In this interview, WALE AKINSELURE speaks with the Director General, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Professor Eghosa Osaghae on consequences of the nation’s foreign policy, issue of federalism, constitution, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, among other issues.
You have been in the saddle as Director General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Victoria Island, Lagos for about four months; help situate Nigeria’s foreign policy, yesterday, today and the future; and what went wrong with our concept of medium super power?
Nigeria’s foreign relations in the last couple of years would be largely a reflection of the dynamics of the global system itself. The global system has been greatly troubled; some say it is unstable, but there has been so much going on. Part of the things that people have concluded, tentatively, is that there seems to be a reinvention, that there are paradigm shifts and there are very interesting developments. Globally, we at, the beginning, that is, the initial years that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, seemed to be moving in the region of what some call a uni-polar world.
So, for a long time, there was some convergence around the liberal ideology or the neoliberal that had the United States, in particular, taking leadership over the world, in many interesting ways. One of them is that even the multilateral organisations appeared to be part and parcel of what was emerging like an agenda to change the world. This was the era of compliance with many of the things that appeared like globally correct; it was the era of democratization; it was the era of liberal reforms. And so, there was some agenda towards making the world almost appear like a uni-polar world. That was the situation for a long time, then comes around China. So, today’s reality will suggest that we may be moving away from potential uni-polarity to multi-polar world. Russia is effectively re-emerging and there are many emerging powers that is one reality.
The other reality is that the world has been greatly troubled by conflicts that are transnational. You would see terrorism, new forms of violent extremism and all of these this things that have affected the world in very critical ways. And of course the global economy itself has been in some kind of instability and they say that the emerging economies from Asia and Africa, for a long time, were having stupendous growth rate that appeared not only that we are recovering but also that they were on the path to economic emancipation and development. And there was also COVID-19 to virtually change the complexion of the world such that all things appear to be at a standstill. And then not to mention the very, some may say disturbing, others may say interesting, even in a country like the United States that held forth the global leadership. Then you come to Africa itself, in the throes of the pandemic, things have not been as they ever were. In ECOWAS, West Africa, we have all kind of issues of conflicts that are transnational, that require multilateral action. See what is happening in the Sahel and so on. So, if you want to put Nigeria’s foreign policy in focus, you have to take cognizance of the wider context within which that foreign policy has had to not only to strengthen Nigeria’s own national interest but also respond to the changing global dynamics from the perspective of our country’s own national interest. More and more it has become evident that the world cannot move in the direction of individual countries acting alone anymore. The kinds of economic challenges, security challenges including climate change itself call for multilateral action. They call for increased cooperation among states and that is the partnership that foreign policies are beginning to emphasize today.
Nigeria has continued to emphasise its concentric circles in terms of immediate good neighbourliness. Nigeria has continued to not only maintain friendly relations with countries around but has also lent support to ECOWAS and the countries that are in West Africa. Nigeria has been involved in finding a common solution to the problems of the Sahel, working through ECOWAS and the African Union (AU) and working even on its own. You may say we ourselves are at the receiving end of the conflicts in the Sahel. Nigeria has also worked through the AU and it is highly involved, there is the Africa Centre for Disease Control that is spearheading and coordinating Nigeria’s response to COVID-19 including the possibility of local production of the vaccines. Nigeria is up there and doing that. Most of all, Nigeria continues to enjoy the tremendous status as a global power that is has enjoyed overtime. You talked about medium power. It appears like Karl Max said a long time ago, when you have these kinds of tendencies, what happens is the world increasingly moves in the direction of the haves and the have nots. But, these countries have continued to use multilateral organisations like the AU, World Trade Organisation (WTO), United Nations (UN), and the Commonwealth to insist on not only having a voice but retaining active participation in international affairs. The ultimate anchor of every country’s involvement in global affairs is the extent to which its sovereignty is upheld and I think, in that regard, many countries have been challenged.
In playing that Big Brother role, some Nigerians are furious that citizens of other countries hardly reciprocate that cordial relationship and sacrifices Nigeria has made to sustain their countries. We have experiences in Ghana, South Africa, Asia, and most recently Indonesia. Isn’t it time we reviewed our foreign policy in the light of these contemporary realities?
