Ademola Araoye,
The deployment of Nigerian ground forces backed by assets of the Nigerian Air Force, as a response to the attempted coup of December 7 in the Republic of Benin by a section of the Beninoise military against the Patrice Talon regime, a viciously clever Africanized democratic monstrosity, is another policy low point for Nigeria. Not unexpectedly, ECOWAS also announced that it was mobilizing ground troops from Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Cote d’Ivoire to join the fray. Of the three in the latter group, only Ghana boasts of a credible democratic culture. Nigeria, Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone, and Benin constitute an axis of states that practice Africanized democracy in a manner that has discounted the tenets and values of classical democracy. It is tragically instructive that the Republic of Benin, which was held up as a poster state of democracy in the post-sovereign conference third wave of democracy on the African continent. That was until the advent of the Talon regime, nine years ago. Talon pushed the country back into the dark days of its one-party rule. The events of 7 December 2025 were thus tragic on many fronts: for Benin, Nigeria, ECOWAS, and the African continent. The primary focus of this intervention is on the delicate demands placed on Nigeria as it navigates the ever more slippery terrain of strategic policymaking in the post-Benin policy fiasco.
The sad response of the Bola Tinubu administration is consistent with Nigeria’s recent self-immolating foreign and security policy thrust. The situation is, however, unfortunate for both Nigeria and the traditionally friendly people of the Republic of Benin. As with other leaders before him similarly cranked out by the convulsive Nigerian democratic machine, Nigeria’s unsophisticated and positively simplistic, single-dimensional policy under Tinubu is a product of crass analytical indolence or a dearth of rigor in foreign and security policy formulation. At this time, Nigeria’s policy has alarmingly evolved into a blanket policy of indiscriminately offering security guarantees to every existing rogue state or legal order that parades itself as a democracy. The security umbrella is assured irrespective of the character of the regime. That policy is booby-trapped, as it presents a first line of inelastic strategic spacing and pacing, or imposes constraints on future capacity for strategic maneuvering in Nigeria’s responses to future turbulence in strategic downstream evolutions. It carries a terrible connotation for Nigeria’s long-term integrity and relevance as a stout player on the delicate chessboard that West Africa has evolved into. Like Niger to its north, Nigeria structurally enjoys intermestic (the peculiarities of intertwined international and affinities) for good or bad, with Benin Republic.
On this evolved board, characterized by an increasingly delicate mosaic of counteracting interests, imperatives, and both endogenous and exogenous forces, Nigeria is unfazed by the nuances and intricacies that define the legitimacy of orders that persist across its neighborhood. In this setting, a more perceptive long-term policy framework focused on policy integrity would emphasize the order’s legitimacy over the legality of the regime in place. With a legality-oriented myopic policy in a tumultuous period in an intrinsically unstable universe, such an orientation toward small, fixated thinking in policymaking, however convenient for the regimes involved, can only be self-defeating in the long run. Sadly, Nigeria, which has paradoxically paraded itself as the gendarmerie of democracy in the sub-region, in the course of articulating a ludicrously faux credential that it does not possess at home, has established itself as the pivot of counter-revolutionary progressivism in Africa. Any effort to dismantle a rogue state, whatever toga of legality that it and its regime parade, represents progress toward progress and ultimate emancipation of the people. In effect, Nigeria has learnt no lesson from its previous wayward policy interventions that have continued to embarrass it. The historic faux pas in Cote d’Ivoire, the worst in Nigeria’s history, and ignominious and shameless retreat from the affairs of the Confederation of Sahelian States (AES) come to mind. In all these, Nigeria itself is trapped in an inextricable web of collaboration with France, a force historically dedicated to undermining any approach to Africa’s continental autonomy or emancipation. That stain can neither be rationalized away nor washed clean by propaganda. There is a limit to the efficacy of mindless propaganda, deception and institutionalized dissembling on matters of grave import.’
