PEOPLE AND POLITICS By MOHAMMED HARUNA

A President and His Foreign Policy

Tuesday through Thursday last week, the Presidential Advisory Council on International Relations under the chairmanship of Chief Emeka Anyaoku, former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, organized a retreat to review the nation’s foreign policy. Fourteen lead papers were scheduled for delivery, not counting the chairman’s welcome address and President Obasanjo’s keynote speech.

As a review of the history of Nigeria ’s foreign policy, Anyaoku’s address was a tour de force. Ever the consummate diplomat, the former Commonwealth Secretary-General started with the personal triumphs of our president abroad – chairmanship of the Commonwealth and the African Union, a central role in NEPAD, New Partnership for Africa ’s Development, etc – then listed our achievements and failures and concluded with the challenges ahead and the things we must do at home to meet those challenges.

By comparison, the president’s speech tried to put a completely positive spin on his record in foreign affairs in the last five years. “If we compare our foreign policy successes since 1999 with the situation a few years before this administration”, he said, “we can see that significant in roads have been made.” His evidence that Nigeria under him has done well abroad was its “growing responsibilities … in ECOWAS, the AU, NEPAD, the Commonwealth and the UN as well as in areas of conflict prevention and peace making.” To wit, the president was clearly equating his personal triumphs abroad with Nigeria ’s successes, whereas it can be argued that those triumphs were pursued and acquired at the expense of Nigeria and Nigerians.

Take his chairmanship of the Commonwealth for example. To date no one knows how much our hosting the Commonwealth Summit in Abuja last December cost Nigeria financially. What we do know is that there was little or no transparency in the expenditure, exemplified by the practically no-bid contract under which the venue of the Summit , the Banquet Hall of the State House, was built by the ubiquitous and the cost-maximizing Julius Berger. No only was there little or no transparency in the spending for the Commonwealth Summit, it was not properly budget for, to start with.

However, high as the financial cost of our hosting the Commonwealth Summit was, it was comparatively a small matter compared with the political price Nigerians had to pay. This price was the blind eye the Commonwealth turned on our last general elections which, by common consent, was one of the most fraudulent in our country’s history. The election was probably worse than Zimbabwe’s, yet the same Commonwealth which expelled it, ostensibly because President Robert Mugabe rigged himself back into office, the same Commonwealth gave ours a ringing endorsement, in deed, if not in words.

It is enough cause for worry that our president apparently believes what is good for him is necessarily good for Nigeria . Worse still, however, is why he believes in this dubious equation. “The growing responsibilities of Nigeria in ECOWAS, the AU, NEPAD, the Commonwealth…”, he said “are clear indicators of endorsement of our internal policies and reform agenda. In addition, the inflow of investors and visitors into Nigeria and the … changing perceptions of the world on Nigeria are indicators of growing international confidence in the things we are doing right at home.”

Not many people would agree with the president that there is an inflow of investors and visitors into Nigeria but even if he is correct, it is worrisome that for him, the test of what is right by Nigerians is not what Nigerians themselves think of his policies and programmes, but what the international community – the code word for our Western colonial and neo-colonial masters – think of those policies and programmes. Thus, if the World Bank and the IMF, the Americans and the British, endorse our economic reforms, it does not matter if the reforms cause more pains than the ills they are supposed to remedy, and if, going by history, they are, in any case, doomed to fail in the long run.

Not only is our president more concerned about what the so-called international community thinks of his policies and programmes than what Nigerians think and feel about those policies and programmes, he blames the Nigerian media, rather than any possible flaws in those policies and programmes, for the widespread image of Nigeria as a country where virtually nothing works. “Virtually all the gory and sorry images that go to form the very negative and clearly misleading perception of Nigeria and Nigerians abroad,” said the president, “are obtained from our local media.”

No fair-minded observer of the Nigerian media will dismiss the president’s charge as baseless. As reporter and editor I have often written about the tendency of the Nigerian media to distort things and, in many cases, to even fabricate stories. Anyaoku, himself, had stories to tell during the session on media and foreign policy about how, quite often with the Nigerian media, the smoke you see coming out of, say the pages of a newspaper, is generated not by fire, but by, well, a smokes machine.

