THE IMPARTIAL OBSERVER
MATTERS OF THE MOMENT
Limits of Ashiru’s Remit
Hank Eso
Friday 12 August, 2011
Nigeria is starkly absent from the broad global political theatre:
no longer within the broad regional concentric rings;
and no longer introspective or for that matter, retrospective at the domestic
level.
In
what is either a uniquely rare case of happenstance or fortuity or for that
matter both, Nigeria’s incumbent foreign Minister, Olugbenga Ashiru indicated
the direction of his foreign policy doctrine for Nigeria in January 2011, some
six months before he was appointed to the position. That op-ed piece was
centered on “national interest, political
expediency and foreign policy” (See The Guardian 27 Jan. 2011). Clues
gleaned from his piece suggest that he sees the problems and challenges
confronting Nigerian foreign policy as merely administrative and systemic rather
than substantive. For all he said, one point remains obvious: Nigeria’s foreign
policy continues to waffle and wobble.
No questions about that. And that is the mantle Ashiru has inherited.
While the exact point where and when the
nation lost her foreign policy bearings remains unknown, one issue is certain:
the downturn has been slow in coming and now fully manifest.
The gathering of former Nigerian foreign policy czars and current vicars in
Abuja last week, at the behest of the Emeka Anyaoku-led Presidential Advisory
Council on International Relations, was a tacit, if not an explicit
acknowledgment of the troubling status quo.
Indeed, it was the first serious effort to review Nigeria’s foreign
policy since the Babangida Administration convened the All-Nigerian Foreign
Policy Conference at Kuru in the spring of
1986.
Olugbenga Ashiru, a career diplomat has his job cut out for him as the new and
twenty-fifth Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs. He inherits in the main, a
dysfunctional Foreign Service and a supporting Foreign Ministry that is an
institutional albatross bedeviled by lack of focus, and extra-officious meddling
from outside and an institution that is grossly underfunded.
( See ”Dissonance
in Nigeria’s Foreign Policy”
and “Whither
Nigeria’s Lethargic Foreign Policy”)
Still, two issues are of
critical importance; no one conducts a credible foreign policy on a shoestring
budget and without a clearly articulated doctrine.
Nigeria has been doing both for the past several years. That in its fifty
years the nation’s foreign ministers have averaged two years in office is not
exactly a befitting credential. The high turnover equals discontinuity plus
dissonance.
Moreover, ephemeral
cliché-driven foreign policy that seeks to mimic the Balewa Doctrine in
different shapes and forms, are nothing but convenient excuses and pretenses at
foreign policy activism that does not exist.
By year 2003, Foreign Minister Sule Lamido had dismissed Nigeria’s
Africa-as-centerpiece or Concentric Circle policy as totally unreasonable,
inapplicable, impracticable and unsustainable in contrast to the preferred
economic diplomacy option driven and
“informed by the political economy of the emerging global order. This order has
found expression in the phenomenon of globalisation as its organising concept…”
Such dissonance and discontinuity marked the degradation of Nigerian foreign
policy activism and the diminution of her international influence.
In a nutshell; Nigeria
long lost her voice and foreign policy dominance and is hardly alive to how best
to recover its niche. So when the
new minister said that there was a change in a sense of direction but goes on to
postulate rudimentary reciprocity as the basis for renewed international
relations, he only affirmed the prevailing depth of the dissonance and rut in
our foreign policy.
Surely, in all
seriousness, Nigerian foreign policy cannot be redacted to questions of the visa
regime and reciprocity that goes with it. Neither can the demand of
“a strict adherence to diplomatic norms
and etiquette” in dealings with Nigerians, government agencies as well as
the ministry of foreign affairs suffice as a grounding tenet of a serious policy
doctrine, as much as it is symptomatic of the weakness of the extant policies
and the many other policy disconnects that are crying for attention.
Even those within
Nigeria’s officialdom readily admit that present Nigerian Foreign Policy pales
to the glorified disposition of the past. Yet, in saying so, they ignore or are
unwilling to admit their own dissembling role and culpability in the withering
and whittling down of the nation’s once very activist foreign policy.
In any case, Foreign
Ministers come and go, and in recent times there has been no unique personality
-- who is either a seasoned professional or a strong individual who can
withstand all the meddling, distractions and dissonance that bedevil our foreign
policy. Moreover, not since
President Olusegun Obasanjo's second coming, have we had a president well-stepped
in foreign policy to drive their own vision and policy. Regrettably, there has
been no longevity or continuity in the appointment and sojourn of foreign
ministers. And as Ashiru observed, one corollary of Nigeria’s nascent democracy
has been the expedient use of diplomatic posts as
“the patronage system of jobs for the
boys at the expense of national interest”. The damage done to national
interest by such political patronage of unsuccessful politicians, who rarely
stayed at their posts, is unquantifiable. As a footnote, one recalls the animus
between Gen. Oluwole Rotimi, erstwhile Nigerian ambassador to the U.S. and
Foreign Minister Ojo Maduekwe, which played out embarrassingly in public.
