By Ambassador Usman Sarki
Nigeria’s participation in the recently held BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, had rekindled the debate about the country’s leadership role in West Africa and the wider African region. The fact that the country was not among the six newly admitted members into the BRICS fold necessitated some soul searching about Nigeria’s importance as well as relevance in the regional and global scheme of things.
This soul searching equally led to questioning of Nigeria’s foreign policy posture and its objectives and purposes currently and in the long-term. “Few choices in foreign policy are irrevocable,” (and options must be kept open), so wrote Margaret MacMillan, in her book, “The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914”. Whether Nigeria has options in her foreign policy to become a regional hegemon or not, may not necessarily be a matter of choice for her. That could depend on the objective conditions obtaining in the region and her own internal dispositions towards achieving relevance and importance. The options associated with such a consideration must however, be kept open.
Whether Nigeria needs an “assertive” foreign policy or not, has been debated and discussed at different opportunities. The question arose out of the relative circumstances in which the country had found herself especially in establishing a sort of soft hegemony in West Africa. The expected hegemony of Nigeria could have materialised in the 1980s and 1990s, when she was seen to hold sway in terms of the power equation in the region, particularly with the successful intervention in Liberia and Sierra Leone under the ECOWAS mandate.
Ambassador Yusuf Tuggar, Nigeria’s Minister for Foreign Affairs
The overwhelming commitment by Nigeria in terms of bearing the financial burdens of ECOWAS was also seen as a reason for calling Nigeria to assume an assertive leadership position in the region. Whether such a preponderant presence by Nigeria in the region may finally be laid to rest as an untenable proposition, or ignited afresh as a necessary requirement by the unfolding events in Niger and other countries under the emerging coalition of coupists and military dictatorships, is a matter that would require a sober reflection and calm assessment.
Nigeria’s internal contradictions and general fragility particular her economic weakness, will not likely allow her to conduct an assertive foreign policy in the foreseeable future.. Rather, prudence would dictate that she should scale down her ambitions and play it safe until such a time when it is propitious to act in a way that is capable of creating impact without the strains and disappointments that could follow an overreach and over extension of national resources and capital.
The internal obstacles to a meaningful activist foreign policy are many, but the important ones are the seeming indifference to foreign policy among the generality of people (until recently) especially the elite, and the suspicions of motives and imputation of certain intentions into any decisions that would lead to religious and sectional divergences across the country. The multiplicity of views and complex range of expectations to be met or to be satisfied as articulated in the press, also make consensus on foreign policy objectives a difficult task to achieve in Nigeria.
These notwithstanding, attempts should be made under the present administration to determine where Nigeria’s predominance should be located, either in building up her strategic capabilities or strengthening her economic base (or both) toward effective regional leadership. These attempts should be based on the correct reading of the mood in the region and the temper of the times, especially with regards to the anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist sentiments that are now growing in the region.
Subjectively, assertiveness can be a demonstration of self-esteem driven by the need for recognition of a nation’s worth and its intrinsic value. Objectively, it is a factor of national power, whose essences are encapsulated in the country’s strength especially military capabilities and economic resilience and growth. Whether Nigeria could muster the two factors and deploy them successfully toward establishing certain prerogatives and areas of exclusive interests, is a matter for conjecture as of now.
Every action is a reaction really to something else or to a phenomena. Asserting a prerogative or a position in itself is a reaction to a perception or a reality that is confronting a nation at a given point in time. Therefore, maintaining an “assertive” foreign policy may not necessarily need to be a permanent disposition by any country, but perhaps a temporary expedience that could change when a specific situation or context evaporates in the estimation of the country in question, in terms of the gravity of the issues at play at that specific point in time
It is instructive to recall that Nigeria is not the only country that is faced with the dilemma of acting as a hegemon in her region. The foreign policy postures of countries like Japan, India, Russia, China, Brazil, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, have been described as “assertive” in the context of the evolving geostrategic situations in their respective precincts and around the world.
Assertiveness is thus, seen in the strategic context linked to both the defensive and offensive capabilities of these countries, and their determination to write new narratives about their respective national interests vis-a-vis their security and other priorities. Their individual economic conditions as well as military capabilities are seen to determine the new assertiveness demonstrated by these countries. This is more so in the context of showing a clear determination to resist the imposition of conditions that are inimical to their national interest and the fostering of their own views about evolving orders across their different geostrategic spectrums.
Assertive foreign policy may therefore, simply mean doing what a nation wants and getting away with it. It may also mean creating a latitude within which a nation operates with much liberty and abandon without care or concern for the reactions of other nations. These two characterisations may not be wholly correct, but they convey the sense of “independence” of action that assertiveness connotes in the conduct of foreign policy.
Translated into concrete policy, joining BRICS or creating a new bloc of nations is a propitious action that is either totally wholesome, or actually fraught with risks in terms of how the end results should be obtained. If Nigeria needs in fact to assert herself or demonstrate a capacity for independent action, she should look at the different trajectories of policies that are at her disposal and attempt to seriously ascertain basic postulations about her interests and possibilities of advancing her prerogatives.
It is time that Nigeria actually looked beyond the West African region and expands her vistas of interest by bringing into being an alliance of countries from North, Central and West Africa, that would translate into a new geostrategic grouping built around security and economic factors. A tentative beginning could be made by exploring the formation of a bloc consisting of Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Algeria and Libya, that straddles the Sahel and links the Atlantic and Mediterranean regions of Africa.
The driving logic behind this initiative should be security and economic factors. These are two compelling reasons to bring any group of countries together more so if they are facing common existential threats in the forms of terrorism, insurgency, transnational crimes, illegal migration, general insecurity and severe climate and environmental challenges.
Having been left out of the G5 grouping of Sahelien countries, Nigeria would need to augment her regional reach by extending her interests beyond the immediate neighbourhood of ECOWAS and bringing countries like Algeria, Libya and Chad into her operational dimension of security and economic considerations. This would of course, depend wholly on how the debacle in the aftermath of the coup d’etat in Niger Republic is cleared up and brought to a decent and satisfactory end.
Without seeming to prevaricate, Nigeria should actually seize the opportunity and the momentum provided by the present situation in Niger to her advantage by strategically working to midwife a new regional grouping that links the countries of North Africa with those in the West, to establish a security corridor that has been in existence for over a thousand years before our present era.
