Nigeria and the West recently suffered a dip in their relationship after the diplomatic faceoff between Nigeria and the United States over the latter’s refusal to sell military hardware to Nigeria to prosecute its campaign against the Boko Haram insurgents. The subsequent criticism of the US by two prominent Nigerians, General Yakubu Gowon, former head of state, and Wole Soyinka, Nobel laureate, upped the ante, with Gowon asking: “What sort of friends are they?”
My concern here, however, is not the specifics of this diplomatic standoff, which reportedly led Nigeria to cancel a military training programme with the US. Instead, I want to explore a more conceptual issue: “friendship” in international relations. I believe this is critical to understanding Nigeria’s relationship with the West and vice versa.
When General Gowon posed the question, “What sort of friends are they?”, I assume he used the word “friends” in a diplomatic sense. But he did not tell us the nature of the friendship he had in mind. As I am sure he knows, friendship is an elastic term in international relations. Two states that are not at war or in conflict are ‘friends’, but this does not imply a close relationship. However, when used to indicate closeness, as would be the case between allies, coalition partners, strategic partners, like-minded states, and states with ‘special relationship’, the term “friendship” means a lot more. Friendship in this sense suggests the existence of an “influence relationship”, in which the states involved are accustomed to expecting and receiving a high level of responsiveness in their relationship.
Now, influence relationship can exist between states with widely unequal powers. For instance, the US is often regarded as the leader of the Free World. Virtually all members of this ‘alliance’, which, by the way, are not only Western countries, accept its leadership. However, while this means that the US is able to exercise influence over the rest, it also means, conversely, that it is susceptible to influence in return. As Henry Kissinger, former US secretary of state, said in his book, Years of Upheaval, “We will never consciously injure the interests of our friends. We expect in return that their policies will take seriously our interests and our responsibilities.” That is the nature of influence relationship: responsiveness and sensitivity even on issues of high politics, such as peace and security.
So, what kind of relationship does Nigeria have with the West? Is Nigeria truly a friend of the West and vice versa? Do they have an influence relationship? The evidence suggests otherwise. In her memoirs, The Downing Street Years, Margaret Thatcher, former British prime minister, observed that “Nigeria’s feeling towards us was volatile”, even without the South African question, on which it was “extremely hostile”.
Of course, Nigeria has its complaints against the West. For example, General Gowon referred to their tepid support during the civil war. But let’s remember that the civil war was sui generis, and that Western public opinion on it was vehemently negative. As Alexis de Torqueville pointed out in Democracy in America, public opinion is a key driver of Western foreign policy, particular that of the US. However, I believe that, since the war, many of Nigeria’s actions, which did not even reflect its own public opinion, violated key Western interests and values and inflicted lasting damage on the “friendship”, if there was any.
For example, the attempt in 1984 by the Buhari regime to kidnap Umaru Dikko from Britain by drugging and putting him in crates was very crude and offensive. Nigeria behaved as if it was capturing a wanted citizen from an enemy state, which Britain clearly was not. The annulment of the presidential election of June 12, 1993 by General Babangida was done without any regard for Western sensitivity and views, let alone those of Nigerians. Not long after that, Nigeria scored another own goal, with the killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995. Not even Mandela’s intervention, not to mention the interventions of Western leaders, could stop Sani Abacha from carrying out the killing.
I was more than a disinterested bystander in some of these events. As a magazine publisher in London, I covered them extensively and spoke to some of the international actors. For instance, I sat for more than two hours with Baroness Lynda Chalker, then Britain’s overseas development minister, in her office at the House of Lords, interviewing her for my magazine, Marketfinder International. I also sat for two hours or so with Emeka Anyaoku, then secretary-general of the Commonwealth, interviewing him for another publication, African Expatriate. They were both extremely disappointed and expressed deep concerns about the damage Nigeria’s actions were doing to its international image. Anyaoku told me, for instance, that when he received the news that the Provisional Ruling Council had confirmed the death sentence on Saro-Wiwa, “I sent a personal message to our head of state in which I alerted him to the international perspective and I hoped that what happened would not happen”.
Although these critical and costly errors happened under the military, they contributed to the international perception of Nigeria that still endures today. Even under the democratic dispensation, Nigeria has continued to score own goals to the annoyance and frustration of its Western ‘friends’. The endemic corruption, the administrative ineptitude that undermines government effectiveness, the mishandling of the wellbeing of the abducted Chibok girls, and the government’s seeming impotence on the Boko Haram insurgency have dealt Nigeria’s international standing a severe blow. And when world leaders, like Hillary Clinton, publicly criticise Nigeria for squandering its oil wealth and entrenching massive corruption, the country’s international image is deeply damaged.
Yet, Nigeria is doing a great job globally through its contributions to peace-keeping operations and its positive role at the United Nations, where it is the longest-serving African country on the Security Council. But, sadly, Nigeria’s domestic problems continue to undermine its international efforts. Nigeria has yet to make the intellectual leap to recognise that foreign policies straddle two environments – the domestic and the global – and that policymakers should constantly mediate between the two. This failure to understand the interface between the domestic and the international has often led Nigeria to be tetchy and defensive whenever its internal weaknesses are highlighted by outsiders, and sometimes it reacts in a way that is counterproductive. For instance, in a recent article in the Economist, titled “Big Country, Thin Skin”, the magazine alleged that President Jonathan unleashed an angry broadside at foreign journalists and diplomats about their portrayal of Nigeria. That is clearly not how to win friends and influence people.
Of course, Western countries have their faults. They are sometimes too intolerant and impatient with Nigeria. But, in my view, they want Nigeria to succeed. It’s in their strategic interest that it does. Nigeria is too important to be ignored. However, like everyone else, the West is frustrated that Nigeria is not achieving its full potential due to self-inflicted internal problems. Nigeria wants to be a serious international player, and rightly so. But it needs to put its house in order and form an influence relationship with the West. It needs the West to achieve global relevance and the West needs it as a strategic partner. Big player ambition requires big player thinking and action.
OLU FASAN
Fasan, a London-based lawyer and political economist, is a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics.
o.fasan@lse.ac.uk
@olu_fasan
