By Osuolale Alalade

It is natural for Nigerians to think of the Muhammadu Buhari change mantra as confined to the much needed Nigerian national reawakening. Given the pervasive morass and the infernal entrapment presented by the decadent extant Nigeria circumstances, this focused national attention to its domestic challenges is legitimate. But this is only just so because Nigeria is more than just another African country. As the single largest agglomeration of black humanity in the whole wide world, the state of Nigeria affects the pulse of black peoples all over the world. The excitements and pains of Nigeria impact Africa. In the conventional appreciation based on some of the difficult experiences of the nation from some Africans states, this may sound paradoxical. But that indeed is the reality. Even the most historically persistent pretend rivals of Nigeria to leadership would readily concede that without Nigeria a significant chunk of the continent’s leverage for action is constrained.

The recent defection of Nigeria from its historical leadership role of progressive and renaissant African states has been marked by serious setbacks in the last decade for the struggle for holistic emancipationof Africa. A grossly mismanaged and prostrate Nigeria since 1999 has had telling repercussions on the integrity of Africa’s struggle for true and holistic emancipation. This is one key challenge calling for the application of Buhari’s change machine.

Beyond the chest beating, huffing and puffing of the recent past, the retrenchment of Nigeria’s leadership in Africa was most pronounced in the latter days of the Obasanjo administration. This was because his foreign policies were mainly driven by the grand ego and projected personal ambitions of a President in dire search for personal glory at the international level. Under him, national policy postures were calculated to his personal ends and therefore tended to compromise Nigeria’s national interests. They certainly badly hurt and weakened the integrity of Africa’s progressive thrust to achieve respect for continental positions on African issues and the attendant drive for holistic emancipation. Obasanjo was also vulnerable to international blackmail because of this ambition. This is exemplified in his convenient compromise on Nigeria’s assurances to Charles Taylor to provide safe landing to stem continued bloodletting and, more importantly, to achieve a peaceful settlement of the Liberia conflict. But at a crucial juncture of his presidency as he pursued his unconstitutional manipulation for a third term, he instigated Taylor’s default of the conditions of his asylum in Nigeria. That way Obasanjo provided a pretext to deliver his institutional protégé for international trial. This was however done to clear the way to get desperately needed support in these western capitals for his own pet project of tenure elongation in Nigeria. By this act, Obasanjo compromised the capacity of the Nigerian state to leverage the good offices of its presidency to achieve peaceful settlements in future conflicts or provide serious guarantees that advance national interests in such difficult scenarios.

This may be contrasted with the approach of Senegal’s former President Abdoulaye Wade who, despite pressure from interested extraneous forces, retained former Chadian President Hissene Habre until his, Wade’s, democratic ouster from office. Thereafter, to defuse international pressure and to bolster the human rights credential of Senegal, the Senegalese parliament created a hybrid Senegalo-African court to try Hissene Habre for alleged war crimes, torture and crimes against humanity. Judges at the Extraordinary African Chamber, composed of two Senegalese and another African said there was sufficient evidence against Mr Habre, who is in now held in custody in Senegal. His trial will mean the first use of universal jurisdiction in Africa. The point here is not to justify the inhuman acts of these African monsters, but rather to highlight how President Obasanjo’s personal ambition undermined the interests of the sovereign Nigerian state to promote its interests in the future and also to fortify the leverage of the office of the President to do good. Also, Senegal made history by instigating the first use of universal jurisdiction in Africa. The Senegalese approach reflects some good thinking.

Due to his shenanigans, Obasanjo left progressive Africa divided. For his personal ambitions for a third term that were rightfully derailed, he finally moved Nigeria to a very destructive camp of implacable proxies of France on the continent. This bastion of anti-progressive Africa is characterized by their historic opposition to the interests of Nigeria, including its continued corporate existence as a leading nation. These states still stand, even now, resolutely against a fully integrated West Africa. A major policy plank of Cote d’Ivoire’s Alassane Ouattara has been to resuscitation of obsolete divisive structures, such as the Conseil de l’Entente, that promote separate developments along Anglo-Franco lines in West Africa.

This is despite Obasanjo’s and Jonathan’s ill-conceived support to the Ivorian presidency and his chairmanship of ECOWAS that was necessary to buoy perception of his stature as a credible leader. Conseil de l’Entente (“Council of Accord” or “Council of Understanding”) is a regional co-operation forum that brings together Francophone West African countries established in May 1959. Almost defunct and certainly dead under Laurent Gbagbo’s administration in Cote d’Ivoire who supported unconditionally the ascendance of ECOWAS across colonially inspired divisions, Conseil de l’Entente was revived by Allasane Ouattara as a symbolic act of continued unalloyed allegiance to Paris. Important to this is the fact that international legitimacy of francophone leadership in Africa is premised on preserving and consolidating the dependency of their mere flag independence on the French metropole. They did this through sham and instrumental democracies underwritten by France. Obasanjo’s policies were complicit in perpetuating this regrettable state of affairs in West Africa. His outings in the Ivorian conflict constitute the single most devastating error in Nigeria’s foreign policy since its emergence as a state and nation.

