For its part, the United States established the United States Africa Command (U.S. AFRICOM) that began initial operations on 1 October, 2007. AFRICOM officially became an independent command on 1 October, 2008. It is one of six geographic combatant commands and is responsible for military relations with African nations, the African Union, and African regional security organisations. For effective operations, AFRCOM plans to relocate its headquarters from Germany to Africa. AFRICOM was active in Libya, working along with France, but with completely different goals, as Italy was shunted aside. In the first week of August, 2014, leaders from 50 African states attended a three-day summit at the White House. Although, the official line is that the African summit was to focus on trade and investments, a major thrust was to explore the role of the United States in curbing rising Islamist violence on the continent. Analysts note the context that the United States summit remained concerned about efforts by (international) terrorist groups to gain a foothold in Africa. At the same time, this largest ever gathering of African leaders in Washington is interpreted as “elevating our engagement” with a continent increasingly under China’s influence. Some perceive that US interests in Africa may not also be unrelated to perceived threat posed by the emergence of the BRICS coupled with fears that the dollar will no longer serve as the dominant currency for international trade. The deployment of over 3000 non–combat troops by the United States to fight Ebola in Liberia, its historic friend on this side, is part of the larger scheme of projecting the soft aspect of America’s sharp power to send a strong signal to Paris. Paris is in charge in the fight against Ebola in Conakry. Great Britain last week convened an international conference on fighting Ebola in Sierra Leone.
For Nigeria, a second significant structural realignment in Africa and crucial determinant for foreign and security policy making is the rise of many centres of power within Africa. From 1960 to the fall of apartheid, the credible local champion in black Africa was Nigeria. Although on the wrong side of history on what has proven to be a horrendous watershed 1963 mistake of the triumph of the retrogressive Monrovia bloc over the progressive Casablanca group on the future of Africa, Nigeria later emerged as the pivot of progressive forces in Africa. The conservative actors were led by neo-cololonial proxies such as Houphouet Boigny and Liberia’s William Tubman acting to protect the interests of the United States. The former floated structures such as the Conseil de l’Entente (“Council of Accord” or “Council of Understanding”) basically to impede regional integration and emancipatory initiatives such as unconditional support for liberation insurgencies all over Africa. Houphouet Boigny’s Cote d’Ivoire frustrated the potentially first armed liberation movement in West Africa – FLING – to begin the armed insurrection against Portuguese colonialism in Guinea Bissau. It took the defiant Sekou Toure to provide the necessary resources, human, material and materiel, for Amilcar Cabral to launch one of Africa’s historic foremost progressive revolutions in the Pan Africa Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verdes, PAIGC.
Houphouet Boigny and diminutive former French secret agent, Omar Bongo, then leading Gabon, were France’s African point men in the attempt to dismember Nigeria. Nigeria, after that trial by ordeal, developed the resources, human and material, to pursue its messianic role of leading anti-apartheid forces in Africa. Nigeria survived to lead the anti-apartheid struggle to a final success and managed to galvanise progressive forces in its sub-region to build a futuristic economic community that has had constructive political impact in conflict management in West Africa. ECOWAS, if the unceasing difficult undercurrent of Francophone opposition is astutely managed, should prove a big asset for the sub-region. It must be observed in this connection that Alassane Ouattara, the man responsible for separating Anglophones from Francophones in Cote d’Ivoire, as Prime Minister under the tutelage of an aging Ivorian president Boigny, has in his controversial reincarnation refloated the notorious Conseil de Entente that is exclusive to Francophones instead of pursuing the full integration of the West Africa sub-region across colonial lines. Reconfigurations in the global and continental strategic landscape and emerging realignment of forces in Africa, all against the background of the resurgence of the 1884 Berlin syndrome, call for a realistic appraisal of policy not only in Nigeria, but for all African state actors with the credentials to be taken seriously in capitals that matter in the world.Meanwhile, China has abandoned the fringes and joined the fray on Africa with its own moral and ethical issues.As earlier noted, the continuing ascendance of France’s profile and the consolidation of its historic status as the hegemon of Africa’s security landscape remains a continental challenge. This situation was especially uncontested in West and Central Africa, until South Africa and Angola called its bluff on the Ivorian crisis, while Nigeria dropped the ball. This last singular failure threatened Nigeria’s front line role in the management of strategic challenges even in the West Africa sub-region.