To be sure, while legality and legitimacy are not mutually exclusive, they are conceptually distinct attributes of any regime or state. Good governance, in fact, ultimately fuses legitimacy and legality. Legality refers to conformity with the technicality of the law as presently formulated by the extant regime. It is often amoral and reflects the interests of the dominant class and power. However, the more the law converges with society’s sense of morality, the greater the governance of the universe moves towards legitimacy. The legal order may or may not reflect the will and interests of the larger society. Legality is constantly malleable through the instrumentality of force or power, however acquired. Legality may be specious, toxic, and even noxious, as Nigeria itself has witnessed at different junctures in its political evolution. Legality is thus a very treacherous foundation for validating any state or regime. It is a transient instrument reflexive of the structure of power in any universe. Legitimacy refers to the prevailing sense in society of the rightness, goodness, or even appropriateness of a governing regime’s credentials. Where, as in the case of Patrice Talon in the Republic of Benin, there is a wide dissonance between legality and legitimacy, something ultimately would have to give. A set of laws governs the Nigerian political process, but whether the law and the practice of democracy in the country enhance system legitimacy is another matter altogether. What constitutes legitimacy is not compliance with the technicality of the law, but rather a broad consensus in society on the goodness of the cause pursued through the use of the power to make laws. This actually goes to the heart of the pervasive lack of legitimacy of many regimes in Africa. In West Africa today, perhaps only Ghana, Cabo Verde, and Senegal have the smallest margin of dissonance between regime legality and regime legitimacy. The jury is still out on the AES as it remains a system in evolution.
It is against this background that the validity of the evolved blueprint directing the management of the not-so-unpredictable crises in the sub-region arising from a contrived and institutionalized slide from classic and authentic democracy to a canvassed Africanized democracy demands rigorous examination. The propagation of the imperative of Africanized democracy, which has found varying expressions in residual ECOWAS states of Nigeria, now embattled Benin, simmering conflicts in Togo and Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea Bissau (under the self-induced ousted Emballo administration), Sierra Leone, and neighboring Cameroun and Equatorial Guinea, among others, is well documented. Or, the ill-thought-out, outright repudiation of classic democracy as the indisputably best form of social organization globally, as salient to Africa, has also been codified. More than its codification is the nebulous endorsement of Africanized democracy by quasi-informed commentators who are strumming populist tunes to the people’s pain, or by self-serving mischief-makers in the mainstream policy process. These problematic conceptual devolutions impose critical discursive interrogations of the emerged challenges along many intersecting analytical planes. Principally, they entail a thorough engagement of the challenges of instability and impediments to progressivism in the environment of an Africanized democratic state. These many conceptual intersections are defined by the pervasive illegitimacy, distinct from the otherwise legality, of any subsisting order of interest, of the preference for regime survival as implacable normative choices implied in the unconditional toxic strategic collaboration forged among regimes characterized by explicit expressions of discounted democratic values in the sub-region (Nigeria/Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria/Benin, Nigeria/Togo). At a higher level, these unfold amid epochal turbulence in the global power structure.
Nigeria’s policy has been primarily driven by its own crippling internal circumstances, which have proven noxious at all levels in shaping the nature of its external engagements. The policy thoughts that have emerged in advancing the partisan career interests of transient politicians and their regimes of the coalition of compatible national rogues as public policy have naturally been in permanent conflict with the larger transcendental will and interest of the continent and the legitimate will of even the hobbled Nigerian state. Nigeria’s policy has been in conflict with the continent’s highest and transcendental emancipatory impulses in the post-Cold War and post-Apartheid eras. Emancipation has remained the inalienable operative mantra of progressivism in Africa’s struggle amid the turbulence characterizing the reordering of the global order. In this setting, it is not the protection of rogue regimes, no matter their claims to legality, that validates policy. The protection of the people’s interests against such rogue states legitimizes policy. And there are too many legalized petty assassins of the hopes of the people around. They dubiously hug false tags of continental leadership and politicians for the undiscerning. For emphasis, the struggle for emancipation confers legitimacy on any African political state order. Legality does not. The continental sentimental thrust is to rid the continent of all forces, both endogenous and exogenous, that have proven ruinous to the common interests of the peoples of the continent and to black humanity as a race. This, however, assumes that the dominant internal forces of the African state would imbibe the transcendental vision of a collective responsibility for good democratic governance. That axiomatic mantra, espoused by Nelson Mandela, has underpinned an emerging consensus on the normative parameters of Afrocentric policy among all progressive states in the post-Cold War and post-Apartheid eras. Unfortunately, Nigeria, in its third republic, has seen a classic vitiation of the substantive tenets of policy around everything normative and definitive of its old, chequered Afrocentric posture. In its stead has been the deployment of state power to advance the personal careers of individuals and to consolidate administrations and regimes steeped in noxious, Africanized democratic practices. The process infuses the interests of the individual Godfather and his unconscionable cronies in a coalition of all available despicable characters for the interests of the emasculated people.