The singular determinant crisis that reflected a robust and bold challenge to this deleterious arrangement was in Cote d’Ivoire where a rebellion was sprung by France and Blaise Compaore’s Burkina Faso to remove Laurent Gbagbo, a declared determined friend of Nigeria and progressive Africa, and his mainly youthful nationalists from power. Obasanjo’s historic faux pas in Cote d’Ivoire betrayed the vision of a progressive Africa and a better consolidated and aligned united West Africa. It bears repeating that the much vilified Laurent Gbagbo in the French inspired narratives of the conflict did in fact and incontrovertibly won the elections that western international conspiracy desperately wanted Ouattara to win. As with his behavior on the domestic front, Obasanjo’s every foreign policy move, unlike Babaginda’s deeply strategic engagements in the sub region on Liberia that advanced Nigeria’s strategic interests, had nothing to do with Nigeria’s national interests.

Obasanjo’s policies were designed to promote his self-acclaim and image as a statesman ready to do anyone’s bidding if it promoted his ego. In lampooning Laurent Gbagbo, Obasanjo merely betrayed a penchant that keen observers have noticed in his domestic politicking. The consequence was that by the time Obasanjo left office, Nigeria had become the arrow head of conservatism on African affairs. Every major African capital, from Pretoria, through Kampala, Kigali to Accra, was frustrated with Nigeria’s diminishing profile and controversial metamorphosis that they could not reconcile with the country’s glorious past. Meanwhile, in Obasanjo’s failure in Abidjan, Nigeria missed the most important realistic opening since its independence to reconfigure the strategic landscape of the sub region to advance the project of economic integration across colonially inspired and sustained political divisions. It was no surprise that Nigeria’s main support in Cote d’Ivoire came from the francophone minions of France in Africa.

The Jonathan administration inherited this sorry deficit. On its part, without any grand strategic blueprint to direct its foreign policy operation, the evidence under the outgoing administration pointed to an abundance of amateurish and flailing engagement and facile rationalizations of embarrassing articulation of non-policy. They said that Nigeria’s foreign policy was to advance democracy in Africa!!!As result of this, under the outgoing administration, Nigeria tumbled more than a notch in international stature and respectability. Many high profile and elite commentators of foreign policy could not help airing their frustrations over the ugliness of watching Nigeria’s lack luster and humiliating posture to basic challenges of policy.

The confused management of the international aspects of the Boko Haram challenge unraveled whatever modicum of credibility was left at the international level. Jerry Rawlings of Ghana said it all when he reminded President elect Muhammadu Buhari that he owes to Nigerians and to black Africans “to restore our pride and the black man’s dignity”. He added, like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni before him, that “the image of President Jonathan climbing the stairs to go and complain about Boko Haram to a French President is an image I hope I will not see again”. Even the Chief of Defence Staff of the Republic of Niger is counting on a reinvigorated interaction in the battle with Boko Haram following the emergence of a new president elect in Nigeria. It is therefore clear that the promised change in Nigeria has significant implications for the direction that Africa is headed midway into the second decade of a new millennium.

Hopefully, the change mantra would be extended to repair the Obasanjo damage to Nigeria’s stature and credibility. This change is required to realign Nigeria’s policy to its historic progressive orbit. In the prevailing circumstances of Nigeria, it is critical that we integrate the lessons learned from the consequences of theunfortunate approaches to foreign policy of the last two administrations. A key lesson is for Nigeria to define its irreducible strategic interests in the transformed regional and global contexts and to formulate a blueprint of actionable operations that translate these interests into concrete and tactical approaches. In this connection, given the experience of the country under President Obasanjo, it is imperative that Nigeria’s policy formulation be institutionalized through the strengthening of both executive and legislative structures as well as civil society that are salient to policy formulation and execution. The idea is to provide many pathways to policy formulation. The objective to infuse more strategic focused thinking on policy. Foreign policy would be premised on serious evaluation of the implications of every proposed policy activity for the advancement of the broad policy objectives of the country. The core strategic challenge is to rectify damages incurred in the post-Obasanjo and Jonathan presidencies,by returning Nigeria back to the orbit of progressive African states that are mobilized by the African renaissance as a platform and paradigm of policy and action. Operationalizing this has to be a multi-level activity both territorially and thematically. Territorially, the old concept of concentricity, in the context of afrocentricity, remains as relevant today as it was when it was initially formulated. The African renaissance gives more flesh to afrocentric policy orientation in the post-Apartheid, post Mandela World Order (pMWO).