Unfortunately, foreign policy is not something that you subject to shocks and such very drastic changes. Foreign policy, in itself, tends to be a consistent pattern of your relationship with the rest of the world. What is common to all foreign policy situations is national interest. So, what you do is to see what enhances your national interest. What you have just said, that is, this Big Brother role, has enhanced, overtime and very abundantly, Nigeria’s status as an African leader. Today, it is a little more difficult to do the kind of things we used to do. If you look around, more recently, we have not undertaken such unilateral actions as we would have done in the days in the Nigeria Trust Fund and so on. But, Nigeria’s remains Africa’s leader and there is a lot that comes with being the leader in Africa. You better believe this, the rest of Africa always looks up to Nigeria’s leadership. In whatever we are doing, whether in the UN, WTO, International Labour Organisation (ILO), in the human rights organisations in Geneva, all the time, the question is: what is Nigeria saying. And whatever Nigeria says is the Africa position. That is the situation of leadership that comes with a lot of responsibility. Consciously or not, there is evidence to suggest that Nigeria is no longer such a big, big brother as we had in the days of apartheid and so on. In terms of the reciprocity, you are looking at it from an investment type of perspective. So, if you have been involved in South Africa’s liberation struggles, you expect to enjoy some privileges, maybe more than those that were not so directly involved. But, don’t forget that a country like South Africa also has its own concentric circles. South Africa is a Southern Africa country and in Southern Africa, you have Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Lesotho. All of these countries will be jostling for South Africa’s immediate attention. Over the years, I believe that is the challenge that both countries must work on to see how we can effectively work together. The truth is that the Xenophobia and so on will spoil the very the conciliatory things that happen within South Africa itself. For instance, when you talk about soft diplomacy, South Africa has been wowed by Nollywood and there is so much consciousness of Nigeria in South Africa. In football, athletics, Nigeria’s contribution in South Africa itself is invaluable. You talk about Ghana, there is no way Nigeria and Ghana cannot remain partners. Every once is a while, there is always something to rock the boat but these are countries whose destinies we were almost cut out for them by virtues of the kind of colonial experiences that we have had, how we have collaborated and partnered on many fronts. So, I think that every once in a while, things appear to get out of hand, there are things that suggest that things are not going so well, sometimes, the things are exaggerated such as the attempt by Ghana to see how you can protect the local industry and make the place safe for Ghanaians. But that is in the order of things. Don’t forget that we, at a time, also had responses that were not conciliatory when we had the era of “Ghana must go”. All put together, I don’t think that the foreign policy terrain is as settled as many of us like to imagine. There are all kinds of things that trigger different actions. There are all kinds of things necessitate reviews; there are all kinds of things that lead to changing perspectives and paradigms and Nigeria is not an exception to this.
The issue of insecurity has been attributed to influx of criminal aliens especially from our neighbouring countries. How long shall we continue to pay the price of being a Father Christmas or being a big brother?
These are things of the mindset and perceptions that have unfortunately come to colour the situation. These trans-border movements are not so peculiar to Nigeria and not isolated in any sense. The herders/farmers conflicts, for example, there are those kinds of movements in Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cameroon, Ghana, Mali, Niger Republic and extend to the Central African Republic. These are movements that are entirely unforeseen, propelled by the uncontrolled forces of climate change. You will know that the shrinking of the Lake Chad basin, Lake Chad itself has been a huge factor here. These forms of trans-human migration in that whole terrain has been historically located overtime. There are all kinds of things that have combined to complicate the situation. It is coming at a time when we have the proliferation of light weapons and small arms. It is coming at a time when North Africa has unraveled and there have been population displacements and movements further South. It has come at a time when grazing land, arable land is fast disappearing. It has come at a time when individual countries themselves have conflicts that are largely identity-based and there are things that threaten the continued existence of the state. It is something that requires new lenses to consider. You cannot deal with the kind of issues that emerge today from the perspective of the old positions and structures that you were dealing with because these are new realities. Don’t forget that Nigerians also cross borders. So, it is not a one-way traffic.
