Ademola Araoye
Nigeria, confused, has been on the wrong side of history for some time now. It lags behind the zeitgeist, even in particular as it relates to its role in Africa. Its foreign policy choices in more recent times have negated the fundamental historic thrust of foreign and security imperative of holistic emancipation of black humanity. This emancipatory agenda which derives from the core principles of pan-Africanism, like pan-Africanism itself transcends the petty interests of the many puny neo-colonial contrivances of pretend states that litter the continent of Africa and the funny ludicrousness of their leadership. Holistic emancipation is a race-based formulation encapsulating, comprehensively, a strategy of securing a respectable placement of black humanity in the affairs of humanity and, associated with this new location in the global universe, the autonomy of the black voice at par with other races in the management of the global order. Holistic emancipation of the black race is a logical next phase following quasi-political decolonization and post-liberation in Southern Africa. The concept thus sums up the axiomatic pillar of pan-Africanism to which Nigeria famously claims to subscribe. Or, does it?
The paradoxes entailed in our foreign and security policy fiascos in the last decades are legion. They have been, as expected, impacted by the fragility of the internal deconsolidation of the Nigerian state. The strategic template of the continent had evolved in a manner to allow for clear distinction between states that had consolidated their statehood and those deconsolidated states. The latter seems content with the continued subservient status that is convenient to sustain horrendous domestic governance paradigms. Deconsolidated political entities are political communities with acknowledged political superior order to which they are permanently affiliated. Accordingly, the capacity of deconsolidated states to articulate a policy that threatens the interests of their sovereign superiors is constrained. The monumental failures of policy are epitomized in Nigeria’s catastrophic engagement in the crisis in Cote d’Ivoire. Nigeria’s ill-thought-out intervention in the conflict in Cote d’Ivoire was bereft of the slightest appreciation of the strategic imperatives involved in the conflict for Nigeria’s long-term goal of sub-regional economic integration. The outcome of Nigeria’s intervention has been the diminution of Nigeria’s credibility as a progressive actor in Africa. Indeed, Nigeria today has become a dyed-in-the-wool proxy of neo-colonial interests in Africa. Even when we have learned to live with the embarrassing humiliations and significant setbacks in Nigerian national policy goals brought on by our seeming naivete in policy formulation, Nigeria trudges on with archaic conceptual tools, if any at all, and no discernible new compasses that integrate critical new realities in Africa to direct policy formulation and actualization. The ever-evolving rational, radical transformations and complexity in the sub-regional and continental terrain have posed a major challenge for Nigeria to navigate.
The disturbing mismanagement of the expressions of the revolutionary ferment in the Sahel reflects all the fallacious fundamentals of Nigeria’s foreign policy that have gone embarrassingly awry. In a repeat of the consequences of its policy myopia in Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, as the visible head of a few self-serving heads of an ECOWAS that is delinked from the transformed political sensibilities of sub-regional civil society, was humbled at the African Union. Its knee-jerk saber-rattling in the Sahel, as it did on the Ivorian crisis, was stoutly rejected by the continental gathering. Nigeria’s foreign policy intelligentsia, consisting largely of old masters who are attached to ultra-conservative prisms and old narratives are frustrated. Rather than provide causal clarifications to aid policy realignments, they merely seek scapegoats for policy failures. The monumental deficiencies in data gathering, codification and analysis, policy formulation, and policy actualization would not be cured by scapegoating state actors in Africa. These state actors have taken on the challenge of advancing holistic black emancipation as a first step to the renaissance of the black race. As a leader of the pack of progressive consolidated states, South Africa has become a favorite Nigerian policy bogeyman. And Russia and China too.
It is inevitable for Russia and China to engage Africa. Africa is a part of the global system that is desirous of recalibrating its subordinate place in the planetary system. The ongoing turbulence in the process of the realignment of elite powers in the restructuring the strategic planetary order presents historic opportunities for Africa to recalibrate its status in the international system. The reconstruction of the global strategic contours presents an opportunity for Africa to move up a niche on the totem pole. The times are not when to be fixated on contentious relationships and partnerships that have historically been detrimental to the interests of black humanity. Africa therefore rightly seeks to move from the tangents to the mainstream of systemic currents. This is understood as an imperative however turbulent these currents may be. The main objectives of the continent in the evolving post-Soviet planetary strategic dispensation are the retrenchment of Africa’s historic subordinate locus and its tangential role in the global system. Associated with this objective is the abandonment of the contempt of Europe for Africa and general perceptions of the beggarly place of the continent in the evaluation of elite powers. This contempt, underpinning the relations of Western Europe and the black universe, has been the basis of interaction of the continent with other forces in the global system. This beggarly status seems entrenched especially in the fossilized dependence fostered by neo-colonial relations that have subsisted since the forceful injection of Africa into the global system. Consequent to the beggarly status and continental dependence are externally inspired policy impositions arising from historic control of the continent by hegemonic state actors superintending the affairs of the continent in relation to the world. In the face of massive disenchantment with the West over the past centuries, in the Third millennium, Africa aspires to ensure that the continent is never to be seen as needing generosity as the basis of its interaction in the global system even if the equities it brings to the table are at a low ebb. This expresses at the political level, the impact of the demystification of the West across the continent. To give effect to this disenchantment are a number of states in the continent that have consolidated their statehood and have developed the institutional strength and capacity to move Africa in new directions. The actualization of the vision of the recalibration of Africa’s place in the global system is at the heart of the postulations on “the end of Western hegemony in Africa.”