The interplay of these factors has been further aided by the unsalutary evolution in Nigeria’s domestic political processes. This includes the perceived political mismanagement of and, in actuality, the not unexpected operational challenges posed by the asymmetric character of the confrontation with the Boko Haram insurgency. These changed realities impose on Nigeria a need torealign its broad distillation of thoughts or grand strategy or whatever ideas direct its engagements with its immediate environment and the world at large to advance its considered fundamental interests and stakes in the system. Deconstructing one myth is important at this point. In the Ivorian crisis, Nigeria deluded itself into believing that Abidjan was in its supposed area of major influence from which other power brokers in Africa were barred. Yet, its controversial policy was bewildering to all perceptive and informed Africanist policy analysts. Late in navigating the complex undercurrents of the crisis, Ghana’s John Arthur Mills backed out of the Nigerian faux pax. Gambia balked early and Angola, among others, lined behind Pretoria in the ultimately failed attempt to redeem Africa from a French project to reinstate a proxy in its old pre-carre. With France withdrawing an earlier promise to support South Africa against Nigeria in the bid for a permanent seat in the Security Council and Obama’s United States changing the principled support of the Bush administration for the nationalist Laurent Gbagbo, President Jacob Zuma of South Africa later crawled to the Elysee to control the damage done to relations with France.
Despite all the touting of concern for democratic deepening in Africa, Obama was prepared to trade George Bush’s American principled support, with a whiff of anti-France sentiment, for neo-nationalist Cote d’Ivoire, for a surreal democratic cause in Cote d’Ivoire to gain the sympathy of Sarkozy’s France in fulfilling his (Obama’s) campaign promise to broaden the coalition base in Iraq and to enhance the participation of NATO allies in Afghanistan. He traded Africa for his domestic political agenda. Obama’s turnaround of US policy in Cote d’Ivoire underlines the strange pathology of democratic advocacy of the West in the Third World, especially in Africa without much serious quid pro quo to offer. In this purview, the validating instrument of western democracy has been compromised not by the intrinsic value of the substantive tenets of this governance paradigm, but by the self-appointed external gendarmerie of global democracy that have instrumentalised democratic praxis as a tool for continued hegemonic control. It is in the context of this strategic appropriation that Naom Chomsky describes the western yearning for democracy in the Third World as a bad joke. He advances western democratic promotion has a funny history because of the schizophrenia of the West. He affirms that the West supports democracy only if it conforms with certain strategic and economic interests of the western validators. What emerges here is that Nigeria never experienced a hegemony, even in West Africa, even if it played critical roles in processes that positively impacted the trajectory of the political history of the continent.
Meanwhile, changing circumstances portend significant implications for the projection of the character of Nigeria’s interaction with elite forces in Africa and the hegemons of the global system on Africa.These include the deterioration, relative to Nigeria, of the overall balance of power, resulting from, among other reasons, remarkable failure of Nigeria to advance technologically whether for peaceful or military ends, the rise of many centres of influence in Africa and significantly the emergence of aspiring continental and regional powers with demonstrated convergence in their broad afro-renaissant vision. The emergence of this group of loosely policy-affiliated states, not alliance, has bifurcated the continental strategic landscape between a predictable constellation of progressive Africanist/renaissant states not led by Nigeria and a still conservative France led proxy Francophone states to which Nigeria has gravitated as an appendage. Nigeria’s readings of developments in its the sub-region and continentally, evaluated on the basis of policy and the character of its engagements, are sadly indicative of a dearth of sophistication in strategic policy formulation and articulation. Despite the often ludicrous rationalisations to the contrary, these demonstrated policy deficits, including Nigeria’s strategically novitiate decision to lead the campaign for the reelection of another French stooge, Jean Ping, as President of the African Union Commission, appear to be directly linked to an increasing loss of confidence in the leadership of the country in African affairs among progressive forces. The structure of the final tally of that elections and the fact that Nigeria’s candidature for the office of Commissioner for Political Affairs of the AU was salvaged by Francophone solidarity clearly indicated that progressive forces had decided to align their sentiments in favour of a South Africa that had rightfully decided to sidestep an informal protocol to safeguard the long term interests of continental organisation and Africa. In the perspective of the progressives, the constellation of renaissant African states who sought a compromise on the way forward in the so-called revolutionary ousting of Libyan strongman Muammar Gadafi from power got it very right. Nigeria was on a different tangent under the misguided notion of enthroning democracy in Tripoli. The outcome of the western orchestrated democracy in Libya is out for all to see.Nigeria’s posture in Libya was a semblance of validation from a key Africa constituency for the West’s self-serving strategic interventions in Libya. Europe and America were lifting oil from Benghazi before the last bullet was fired in Libya. Africa has ended up with a not unavoidable lose-lose scenario in that distressed, agonising and slowly dying country. Nigeria was a direct facilitator of this sad situation. The consequences of the manner of the fall of Gaddafi are glaring enough in the Sahelo-Sahara and possibly in the fates of Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states in the terrorist insurgency of Boko Haram.