The situation today, unfortunately, is that from being seasonal migration, the desperate economic situations, devastating effects of climate change, have pushed people to things that appear like choice-less migrations. How do we deal with this because they now pose a different kind of scenario for Nigeria? There is suspicion that a lot of the criminal activities going on in the country, in terms of banditry, terrorism, clashes with herds’ people, kidnapping, abduction has a large percentage of non-Nigerians involvement. These are things that we need to address and very quickly so. We have to do so within the multilateral agreements that we have, things about the ECOWAS protocol on free movement of persons and goods and services that is not something that Nigeria can singlehandedly change. What Nigeria is trying to do is to reduce unilateralism because when you are so unilateral, you create more problems. You even de-incentivise your potential collaborators and partners. So, it is how to ensure that we have the buy-in of many of our people and also we do so from the position of leadership. That is Nigeria’s most strategic involvement in all of this. Look at what we are doing with the Multinational Joint Task Force, these are the kind of things that the present era would expect to happen. I don’t think that big power politics, even in the regional sense, will mean that we are ramming things down the throats of our neighbours or doing things that we can do it alone. Nigeria cannot think so; Nigeria is not thinking so; Nigeria is looking for ways to see that partnership will win at the end. Let’s not forget that these people we are talking about are also Africans so we need collateral actions and partnerships to address many of these things.
Beyond the challenges in relating with neighbouring countries, back home, there are things that threaten the continued existence of the state. There are issues of marginalization, lack of equity, fairness in access to and distribution of resources and attendant secessionist agitations that seem to point to poor governance. Isn’t it said that charity begins at home?
What you have done is to employ your premises to arrive at your own conclusions. The issues of what you call marginalization, injustice are issues of perception. Perceptions are things that are contingent and that is why some people say perception may not be very far from what people think they experience. The very strong calibrations that we use like marginalization, injustice does not have ethnic, religious, regional colourations only. There are people in Imalefalafia, Ibadan that are thoroughly deprived, don’t have access, have been been marginalized, have never had any go at the mainstream of our country. When people talk about these things in such superlatives, categories, think of the opposite side. If you know the nuances of marginalization, deprivation, lack of access, unemployment, they don’t wear those kinds of identical colourations, they are common to everyone. I am sure that in the North of Nigeria as well as in the South, there are people who are oppressed. I think what we should be looking for are ways that makes it possible for us to have countervailing, centripetal forces that tend to mobilise our people. Part of why we have this problem that unfortunately we are at the lowest ebb of our national development as a country that people don’t think of Nigeria in any critically strategic sense. This is Nigeria, that anyhow you look at it, whose greatest strength has always been its population, its diversity and kind of things that will lead the world to ask what can they learn from Nigeria and Nigeria has led the world in that regard. For instance, Nigeria is perhaps the world leader in religious diversity because the Muslim, Christian relationship is become 50:50. There are very few countries in the world that come close to that. So, the world has had a lot to learn from Nigeria. Nigeria has had a federal system that has worked in spite of the imperfections that we talk about. Nigeria fought a civil war; Nigeria got out of a civil war; Nigeria has had all these threats, yet, people see Nigeria as resilient that can only be explained by that federal framework. If you critically look at it, Nigeria scores very high in the notion of toleration, inclusivity, accommodation, at the end of the day. Today, what we should be emphasizing should be how the different units of our country should be made more productive. We must move away from this notion of sharing the national cake, where everyone is so lay back waiting for the country will bring for us, only in terms of what we can share. That sharing mentality has to give way to a transforming mentality that would make us emphasise our productivity. I understand that every once in a while, there are issues of where we are with these things, perceptions of marginalization are things we can address. In addressing them, we must emphasise the things that bind us together. We must not lose sight of the overarching Nigeria dream, the kind of things that make our founding fathers to say we are better off staying together than living apart. In any case, I think Nigeria has become too intricately integrated to even consider any possibility of a conflagration along the line. Somebody tells me, too big to fail was what they always said about Russia but Russia failed. Nigeria is too big to fail. Nigeria has always been the one showing the world that resilience comes out of a political culture of reciprocity. So, within our country, we have a political culture that is built on reciprocity. There has to be a paradigm change. We must begin to see how to use the strengths that are structurally available in the federal system that we operate to see how we can optimize these potentials that are in it. Unfortunately, because we have been very short-sighted, we have been looking only at natural resources and suffering from a resource curse. We must move away from those forms of things; we must now begin to say that the state must work; local governments must work; constituencies, communities must work. We all don’t have to look to the federal government. Whether we like to admit it or not, there are parts of Nigeria where things are done differently. I live in Lagos; I see the kind of efforts that the Lagos state government is making, sometimes in collaboration with the federal government. The kind of things that our people complain about as things that marginalize them are things that the state government can provide in terms of public good. Why is everyone saying that it is the federal government only? Is it federal government that will come to provide intra-city roads? Is it federal government that will come to provide the good infrastructure for our primary and secondary schools or even for state hospitals? Is it federal government that will open our state to direct foreign investment? It is not the time to trade blames.
