State House Abuja hosted an envoy last July. He was from Morocco. A delegation from that country had also been around on May 29, 2015. That time, I had expressed surprise that the north African country attended the inauguration of President Muhammadu Buhari. It was because the immediate past administration here had closed shop with a spat with Rabat. In the weeks before the 2015 general elections, Abuja had made a claim about Morocco. Rabat said it wasn’t true.
Occupants of Abubakar Tafawa Balewa House, Abuja, insisted it was true. It took the then Nigerian president to categorically declare that Rabat was right. I had pointed out at the time that for the political point which that administration wanted to score, Morocco was
the last nation it should have contacted. Why? In 2014, Nigeria had openly danced samba in Western Sahara. It had sent a delegation of women to that territory’s camps for displaced persons with a huge donation which carried the stamp of the then First Lady, while Morocco watched with consternation. Only a nation that lacked proper coordination in the conduct of its foreign affairs, or lacked long memory could have sought for Morocco’s support under that condition.
Of course, everyone knows that friends of Western Sahara are enemies of Morocco. It’s because Morocco claims Western Sahara (that has declared itself independent) as its territory. Morocco had since shown itself more disposed to doing business with the Buhari administration though. It sent an envoy to see the President days before the July African Union Summit in Rwanda. I had paid attention to the outcome of that meeting with our leader. Morocco would construct a fertiliser plant in Nigeria, it was said. It’s good. But a keen observer would necessarily ask questions about an envoy who came from Rabat, and the construction of a fertiliser plant was all that he had come to announce to the President. The business of diplomacy is more complex than that.
Yes, any journalist would realise that reporters of this event might have picked the angle which they found most interesting. It was either that or our foreign affairs officials chose to feed the media only with the fertiliser plant story for a reason. What could that reason be? I wasn’t surprised that two days after, the Moroccan envoy showed up in Kenya and there the announcement was that he had sought for President Uhuru Kenyatta’s assistance in order for his country to return as a member of the AU. Had he asked Abuja for the same assistance? He did. Why were Nigerians not informed about this? Should the AU take Morocco back with conditions attached?
Western Sahara was the reason Morocco left the AU in 1984. Western Sahara was a territory the Spanish had held as a colony. When Spain left in 1975, it didn’t move Western Sahara towards political independence, rather it left it to Morocco. Freedom fighters in Western Sahara never accepted Morocco’s presence. The Polisario Front had therefore been waging war to get Morocco out. Algeria has been its frontline backer, providing Polisario with a haven on its territory, and closing its borders with Morocco since 1994 for the same reason. African nations mostly see the presence of Morocco in Western Sahara as a case of colonisation. They were colonised too, so it was morally indefensible for them to support Morocco in the matter. Under the AU, they had recognised the right of the people of Western Sahara to self-determination, and had largely recognised the territory in “state” capacity. Many member nations host embassies of Western Sahara. Nigeria does. Meanwhile, Morocco continues to treat Western Sahara as part of its territory. Amid allegations of human rights abuses, many of the people in the territory are displaced, living in camps. Morocco has rejected calls to have independent investigators look into this. Some 200,000 refugees are in southern parts of Algeria, and there are other camps in Mauritania. The late Ambassador Olusegun Olusola (founder of African Refugee Foundation) used to seize every opportunity he had to give an account of how Algeria treated these refugees. While I was at the Political Desk of The Guardian newspaper in 1997, I attended a media event hosted by the News Agency of Nigeria, located in Lagos at the time, where Olusola gave vivid details of how Algeria made refugees from Western Sahara feel at home.
This is a demonstration of how strongly African nations feel about the people of Western Sahara. They’re an emotive issue for the rest of the continent, Nigeria inclusive.
Like the AU, the UN has been interested in the fate of Western Sahara. It has proffered solutions which Morocco routinely rejects. The UN has maintained a peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara since 1991. Part of the aim of the mission was to hold a referendum on autonomy for Western Sahara. Morocco is against it, and France has vetoed it in the Security Council. Meanwhile, this UN mission doesn’t have the mandate to monitor human rights abuses, and it has just a handful of staff for
it to be effective. As for the AU, its insistence that Morocco must let Western Sahara determine its own fate is one of the few bright spots in its austere achievements. Even when Morocco walked away at the time the AU recognised Western Sahara, the body maintained its position. Now, Morocco is appealing to the AU members to allow it to return. The appeal has to be made because there’s a process to follow in order to return.
If members don’t vote in favour, it won’t happen. This is the pit into which Morocco has fallen, yet it’s giving condition for its return and, shockingly, some AU members support it.
When the AU met in Rwanda in July, Morocco sent a letter to the gathering. Its king stated that he wanted the AU to consider having his nation back. Then, he added that although his country wanted to return, the recognition of a “pseudo state” was “hard for the Moroccan people to accept”. He meant Western Sahara. Is Morocco saying the AU members should drop the only stance for which they have received any tangible ovation in all the years of being in the union? Report was that Morocco, through its envoy, had also lobbied Rwanda’s leader, the AU’s host, to ensure that Western Sahara wasn’t invited to the summit. This failed.
But Algeria had a word for its neighbour. It had no objection if Morocco wanted to join the AU, but Moroccans should do so without preconditions, it had said. Several other AU members didn’t sound like this, so one got the impression that Morocco’s diplomatic shuttle before the summit achieved its aim. Senegal, for instance, declared its support for Morocco’s bid to join the AU; it wouldn’t mind if Western Sahara was sacrificed in the process. “Today, Morocco has decided to come back and has requested that international constitutional legality be respected in accordance with the United Nations where the Western Sahara is not represented as an independent state,” Senegalese president had said. Some 28 nations out of the 54 AU members have also supported Morocco’s decision to join the AU on condition that Western Sahara was suspended. The Kigali summit therefore ended with a divided AU.
This latest development turns my attention back to Nigeria’s role in the matter. Morocco’s special envoy sought for our support, but Nigerians weren’t informed. In compliance with the AU’s resolutions, we’ve traditionally been for steps that will ensure Western Sahara self-determines its fate. Since Morocco lobbies us to drop this position, as its words in Rwanda indicates, Nigerians have a right to know what position we’ve taken on the request. Has Morocco successfully bribed us with a gift of a fertiliser plant? Should Nigerians take it for granted that we’ve turned around from supporting decolonisation on the continent because Morocco offers us this morsel?
I’ve always expressed my concern on this page about how our foreign policy establishment remains silent over salient issues that require prompt and unequivocal pronouncement. Less-fancied nations aren’t timid to state where they stand on Western Sahara in the wake of Morocco’s diplomatic push. Abuja should state where we stand, fertiliser plant or otherwise. Meanwhile, I think it’s a shame that Morocco shunned the AU years ago, came back to give conditions for it to return, and African nations were falling over one another to comply because of whatever morsels they’d been offered.
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