Technologically, it is clear that Nigeria is faced with serious limitations if we cannot produce enough bullets and basic guns to fight a terrorist insurgency. This is despite the unveiling of an unmanned drone by the Nigerian Air Force recently. The open rebuff of our pleadings to weapons producing countries to help us salvage our image and fight the Boko Haram has seen our reputation plummet as a sovereign state. We cannot fight our battles on our own steam and terms. We entered into virtual and fruitless international receivership and after taking sides against Russia in the troubles in Ukraine. Next we found ourselves in Moscow to solicit for arms. While we are at this, the arms industry announced a revolutionary new South African-designed and developed aircraft that is destined for a significant role in a wide range of civilian and military tasks around the world. The Advanced High-Performance Reconnaissance Light Aircraft, AHRLAC, took the aviation market by storm, challenging dominant Western manufacturers with its multi-role applications, low acquisition cost, reduced requirement for maintenance support and extensive operational capabilities. The brochure cites that the South African AHRLAC offers a highly flexible form of mission configurable payload system which enables it to be transformed quickly between operational roles. It can stay in the air for more than seven hours, making it the ideal solution for patrolling large land areas, borders and oceans. It can fly 4000 miles without refuelling. The two-crew aircraft can carry out a wide range of operations including surveillance, policing, border/coastal patrol and anti-smuggling; armed patrol and counter insurgency operations; disaster relief and emergency supply to remote areas; and intelligence gathering.
By contrast, in 2014, the Nigerian Defence Industries continues to operate the ordnance factories for the manufacture and supply of arms and ammunition as well as inspecting, testing and recommending ordnance materiel intended for use by the Armed Forces and other security organisations while using the excess capacity to support the development of local industries. The national defence industry project has failed so we smuggle $9.3 million to South Africa to buy weapons, if the official story line is to be believed. Importantly, we got caught and humiliated. As anecdotal as these may seem, our inability to manufacture mere bullets to equip our forces that has led to mutinies and the massive gaps in our technological capacities vis-a vis other leading forces in Africa provide solid indicators that we are lacking in the most critical dimension of instruments available to pursue national foreign and security policy. Ultimately, sharp power still triumphs.
Away from the realms of what experts have termed sharp or military power, both South Africa and Nigeria would seem to be at par on other dimension of power. Nigeria may seem to have an edge in black Africa when it comes to economic or sticky power. Although the rebased figures put Nigeria ahead on absolute economic indices, sticky power refers more to the capacity of the economy to lure others to participate in it. This is what Russell Walter Mead describes as the pleasing scent that draws an insect towards its sap. South Africa has more diversified range of exports, compared to Nigeria’s mainly oil-derived national resource base. Yet, both have a capacity through their economies to integrate, to some measure, major capitals who would be sympathetic figures or who’ll be constrained by their economic links to pursue very untoward policy that may be injurious to their economic interests. This would mean that the real cost of an injurious policy stand by France against Nigeria would be measured in terms of the value of investments at stake and the loss of market open to French businesses in the country. When South Africa and Nigeria compare notes and develop common policies in relation to Africa, they up the stakes for extra African powers who may be tempted to challenge their jointly held policies.
Finally, on the projection of soft power or sweet power, the jury is still out. Yet, Nigeria would appear to evoke mixed feelings. While its credentials as a generous nation that has contributed to the ultimate liberation of Africa is accepted by all objective commentators, it is by no means given that this has translated into goodwill across the social spectrum throughout the continent. Nollywood is on the international continent’s entertainment radar. Yet, a closer look suggests a need for greater refinement of the images and the penchant to demonise tradition put most of its products as local antennas of hypocritical western evangelical missions in Africa. Meanwhile, what is the proportion of the foreign student component in the student population in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions? How many budding African intellectuals, both young and old, do Nigerian academies attract? What proportion of research in Nigeria is dedicated African-related issues and policy? How many Nigerians speak Swahili, French, Portuguese, or Arabic?