The military debacle on Boko Haram is also revealing of the prevailing dearth of strategic thinking in Nigeria’s security and foreign policy. Strategic thinking must begin with clearly defined inviolable national interests, understanding of the environment, a good appreciation of resources and assets available as well as limitations, anda careful delineation of the geographical orbit of the most significance for the protection of these interests. Strategic thinking is also how to build a credible reach, in the geo-physical sense, and ensure integrity in implementation of the defined substantive interests and values central to policy. Geo-physical reach is closely linked to secured technological resources, including material and the human factor, defined as capacity. If Nigeria has no capacity to airlift its troops or mobilise its navy in a timely fashion to Bissau for key operational purposes, it has no credible claim to marking Bissau on the map as located in its zone of influence. It is the bottom line, even though we also recognise burden sharing in strategic and collaborative ventures such as the United States providing airlifts for specified French operations in Africa, where their interests converge. China is a global power because, beyond the growth of its economy that has increased its stickiness for policy making and the assured muscle to impact the global value the US dollar, it finally developed a blue ocean navigating fleet.
Against this background, the emerged policy formulation process must determine the balance in the mix of diplomacy, soft power and conventional force in the engagement with these new forces. Given the global nexus that is amply reflected in the emergence of the Boko Haram as key policy drivers in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Tchad, the rise of such groups as the Al Shabaab in Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania as well as the MUJAO in northern Mali, it is clear that strategic policy formulation in Nigeria has to be sensitive to the dangerous transformation in the global security landscape. But it must also respect the profound structural continuities and changes in Africa. The conceptual framework of our foreign and security requires constant review and reevaluation. In the past, Professor Gambari brilliantly floated the concept of concentric zones, by which Nigeria conceptually calibrated the intensity of its expected policy responses to developments in the various zones located in the concentric rings. The circles were often defined in terms of geophysical proximity to Nigeria. In actuality, in the then prevailing strategic layout, the concept of concentric zones and afrocentricity, as substantive strategic focus of policy, were theoretical paradigms of the interests and values to which Nigeria was prepared in a calibrated manner to stake our resources. But Nigeria was realistic about the constraints posed by the extant configuration in the sub region that shaped the practical application of the concentric layout. For, we were constrained in the sub-region by the hegemonic stakes of France, instigating its proxies in Houphouet Boigny’s Cote d’Ivoire to derail the poster child of the success of Anglophone West Africa ECOWAS project. From this longitudinal span, by default Nigeria missed a centennial opportunity to reconfigure the strategic layout by helping to oust the nationalist and Africanist Laurent Gbagbo administration from Abidjan. The opening to transcend the contrived division of West Africa as Francophone, Lusophone or Anglophone through this potential singular historic strategic turnaround was lost on policy wonks in Abuja. As a result, France has reinforced its military base 43rd BIMA in Cote d’Ivoire and reinforced its intelligence capacity in that country into a vast network to cover much of Africa, but certainly to overwhelm West Africa and contain the incursions of the United States. Mali would be under firm grip of France for some time. Paul Biya’s Cameroun is waiting in the wings for Nigeria to falter. France again is embroiled with Portugal in the instability in Guinea Bissau to keep the tired Lusophone country under its orbit through its continued membership of the CFA zone.
Leave a Reply