Does our current constitution engender the kind of federal structure you talk about? Moreover, there is an ongoing process to amend the 1999 constitution, some request for an overhaul while some canvass for a return to the 1963 constitution. Where do you stand?
The philosophy of federalism talks about cooperation; cooperation between the central government (federal government) and the subnational government. It is true that our constitution gives too much to the federal government. It is impossible to return to the 1963 constitution, that is the reality. People talk about the 1963 constitution that had regions that were relatively autonomous; the regions had their own constitutions; the regions had things that made them relatively autonomous including the fact that some of them had consular representations abroad alongside the federal government. Not many people will know that at the time we had the consulate of the federal republic of Nigeria, we also had in London the consulate of the Western Nigeria, Northern Nigeria and Eastern Nigeria. That was constitution at its extreme. We don’t want to go back to those forms of extremism. If we go back to the jurisdictions of the governmental forms that we have, the exclusive, legislative, concurrent list, those things can be practiced and negotiated to ensure that there is greater stability. I hear people say for instance that state governors are handicapped because they don’t control the security apparatus. When the governor in Oyo state wants to exercise his power in ways that will require immediate police deployment, does it occur to you that he is able to do that? Does it occur to you that local government chairpersons are also able to mobilise? I know that the Nigeria police force relies exclusively on the support of state and local government. If you take away those forms of support, the Nigeria police force will fall apart. So when people say that it is only when you create state police that you can make a difference, we need to have a rethink. I know when tempers are high and so people are mutually exclusive in how they think, they are likely to say these are the strongest issues that we should be dealing with. But, you will see that there is ample hope for peaceful negotiation. And a great deal that is already happening without returning to the trenches. Two weeks ago, the federal high court in Rivers state ruled that the federal authorities don’t have the constitutional basis to collect Value Added Tax. That is significant because federalism doesn’t move mostly by non-state actors say. Our federalism has proven itself to be very strong, has proven itself to be resilient and it is what we have that we have to use. I know that every once in a while, tempers will flare the way they have done in recent past. Imagine what could have happened if Nigeria was not federal system.
You have said the issues mentioned can be termed perception, however, on the streets, a good number of Nigerians are still not happy at the state of things in this country. That displeasure seems to be reflecting in continued apathy of Nigerians towards elections. With the present displeasure, how can the interest or consciousness of Nigerians be built to be involved as we approach the 2023 general election?
In Afghanistan, it has been unraveling in the last couple of days. One of the things you will find striking is the statement that President Joe Biden made that if Afghanistan is unraveling, the responsibility of the Afghan military is to ensure that people cannot come from outside; they must defend their territory. People cannot come forced to be free, even if it is a must. We have the greatest weapon that democracy has given to everyone which is franchise. Political parties woo voters, they have programmes. Political parties themselves, in America and others, have ideological predispositions that make them evidently different. How really different are the political parties we have in Nigeria? One famous political economist talked about the configuration of parties in Africa leading to what he called choiceless democracy. The question is what options are really available. The politicians that we talk about, are they coming from outer space? Don’t we know them? Haven’t they been in one party or the other, over the years? These things about moving from party A to party B didn’t just start. The press has a lot to do to mobilise people and try to reconstruct the consciousness that will make people to be able to see the difference. When people in other parts of the world have been so pressed, it is they who decide to vote this way or that way.
Talking about the Afghanistan situation, we also have terrorist organisations operating in Nigeria like Boko Haram, do you think the Taliban experience can ever happen in Nigeria?
It can never happen in Nigeria. The circumstances are very different. You can say that the Taliban is a terrorist but the terrorist stint we have had in Nigeria have not had a go at government. They are never going to have a go at government.
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