Given its historic role in the political emancipation of Africa, it is natural for Nigeria to hunger for the perpetuation of its glorious moments under the sun. The snag is that the sun has shifted place and the shadow is growing long. There is no one centre of gravity in Africa today. And it is not desirable. For a new post-Apartheid South Africa still cutting its teeth in the slippery international terrain, it is tempting to press its technological and economic advantages over the rest of Africa. It also has the advantage of being an immediate post-colonial state with a political elite possessing such heightened degree of political consciousness that is unprecedented on the continent. Hopefully some of its recent escapades in Cote d’Ivoire and the Central African Republic should inform it of the complexities of international engagements even in Africa.
Nigeria, and in particular with South Africa, have to come to terms with certain sharp realities that impose on them the imperatives to painfully abjure the temptation or the emerging tendency to assert exclusive zones of influence in Africa or pursue the illusion of going it all alone in a leadership role in Africa. Such a project would be myopic and not practicable. Recent events in Cote d’Ivoire, Libya, Mali, in the Central African Republic and even in Nigeria provide signposts of the looming danger for Africa, should any of these two countries seek national egomaniacal projects resembling a sub-regional or continental exclusive zone of influence in the search for some nebulous pax Nigeriana or a pax Azania. This would be an exercise in futility with dire consequences for the holistic renaissance of black humanity. It is simply not a feasible option, in circumstances where the total coefficient of power of the ten strongest African states in relation to the cumulative system power and force is insignificant and inconsequential. All African states would continue to be minced dinner meat and beef steak for elite predatory states acting together as one.
All said and down, Nigeria needs a creative new grand vision to direct foreign and security policy for the next 50 or so years. The suggestion is to realign and broaden the country’s earlier mainly politically focussed messianic vision and liberation mission by integrating its afrocentric thrust into the collective African renaissant project. African renaissance provides a template for a policy across avery wide plane of human endeavour, including foreign and security policies. As a collection of relatively weak states in a more complex and turbulent post-Cold War epoch, individual African states, Nigeria and South Africa inclusive, must band together, driven and bound by Africanist policy convergences, to be relevant especially on matters that touch on black humanity as a whole. It is projected that this constellation of progressive African forces would be, first, arrayed against a predictable circuit of African states that historically are led and have and continue to serve as willing proxies of extra African powers. More importantly, the progressive African constellation would mobilise as the bulwark against the divide and rule strategy of Africa’s traditional elite predatory state actors who are threatened by the prospect of a truly emancipated Africa.
Nigeria and South Africa must become the pivot of, to modify Prof Bolaji Akinyemi’s idea, a Concert of Renaissant African States (CRAS) as an informal consultative platform to advance Africas’s renaissant vision. To achieve this objective, Nigeria must revitalise its structures, including strengthening potential value added of its personnel, in a broad realm of critical substantive areas to enhance critical strategic thinking in its foreign and security policy formulation. Nigeria must reject outmoded and pretentious thinking of sub-regional or continental ascendance or domination as a policy objective. Such a policy goal is neither feasible nor desirable in the evolved global strategic landscape at all of levels of strategic intercourse: sub-regional, continental and systemic. Even the touted hegemon of the global system with almost infinite panoply of instrumentsat its disposal is hard put to maintain its global hegemony. Nigeria should put greater emphasis on collaborating in building new and strengthening the integrity of existing sub-regional and continental structures and mechanisms as the final instruments of Africanist policy that converges with meeting the challenge of defeating powerful extra African powers determined to keep the continent back. African continental bodies, exemplified by the African Union, must be enabled to provide robust as well as qualitative leadership in the frontlines of Africa’s engagement with the world. Global organisations of all and every hue must occupy a second or third rung against preeminent continental structures. The best of Africa should be uploaded on the African Union as the foremost vehicle of African emancipation. Nigeria can provide leadership in jettisoning archaic visions and in concretising in its policy the emergence of a truly renaissant Africa.
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