The first level would be at the level of institutions such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and associated structures. This Ministry, fixated in past glory and currently distressed by years of political mismanagement, must be completely overhauled to elevate its operations to attain the level of sophistication and standards expected of a truly leading state in Africa that has the capacity to cope with the complexities of life in today’s more demanding international environment. The capacity to effectively gather required information and undertake in-depth analyses of these developments with a view distilling emerging elements into concrete policy options is paramount. To achieve this goal, it is imperative to retrain staff to strengthen personal capacities to cope with the evolved complexities and challenges of meaningful interactions, beyond mere traditional representational duties, of the Ministry.

The ministry would benefit from the grooming of young talented staff to acquire specialized expertise in areas such as negotiating complex economic issues on global fora, including on conflict related to water management, international politics of energy, all dimensions of hydrocarbons, green energy; wind, solar and organic sources, as well as nuclear matters, conflict management and in hostage situations at the senior levels to serve as the nucleus of a corps of conflict managers on the continent, electoral problems. This is only a limited sample of issues. The Nigerian Foreign Service must develop a wide and diversified range of expertise that a leading state should be able to realistically depend on. The implication is that the subject areas constituting its staff catchment and development areas have to be expanded beyond the social sciences to include critical areas of scientific and newly emerging endeavors and challenges.

The profile of the political heads of this Ministry is critical. They must be individuals with formidable academic background in Foreign Policy and Strategic Studies and who have made significant theoretical contributions in that field, especially in areas that are very salient to the advancement of Nigeria’s strategic objectives. Nigeria needs to borrow a leaf from more sophisticated climes where experts in various fields are invited by the President to manage specialized areas and are accountable for the tasks assigned to them. Change in Nigeria must encompass the quality of presidential decisions on who does what in this crucial domain. Responsibility for the articulation of key strategic foreign policy goals of the administration must not be parceled out as political largess. Nigeria is too important to reduce every matter to political convenience. Key ambassadorial appointments must have a preponderant presence of qualitative foreign service officers. Ambassadorial posts should not become sweet banishment for failed or unwanted political actors.

In this connection is also the need to review the mandate of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. This institute should represent the flagship of Nigeria’s serious intellectual engagement on foreign policy with the global policy institutes. With all due respect or except I have been outside the relevant loop, the very limited outputs on foreign policy from Nigeria have sadly mirrored the dearth of serious theoretical or conceptual engagements. As the country had been in decay, it would be unfair to expect the situation in any institution to be different from the general pathetic state of national affairs. The NIIA must be given a big dose of new energy through a comprehensive robust shake up. It must be the platform for very serious minded and dedicated professionals to undertake rigorous research with clearly visible outcome in world standard publication. It should, at a minimum, be able to provide into the public realm, credible analytical appreciations of alternative policy choices and also educate the public of the evolution around the world and implications for Nigeria.

This leads to a yearning lacuna in interventions on foreign policy. Nigeria lacks one critical element of the infrastructure for foreign policy making. Even though Nigerian politics, both domestic and foreign, is not ideologically oriented, even within this context is the lack of robust competition of varying ideas and perspectives on policy. While this may reflect a culture of a general lack of healthy cross modulation of ideas and clashing conceptual orientations in policy formulation, it also results from the abject absence of non –governmental Think-tanks to undertake expert interrogations of ideas as critical elements into policy making. For example, some of the best analytical treatises on the Boko Haram have been foreign authored. The presence of Think Tanks endowed by privileged Nigerians should provide important viewpoints that serve either to validate or challenge the underpinnings to policy.

Buhari’s All Peoples’ Congress (APC) should begin a radical restructuring of this very important realm by encouraging the dedication of private resources to bolster the culture of civil engagement in policy. It would also provide a training ground for the cultivation of young Nigerians and, potentially,new generation of African intellectuals to challenge often interest inspired narratives of developments in Africa by non-Africans. In the least it would lead to a good juggling of interpretative discourses so that Nigerians can contribute to the shaping of the contours of the critical appreciation of African affairs.

Even while foreign policy is largely under the belt of the President, every serious country tasks the legislature to check the Executive to avoid the kind of scenario conjured by the awry ego of a President who sells policies conveniently designed more to ingratiate himself to the world than serve the interests of the country. For example, whatever the merits of the Green Tree agreement that gave away Bakassi, the Nigerian Legislature stands indicted in allowing the President to have his way on a policy of great strategic import that was unilaterally pursued by the Obasanjo presidency. The President-elect, in the context of this change mantra, has a historic responsibility to set worthy precedents that would lay the foundation for inclusive engagement of all relevant constituencies in foreign and security policy. The House Committees on Foreign Policy may also consider institutionalizing a requirement to bring experts on these arcane matters on board their legislative advisory teams. This is required to enhance the quality of the interventions on foreign policy. Again, the place and role of Nigeria is too important for the struggle for Africa’s emancipation that every aspect of our policy should reflect deep strategic thinking and reflective of the quality of minds available in Nigeria, and even its diaspora, on these important matters. This may be the challenge of the coming change to our African policy.