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Strengthening Nigeria’s foreign
policy
By Emeka Anyaoku
It
gives me great pleasure to welcome this august assemblage of distinguished
stakeholders in the Nigerian project. I am also pleased to welcome to this
opening session High Commissioners and Ambassadors accredited to the Federal
Republic of Nigeria. I am particularly delighted that our indefatigable
President has found and made time available to be present with us, and to offer
us the use of the excellent facilities in this presidential functions auditorium.
I am expectant about the thoughts the President will share with us today.
I
also want to thank our former Presidents and Heads of State who answered our
patriotic call to be present at this august gathering. My appreciation also
goes to all other distinguished dignitaries here present who could have found
one good reason or the other to be absent but are here. Thank you all very
much.
We
decided with the approval of Mr. President to have this retreat for several
reasons. The recent and current successes of Nigeria’s foreign policy
reflected by the string of appointments of our President in the international
community led us to want to examine how we can help to optimise
Nigeria’s performance in the various fora concerned.
Our
President was the chairman of the last South-South summit meeting in Havanna
and is the current chairman of the Commonwealth after the success of the Abuja
CHOGM of 2003. Nigeria and South Africa were largely the initiators of the New
Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and our President currently
chairs the NEPAD’s Heads of State and Government Implementation Committee
(HSGIC). He is also the head of the Peace and Security Council of the AU (PSC).
And to crown it all, the President currently serves as the Chairman of the
African Union.
Beginning
with our primary constituency, Nigeria has been totally involved in finding
peace in the troubled and distressed parts of our West Africa region,
particularly in the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea-Bissau. This
has cost the country tremendous resources and even the lives of our men. We
have done this with the full awareness that if we do not put out the fire in
our neighborhood, we ourselves may be engulfed in the spreading conflagration.
In other words, our policies in our region have been based on enlightened
self-interest as well as on the desire to serve humanity of whom our fellow
Africans are part.
Nigeria
has also through its President successfully rolled back a military putsch in
Sao Tome and Principe.
But
there are other foreign policy challenges facing Nigeria in our immediate
region. Among them is the increasing economic importance of the Gulf of Guinea,
which was sadly evidence in recent times by an attempted mercenary invasion of
Equatorial Guinea, our neighbour to the South and by increasing United States
arbitrary entry into the Gulf of Guinea. Because of these developments, we have
been canvassing all the states of the Gulf of Guinea namely, Equatorial Guinea,
Sao Tome and Principe, Gabon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The
Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville), Angola, and the Republic of Cameroun to
ratify the protocol setting up the Gulf of Guinea Commission. This new body
would help not only to enhance the security of the region but also to promote
joint development of the huge hydrocarbon resources embedded in the
over-lapping exclusive Economic Zones in the oceans surrounding us. The Gulf of
Guinea Commission is a policy in progress and this administration will earn our
commendation for hopefully bringing to reality an idea that had been in
Nigeria’s policy domain since 1976.
In
robust intervention of our government through the commitment of troops to
Darfur in the Sudan under the auspices of the African Union, has attracted
positive notice by the international community. Of course, there is still a
long way to go in helping to facilitate the coming of peace and the return of
the refugees and the displaced persons to their homes in the Sudan; but the
fact that our President is at the vanguard of the peace efforts is another
welcome evidence of Nigeria as a major player in international politics.
At
this time of major discussions of the reform of the United Nations,
Nigeria’s standing within the international community assumes particular
importance.
It
is generally recognised that a restructured and reconfigured United Nations, in
which acknowledged regional powers can permanently represent regional interests
and centres of power and influence not currently reflected in the present
composition of the Security Council, would be an improvement of the current
status quo. Nigeria’s standing particularly in Africa is therefore
relevant to its bid for one of such permanent seats in the Security Council.
But
I must add that if the bid is to succeed, Nigeria must endeavour to
out-campaign such other formidable African candidates as Egypt and South
Africa. It must match them in regular payment of its dues to the UN and its
specialised agencies, as well as improper funding of its missions abroad,
particularly its Permanent Mission to the United Nations.
Since
1999, Nigeria under our current President has reversed the international
isolation to which we had been consigned as a result of our domestic situation
which was characterised by major negations of the tenets of good governance. We
are no longer a pariah state. We are now consulted on the major issues facing
humanity, such as peace and stability in Africa, economic development, the
environment and terrorism.
The
world has changed and is changing. We in Nigeria can justifiably congratulate
ourselves in having helped to decolonise Southern Africa and to dismantle the
odious apartheid regime. In retrospect, it was easy to fight a more easily
identifiable target. We now know that the lingering and residual consequences
of the slave trade, colonialism and racial discrimination, which reached its
climax in the South
African
apartheid regime, are not going to totally go away. The consequences of these
legacies are still with us in the form of, among others, under-development and
inequitable terms of trade.
The
World Trade Organisation (WTO) is not yet able to prevent unfair trade
practices at the expense of the poor countries of the world. And these problems
are inadequately acknowledged by those countries who are benefiting from what
is still a skewed economic regime known as globalization. After the failure of
the WTO Ministerial Conference in Cancun, the successful outcome of the July
2004 General Council meeting has come as a ray of hope to put the trade talks
back on track.
The
package of framework and other agreements that the WTO members approved at the
General Council will, we hope, greatly enhance the chances of fulfilling the
aspirations of the Doha Development Agenda which placethe needs and interests of
developing and least developed countries at the heart of the Doha Work
Programme.