As a result of this, the position of France, the most tenacious of neo-colonial hegemons on the African continent, is seen as having deteriorated significantly in recent years. France is observed to have lost control of many of the territories it colonized there for many years, even as Western countries use security and instability to maintain their military presence on the continent and patronize terrorists and armed groups against democratically elected governments that don’t meet France’s opportunistic demands. To maintain a continued stranglehold, neo-colonial elite states instigate instability to provide excuses for their long-term stay to install or protect their cronies in power. This accounts for the successive emergence of radical pan-African forces in the Francophone universe through democratic channels in the last decades as in Cote d’Ivoire under Laurent Gbagbo and Gabon under Ali Bongo. In Cote d’Ivoire, the radical regime of democratically re-elected Laurent Gbagbo was quashed by France through the instrumentality of force and the deployment of its vast leverage to control the narratives and policies of invariably compromised international institutions such as the International Criminal Court (ICC). In this, it had the connivance of Barack Obama in the White House who traded the interest of Africa to secure French support for faltering United States policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is thus regrettable that Nigeria, hitherto a preeminent articulator of pan-African ideals, bought hook, line and sinker French anti-Africanist propaganda. Post-liberation states in Southern Africa saw through France and acted accordingly. Even the United States under George W. Bush gave tacit support to the Ivorian radicals. Of course, as a payback for France’s opposition to US policy ion Iraq and Afghanistan. South Africa, Rwanda, and Angola among a few other states were visionary in confronting Abuja’s retrogressive activism in Abidjan. The outcome of Nigeria’s mishandling of the revolutionary repudiation of France’s domination of Africa by the three Sahelian states of Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali has been the decision of the Alliance of Sahelian States to exit ECOWAS. This has led to panic in the community. The lesson of Cote d’Ivoire was clear. International politics is not about the pursuit of some high fallutin moral precepts.
Meanwhile, developments in Africa reflect the determination of the continent to finally extricate itself from the control of hegemonic powers. The revolutions that have been well received in progressive Africa, including the infusion of Russia and China in the equation, have also been motorized by the demystification of the West through the increasing realization of the untenable hegemonic falsehoods and hypocrisy underpinning the superordinate-subordinate relations that have subsisted between the West and Africa since the advent of a globalization process. The integration of Africa into global affairs was triggered by a Western search for conquest. The tragedy was buoyed by falsehoods propagated around the virtues of Western hegemonic societies and agents. The demonization of black humanity and his essence as a being has driven historically toxic relations between Western Europe and black humanity. Interactions have been premised on the devaluation of the essences of black humanity, including enslavement, and white defamations of black spirituality and values. The strategic end goal was comprehensive entrapment as a permanent political proxy rather than as a partner in the scheme of global affairs. Political entrapment was instrumental to the mindless exploitation of Africa’s economic assets by the machinery, structures, and institutions directed to advance the interests of a dominant West. The demystification of the West, integral to which is the exposure of the bankruptcy and hollowness of a claim of superiority of white spirituality, has engendered a search in Africa for new strategic partnerships based on mutual and reciprocal respect. The vanguard of Africa’s movement in new directions is its consolidated states whose internal circumstances are enabling the pursuit of radical directions in its interaction with the global system. Recent trenchant voices of leaders of African states with revolutionary convictions and plans in the international arena reflect significant movements in radical directions from the status quo. Nigeria must strengthen the capacity of its utterly dilapidated institutions responsible for foreign and security policy to meet the challenges of holistic emancipation of black humanity. This is the least action required to begin to infuse a new dynamism needed to realign policy in progressive directions if the choice is to our remain constructively relevant to the challenge of holistic emancipation of the black race. Nigeria can begin the catch-up race now.
*Professor Ademola Araoye is a retired official of the United Nations and former Director of Abuja Leadership Center, a TETFUND Center of Excellence in Public Governance and Leadership at the University of Abuja. He is author of Sources of Conflict in the Post- Colonial African State (AWP, 2012).