In sum: Nigeria’s foreign
policy continues to wobble; her voice distance and her presence in the
international scene extremely perfunctory. But foreign policy is not a
self-driven mechanism as it is a visionary product of well-articulated
policy-oriented endeavor.
Furthermore, it is an
accepted maxim that every foreign policy strength or weakness mirrors in the
main, the domestic and national scene, the foibles of the leadership; the
vagaries of local politics and considerations included.
Moreover, every bureaucracy creates its own weaknesses and the Nigerian
Foreign Service establishment is not an exception. Over the years the Foreign
Ministry has devoted more time to institutional promotion and
self-administration than really prosecuting the foreign policy mandates and
catering for Nigerians abroad. In converse, those Nigerian diplomats who are
sent abroad but hardly receive any policy guidance from home, are left to fly on
a wing and prayers. Naturally,
they feel blameless when they fail.
Together, these policy
fault lines spell great challenges to anyone appointed as Nigeria’s foreign
policy vicar. Setting aside the
seeming nuisance of the harassment visited on Nigerians while abroad, domestic
and foreign expectations about Nigeria’s capabilities are constantly high and
are further compounded by the nostalgia felt by Nigerians and Africans, of the
heady era when Nigeria indisputably held Africa’s foreign policy leadership and
was the uncontested bellwether. Not
anymore.
Today, many Nigerians are
neither enthused nor impressed with their nation’s foreign policy dynamics,
utterances and overall disposition.
Issues and questions begging for answers; some of the scope and character from
which nations cut their teeth and some gain respect for their nimble role or
assertiveness, have all eluded us. Nigeria is starkly absent from the broad
global political theatre: no longer within the broad regional concentric rings;
and no longer introspective or for that matter, retrospective at the domestic
level.
So are things about to
change under Ashiru’s watch? It is doubtful, even as one must give the benefit
of doubt to President Goodluck Jonathan and his appointees. For those who have
made nebulous excuses for Nigeria’s many failings, it is a hard sell to
rationalize the foreign policy failings; even more so than the ongoing political
permissiveness that dogs the nation. But Ashiru is not one to rest on his
laurels, so he will run against the establishment in order to bring about the
desired change. To succeed, however, he must begin with the revamping of his
Ministry’s Policy Planning Department, which was once vibrant and assertive
under Ambassador Brownson Dede and his deputy Segun Apata, but has since become
moribund.
There are several
tale-tale signs of how bad things are. Nigeria’s role in the crisis in Darfur,
Cote D’Ivoire, Libya, and Egypt, were less than pivotal notwithstanding that
they coincided with her tenure of the UN Security Council. On the Council, she
does not command the African voice or the confidence of the BRICS (Brazil,
India, China and South Africa) alliance. This posture is similarly true of her
disposition within the African Union.
Understandably conflicted
over the issue of South Sudan, Nigeria, a nation that hosted the CPA talks in
Abuja at the most critical juncture pussyfooted; quite in contrast to its robust
disposition and role in Angola and in the recognition of the SADR, thus ceding
the leadership role on overseeing the peaceful secession of South Sudan to
western countries. Perhaps the
nation was hamstrung and spooked by its own “Biafran experience” or the presumed
implications its support for South Sudan might have on the restive Niger Delta
region. Whatever be the case, her lethargic role in the various instances were
sufficiently glaring for her to have become inconsequential in critical
considerations.
On Libya, Nigeria inexplicably voted along with the western countries’ hardly
concealed enforcement action, aimed at regime change and dismemberment of that
country under the guise of “civilian protection”, even when it was clear to all
that there could be no military solution to the Libyan crisis; and that even if
there was, it would have dire and unprecedented implications for international
politics. Comparatively and in
retrospect, despite its pariah status, the “Constructive Engagement”
foreign policy dynamics under the Abacha regime that guided Nigeria’s role in
Liberia and Sierra Leone seems far more coherent and assertive. It is thus clear
why citizens of both countries are not bashful in extolling Nigeria’s leadership
role in saving their countries.
