France to have a firm grip on the economies of the Francophone African countries and dominate their external trade and investment relations. France also controlled their defence policies by establishing a number of military bases in key countries, such as Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon and Djibouti.
In addition, a large number of French citizens work in those countries’ bureaucracies, and France extensively lobbies for their elites to secure important positions in international organisations. The term Francafrique has been used to describe this neo-colonial relationship.
An additional factor in French power and influence is the global spread of the French language. Francophone Africa is the only region in the world where the French language is still growing. As literacy levels increase in Africa, so does the use of the colonial languages (English, French, and Portuguese), which have been adopted as official languages, expands, despite the spread of African languages that serve as lingua franca in most countries.
It is reckoned that more than 300 million people in Africa speak French in varying levels of fluency. This represents 67 per cent of the French-speaking population in the world. In other words, four and half times more people speak French in Africa than in France.
What has often been ignored or underreported in discussions on French neo-colonialism in Africa is the strategic value of France’s close ties with its ex-colonies and why France goes to great lengths to defend those ties. The strategic objective of those economic, military and cultural ties is to embed French power in Africa and signal to the world that it is still a great power.
In terms of economic importance, Nigeria offers more opportunities to France than its Francophone West African countries, whose total wealth (or GDP) is much less than Nigeria’s. This is why Nigeria is France’s largest trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa.
However, from a strategic point of view, France cannot pivot to Nigeria in order to enhance its power in the world system. It faces far stronger competitors in that country than in Francophone West Africa, and it can’t craft in Nigeria the kinds of neo-colonial relations it has established in Francophone Africa.
Bangura wrote from Nyon, Switzerland [email protected]
English (US) ·