We
need to secure, under the globalised WTO regime, access to markets of the OECD
countries for our agricultural produce. Having recorded an impressive seven per
cent growth rate in its agricultural sector in the last year, Nigeria must now
in its foreign and trade policy begin to examine ways of taking advantage for
global free trade in agricultural produce.
Our
foreign policy must also be geared to marshalling international support for our
National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS) as well as
addressing the other roots of the economic problems of Nigeria, the rest of
Africa, and the other poor countries of the world. In this regard, the issue of
debt servicing continues to be anathema to the development programmes of our
country and others.
The
debt burden continues in our national budgets to divert resources away from the
development of necessary infrastructure and the delivery of basic and essential
services. Perhaps the time has come for us in our campaign for relief to link
the question of debt with the issue of reparations for the slave trade and
colonialism. If agitating for reparations will prick the conscience of the
former slave masters, we should at the least, begin to examine the feasibility
of mobilising our African brothers and sisters for such a campaign.
In
recognition of the fact that peace is a basic necessity for development, our
foreign policy of pursuing peace abroad must be anchored on peace at home. No
country can do well abroad if the home front is weak. Of course, I am aware
that some countries sometimes embark on policies of adventure abroad in order
to distract the population at home and create the possibility of success and
glory abroad. But experience has shown that even when this happens, the
euphoria is found to be ephemeral because whatever domestic problem was papered
over usually reemerges and endures unless it is solved. This is why this
administration deserves our commendation for resisting the temptation of that
conflict with our neighbour, Cameroon, over Bakassi Peninsula.
In
speaking about peace at home, I would like to draw attention to the need for us
to reconfigure our constitution with a view to achieving a more meaningful
federation, a federation that will be more conducive to attaining national
peace and stability, and national development. In my view, the Federal
Government, which has demonstrated to a general applause a willingness to hold
conversation with the representatives of a restive group in the country should,
in our present circumstances, be willing and able to take the initiative to
organise a national dialogue of the representatives of the country’s
ethnic groups. The aim of such dialogue would be to discuss and produce a
national consensus on the fundamentals of the constitution and on ways of
strengthening our country’s corporate existence.
For example, there are currently eight hundred and twelve
“governments” in Nigeria made up of seven hundred and seventy four
local governments, (774) thirty-seven (37) state governments including the
Federal Capital Territory and the Federal Government. Our country must be one
of the most administered countries in the World.
Our
present cost of administration impacts very adversely on the resources
available for our national development. We must free the resources spent on
governance and deploy them on development, which will palpably benefit our
toiling and unemployed masses. In this way, we would give our people a greater
stake in the democratic dispensation. And once that is done, we can then make
advocacy and entrenchment of democracy a major plank of our foreign policy with
the justification that democracies hardly go to war against one another, and
that with successful inclusive democracy, would come peace because most of the
conflicts in Africa at large derive from the politics and governance of
exclusion.
We
should also seek to project our foreign policy more effectively to our
citizens, making it clearer that spending abroad is linked to the domestic
well-being of our people. For example, the government should always be ready to
explain that as we help to consolidate peace in our region and in Africa as a
whole, we are not only seeking to avoid conflagrations that can reach our
country but also working to open the market in those countries to our
manufactures and agricultural goods.
In
this regard, I believe that the recent criticism in some sections of the media
of the government’s financial loans to Sao Tome and Principe and Ghana,
demonstrated the need for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to radically
reappraise its approach to the issue of information dissemination. It can do
this without compromising the age-old tradition that confidentiality is
necessary for delicate negotiations in the conduct of foreign policy.
Let
me now turn to the presenters of papers in this retreat. I am sure that they
will roam and range widely in order to capture all the areas of our foreign
policy. There will, I expect, be suggestions of reversal of step in some areas,
and of more forward movement in other areas. We may for example in the light of
current international environment, need to discuss extensively the role of oil
and gas in our foreign policy.
It
will of course be recognised that at the end of the day, our country has
enduring national interests, which will always remain no matter who is in
government. Our international affairs research institutions are expected to
provide ongoing analyses of the permanent national interests which are to be
pursued by our foreign policy.
To
give one example, there must be constant analyses of Nigeria’s interest
in the various international conventions and treaties which the country is
called upon to sign. Such analyses will determine not just whether or not to
sign, but more particularly, the directions our negotiators should take in the
bargaining that usually precedes the signing of the instrument concerned.
Before
I come to my final point, I would like to mention the issue of responsibility
for formulating and implementing foreign policy in an executive presidential
democracy such as we have. It is a subject on which our legal minds might have
differing interpretations of our constitutional provisions.
However,
precedents in other similarly governed countries and the merits of the case, in
my view, leave the responsibility of foreign policy squarely to the Executive.
My
final point is that foreign policy has a huge financial cost. It is not cheap.
Embassies have to be adequately funded and in hard currency. We cannot afford
to be indifferent to the financial situation of our Foreign Ministry at home
and our diplomatic missions abroad. A poorly funded foreign policy
infrastructure undermines not only our image, but also whatever we are trying
to do. But we must also stress the need for judicious management, at home and
abroad, of resources when these have been adequately provided.
Mr.
President, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to end my remarks
with the expression of confidence that this exercise will benefit both those in
government who have the task of formulating and executing our foreign policy,
as well as the rest of our people who though not in government, are
nevertheless the real stakeholders in the success or failure of our
nation’s foreign relations.
• Excerpts of the speech by Chief Emeka Anyaoku (cfr) at the opening session of the
Foreign Policy Retreat by the Presidential Advisory Council on International
Affairs, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.
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