There are clearly evident
limits to what Gbenga Ashiru can achieve as foreign minister, if the foreign
policy decision-making and operating environment is not exorcised of the present
lethargic incubus. Nigeria’s
foreign policy will not become proactive overnight, merely on the say so of one
president or foreign minister. But the institutional set up has to be modified,
perhaps by taking the Foreign Service out of the Civil Service structure; by
barring any lateral transfers from state civil services into the Foreign
Service, as is the case with Turkey and by pegging, if necessary through
constitutional dictates, the number of political appointees to ambassadorial
posts.
On substance, an economic
diplomacy doctrine that is disconnected from the prevailing economic realities
on the ground will always be dysfunctional.
Hence, what is desirable is a holistic rather than piecemeal approach
that emphasizes the nexus, between the national economy along with its import
and export components and the leverage which foreign policy executors can muster
when playing in the global arena. That we presently import almost everything and
sell only oil is not exactly a strong leveraging factor. We need also to define
and debate policies and their essence. Ironically, of Nigeria’s twenty-four
former foreign ministers, only two, Joe Garba and Ibrahim Gambari have
documented the fundamental imperatives that were at play during their respective
tenures. Inconsequential as such an obligation might seem, it serves two
critical functions; a basis for lessons learned and it puts Nigeria’s
interlocutors on notice that any adverse treatment of their relations with
Nigeria will not go unrecorded for history.
Foreign policy is not just what a nation projects outside but
what it is capable of attracting as a reliable partner.
This latter reality translates to how it manages and sells its own
domestic environment. Presently, Nigeria faces a humongous task in selling its
skewed national image and distressed environment.
Investors, tourists and capital will always take flight when the situation becomes, as is now the case, one of glaring insecurity, talk less of
incessant terrorist activities like those of Boko Haram and the attending
overbearing reaction of law enforcement agencies that border on extra-judicial
and extra-official mayhem all in
the name of keeping law and order. In real time, any worthy Nigerian envoy would
be at pains to explain and justify why Nigeria continue to use the military for
civilian police duties, a trend that started when President Shehu Shagari
deployed soldiers to quell the Maitasine violent riots.
There are others challenges also; some more insidious than
others. While it may not seem so, the current upsurge of Nigerians trooping to
India for medical attention and organ transplants, with many being duped, and
killed by quacks, is a vexing foreign policy issue as much as it is a health
issue. The Nigerian Government is perhaps oblivious that most of such trips are
arranged by a fee-for-referral cabal in Nigeria that may also be involved in
facilitating the required visas. What could be a more pressing foreign policy is
than this?
There are other areas of concern. Unquestionably, there
continue to be a broad and unfettered intrusion into the foreign policy realm,
even with some States appointing Diaspora Envoys without any reference to the
Foreign Ministry. Another parallel
is the incremental and now distractive practice of parasitic retired Foreign
Service establishment personnel using the cover of appointment as Advisers or
Special Assistants to the President to meddle and hijack the nation’s foreign
policy machinery—all the while undermining the Foreign Ministry and confusing
Nigeria’s foreign policy interlocutors. The byproduct of this sorry state is
that many governments now bypass Nigeria envoys at post and even the Foreign
Ministry to conduct bilateral diplomacy directly with the Presidency without any
repercussions or sanctions.
Moreover, the Legislative Branch rather than oversee, fund
and give assent to foreign policy tenets and appointments, has continually
engaged in micromanaging, by unapologetically insinuating itself into foreign
policy politics and remit, to the point of not properly screening foreign
ministerial and ambassadorial appointees.
The notion that one is good to go merely by appointment and therefore is
asked to bow and head on to a representational office is at best ludicrous.
Nigeria’s foreign policy will not recover its lost niche and
essence any time soon, without the nation first grasping its past failures,
which will translate to understanding why reform and uncovering the causes of
the present policy dissonance has so far proven elusive. But all said the
greatest limitation dogging Nigerian foreign policy is the lack of vision and
policy clarity. As in most things in life a little or blurred clarity in the
foreign policy realm is a dangerous thing. Foreign policy is never conducted in
a vacuum or blindfolded.
It is hoped that Gbenga Ashiru will serve beyond the two-year
average tenure of his predecessors and that he would be given the free hand to
articulate foreign policy and speak for Nigeria in unfettered ways. Being a
careerist is a plus, but that too, could prove to be a key limit to his remit,
especially in a setting where politics trumps everything and our national
interest priorities may have changed on paper but not in practice.
With neither anger nor partiality, until next time, keep the law, stay
impartial, and observe closely.
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Hank Eso is a columnist for Kwenu.com. His observations on Nigerian, African and global politics and related issues, has
appeared in various print media, journals and internet-based sites.
© Hank Eso, 12 August
2011. Email:
hankeso@aol.com