As highlighted earlier, developments across Africa are unfolding amid turbulence around the reconfiguration of the global structure. They are thus inputs to and simultaneously constitute outcomes of the intensive interaction within the international process. These episodes and events, therefore, elicit not just passing interest from gladiatorial elite powers; they become elements of significant salience in a broader calculus of elite contestations beyond even the imagination of local actors. The outcome of the current fluidity of the international structure, therefore, has critical implications for Africa and the management of its legion of conflicts. The ensuing turbulence in the politics of systemic reconfiguration, of which the war in Ukraine is the theater in Europe, has potentially transformed Africa’s engagement from a scramble for the continent to a jostling for a respectable space under the evolving dispensation. The proper management of disruption of the status quo provides the opportunity for Africa to consolidate the integrity of its claim to possessing the capacity for construction engagements with its internal challenges as an autonomous element in the global mix. This has profound implications for stability in Africa. Put together, given Africa’s location in the reconfiguration of the international structure, there is no room for specious reasoning in the management of strategic challenges by regional powers such as Nigeria.
It is against this background that a coup d’etat in any hitherto obscure African country, which in the normal state of affairs would have gone relatively unnoticed, has acquired great significance. A coup now acquires the character of an opening salvo in a power struggle among elite powers in the international system, within a realist calculus of one bloc seeking to gain new partners against the rival global power axis’s aspiration to retain historic hegemonic influence over the African continent. In the case of Benin, France, which remains embroiled in the struggle to maintain its landmark domination of neo-colonial spaces, like Nigeria, is not moved by considerations for the legitimacy of the proxy regimes in Benin, Togo, and Côte d’Ivoire. The continued hegemonic ascendance of France in any African space runs afoul of the aspiration of progressive African states, who seem determined to wrestle control of their future from the neo-colonial West, whose embrace has demonstrably been ruinous for the continent. This charge for emancipation confers legitimacy on movements in a radical direction. Such movements are often led by a group of actors whose consolidated statehoods enable them to mobilize a national will to repudiate existing paradigms of their subordinate status vis-à-vis Western neo-colonial forces. The new dynamism of Africa is founded on the massive demystification of the West and the awakened consciousness of the falsehoods and fallacies underpinning Western hegemony across all existential realms, political, social, cultural, and including spiritual, on which earlier interaction of Africa with the Western universe was based. Nigeria should not be seen as the hatchet state doing the dirty job of France in Africa.
At a more mundane level, the history of Nigeria’s unwanted and unjustifiable intervention to save a rogue regime will not go away. Where was this “friendly” neighbor when Talon was riding roughshod over the Constitution and changing electoral law to perpetuate his one man ascendance over the Republic? Sadly, President Tinubu’s faux pas in Cotonou would also affect inter-communal relations between the Yoruba and other major ethnic groups in that country. While northern Nigeria opposed and ultimately prevailed against a proposed deployment of force by Nigeria in the Niger Republic, the Yoruba in South West Nigeria, under similar circumstances, failed to do the same against unwarranted military intervention in Benin Republic. There are creative ways to avoid using a sledgehammer to crush a mosquito perched on one’s balls. It is called creative balancing.
On a final note, whatever it takes, it is not too late for Nigeria to embrace Africa’s sought-after capacity for future autonomy by imbibing the progressive ferment. President Bola Tinubu should wean himself away from France and stop playing the role of a cleanup maid to an expired ghost. That implies he must align Nigeria’s policies with the more legitimate principles of emancipation rather than to protect the specious and dubious legality of regimes like those of Patrice Talon in Cotonou, Ouattara in Abidjan, or Eyadema in Lomé. In due course, the ugly folios of Ouattara and Eyadema would stare at him. These vermin are no more than a tragic throwback to the horrible era of the One-Man-state of the Cold War. Nigeria has no business being in the company of these stinking, destructive demons that represent the regrettable tenacious residues of our past. Nigeria can, and should do better.
*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).
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