“Only in Nigeria would we usher into the Villa foreign businessmen whose sole business is importation of toothpaste or bottled water or tomato paste or baby milk”
–Bolaji Akinyemi, University of Ibadan Convocation Lecture, November 16, 2016.
For Nigeria’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prof. Bolaji Akinyemi, the 2016 Convocation Lecture of the University of Ibadan, which he delivered on Wednesday, was a kind of homecoming. For, as known, Akinyemi was a lecturer at the Department of Political Science of that university, in what may be called its glory days. Truly international, that department had on its staff such iconic scholars as Billy Dudley, Sam Nolushungu, both of the blessed memory; Richard Joseph, whose book on Prebendal Politics is enjoying a rebound; Bayo Adekanye, a leading comparativist; Bunmi Ayoade, among others.
The intellectual temper and excellent debating culture of those years undergirded such formulations as the Akinyemi Doctrine, which the guest lecturer brought into his tenure first, as Director General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, and subsequently Minister of External Affairs. Echoes of what has been called the golden age of Nigeria’s foreign policy when philosophers became kings, are much in evidence as one wades through the Ibadan lecture entitled, “Nigerian Exceptionalism: Nigerian Quest for World Leadership”. It documents massively the rationale, historiography, and intellectual props for Nigeria’s manifest destiny and her projected role as a leader in continental and global affairs.
The lecture can be read in many ways: as nostalgia, for the international exertions of a robust and strong Nigerian state which enjoyed legitimacy from a fairly welfarist governance model and a vigorous foreign policy. It can be read, too, as an eloquent manifesto for a renascent Nigeria resituated on the world map, possessing capabilities in both nuclear and space technologies. It is also a statesman’s handbook of prudent conduct and sound management in a period of recession of political imagination and the economy.
Above all and most engagingly, it brings up the prospect of a black powerful state which will be a reference point and a destination for black peoples around the world. To ask the question whether Nigeria is moving in such a direction, stagnating or regressing is to empathise with the lecturer’s own equivocations about choosing an apt title for the lecture. For example, earlier proposals for a title, the lecturer informs, included queries over whether Nigeria’s exceptionalism is a myth or reality, or chasing a rainbow, among others. In other words, adversity conditions nations to bounded imaginaries in which even to dream or to dare takes on the prospect of a wild goose chase.
Conscious of the very ambiguity of the concept of “exceptionalism” and a global mandate for a country where all you see these days are falling faces and embattled brows and brimming with undeclared wars, Akinyemi approaches his topic gingerly by historicising Nigeria’s exceptionalism and contextualising it within the country’s power indices, much of it natural rather than acquired. He reminds us that even before independence, Nigeria’s emerging leaders had begun to carry themselves around with the self-confident stature of politicians that believed in Nigeria’s historically assigned role of becoming a player on the global canvass. Brushes with Nkrumah’s Ghana, which had begun to appropriate a messianic identity as continental saviour and leader provided the necessary jolt for Nigerian leaders to begin to assert themselves, rather than watch Ghana steal the show.
If there were really doubts in the early years of independence about Nigeria’s manifest destiny, the United States smothered them when President John Kennedy treated Nigeria’s Prime Minister, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, as a Special Guest in the course of Balewa’s visit to Washington. Kennedy reportedly remarked that “Nigeria’s development and leadership are of the greatest interest to the United States”. That statement, for this writer, broaches an ambiguity in Nigeria’s projected global role, namely, whether its influence will be made and packaged in the United States and Britain, or whether it will be based on volition, self-reliant development and national interest.
I have argued elsewhere, that as long as Nigeria is desperately subservient to the West and unable to choose its development options as the Asian Tigers did, its global role will be circumscribed by that factor of substantial dependence. As Akinyemi recognises, even his proposal for a Black Bomb or a nuclear option for Nigeria is subject to the whims of the US which may go against it. For instance, he referred to a conversation with the late Head of State, Gen Sani Abacha, about the possibility of Nigeria developing a nuclear weapon. Narrated he: “When Abacha became Head of State in 1993, he raised the feasibility of such a programme (nuclear weapon) with me. But I said the United States would not permit it”. In other words, it remains to be seen the extent to which Nigeria will be permitted to veer away from an assigned role of being a junior partner in a Western dominated alliance, or whether it will be allowed to act its own script.
There is no deterministic answer to such a poser because the election of Donald Trump as the United States President indicates a more insular America focused on its own problems, hostile to immigrants, thus engendering by default the leeway for Nigeria to play its own game as it sees fit. Articulating some of the bases for Nigeria’s global role which he maintains should rest on a carefully defined strategic doctrine and enhanced military capability, Akinyemi alludes to such factors as Nigeria’s influential role in peacekeeping, our emergent space programme which makes us the only African country that possesses satellites in space, and the Technical Aid Corps, interestingly started during the tenure of Akinyemi as Foreign Affairs Minister. There is also a robust human resources profile illustrated by such Nigerians as Dr. Olurotimi Badero, a specialist consultant in internal medicine, nephrology and hypertension. There are also the expectations aroused concerning us by several distinguished visitors to Nigeria who have commented favourably about the possibilities of our eventual world leadership.
What are the things we need to do to bring the country nearer its destined historical mission? Here the lecturer is forthcoming and prolific. As the opening quote illustrates, it is necessary to act with gravitas required of a nation on assignment. We can do this by firming up the quality and tenor of public institutions and personnel, turning our often querulous diversity to advantage by appointing Muslims as ambassadors to Muslim countries and Christians as ambassadors to Christian countries. That is not all. Inclusive governance must necessarily involve pruning drastically the current privileges of Nigerian office holders as well as constitution amendments which will include compulsory savings along the Norwegian model by national and sub-national governments. There is the need to tell our stories to the world rather than allow others to tell them from their own perspectives. This implies too that Nigerian leaders do not go around denigrating their country.
Some of these ideas may not necessarily be new but the synthesis of familiar ideas with some original to the lecturer is striking and should provide grist for public debates, with at least a few compelling ones finding their way into the policy making arena.
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