Even then it is not correct to say that the stories that give Nigerian and Nigerians their poor image abroad are mere fabrications or distortions of the Nigerian media. The Nigerian media, for example, did not invent the financial crimes at home and abroad that have made every Nigerian a suspect abroad. Nor did the Nigerian media invent the insecurity at home that has kept potential foreign investors – and for that matter even potential Nigerian investors - at bay. Nor did the media invent the myriads of cases of corruption that has conferred on Nigeria the status of one of the most corrupt in the world.

In this respect, the widely quoted UNIDO 2004 report on Nigeria is highly instructive. “By 1999,” said the report, “Nigeria had an estimated $107 billion of its private wealth held abroad … Indeed 70 percent of Nigeria’s private wealth was held outside Nigeria.” Obviously if Nigerians had little or no faith in their own country, it was asking too much to expect outsiders to do otherwise.

This was in 1999. Between then and now, nothing much that Obasanjo’s administration has done, not even his brave attempt at fighting high-level scamming and corruption through the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), has had the desired effect. If anything, the selective deployment of these and other weapons against crime and corruption has tended to make the public cynical about the president’s crusade against the twin evils.

If the president has a wrong notion about what constitutes the country’s successes and failures in its foreign policy and if he blames the wrong people for the failures, he was quite accurate in his description and prognosis of international relations. “We are,” he said, “in a world where there is only one super power with little or no checks and balances. It is a world where the UN could be ignored or over-ridden; where we in Africa are trying to put our houses together, the EU is trying to enlarge itself, and one in which BY THE MID 21^ST CENTURY, CHINA WOULD MOST LIKELY BE THE MOST POWERFUL NATION IN THE WORLD – MILITARILY, POLITICALLY AND ECONOMICALLY.” (Emphasis mine).

Now, if Obasanjo believes that China , and by extension, Asia , is the future, one must wonder why he seems only too eager to hitch the Nigerian wagon to the American engine. One must ask why we have allowed the Americans unfettered access to our military machine, and as several participants at the retreat asked, why the authorities have shown little or no concern about the movement of American war ships into the Gulf of Guinea .

Not that we should hitch our wagon to the Chinese engine, either. However, with them emerging as a super power, it means not even the Americans can keep down a people determined to raise themselves by their own boots trap – with of course a little help from others.

It can be argued that the Americans have a legitimate interest in protecting their investments in oil and gas exploration in Nigeria . However, when they seek to protect such interests by stationing their warships off our shores, it could mean that they no longer have much faith in the future of Nigeria . This raises the distinct possibility, even probability, that they may be harbouring thoughts of “Kuwaitizing” the Niger Delta, a reference to how the West curved Kuwait out of Iraq early last century, in order to increase its stranglehold on Middle East oil.

That several participants at the retreat, some of them very senior and highly seasoned diplomats, would express grave concern about this possibility shows that it is no idle speculation. Indeed one active participant who said she is Urhobo, asserted that the Delta people would only be too glad to be “Kuwaitized,” if the region continued to suffer neglect.

I may be wrong but my calculations tells me that any “Kuwaitization” of the Niger Delta is likely to prove self-defeating to both the Americans and the Niger Deltans, given the fratricidal tendencies of its people, a tendency which is likely to intensify as the oil dries up, which, barring new discoveries, may be under 30 years.

Unfortunately nations, even super powers, often tend to think short term when they are desperate. And right now America under Bush has shown itself to be a desperate nation. Desperate not merely for access to oil and gas at a fair price, something which, like the rest of the world, it is entitled to, but desperate to have access to CHEAP oil and gas.

What all this means is that our president must re-examine his assumptions about, and re-think, his foreign policy strategy. First, he should shed his assumption that Nigeria ’s problem abroad is one of image not substance. He should also realize that even if the problem is one of image – which I insist it isn’t – he does not have the right media tool to change that image given his administration’s tendency to scapegoat and antagonize the media and given also his government’s pattern of spending on its own media.

Since 1999 his media strategy has been to proliferate FM radio stations and NTA sub-stations instead of modernizing existing FRCN stations and allowing them the editorial autonomy that will enable them maximize their local audiences, and instead of modernizing the Voice of Nigeria to make it a credible continental, if not a global, radio station, similar to the BBC or the VOA.

Second, the president should shed his assumption that the West, in particular, the Americans, have our best interests at heart when they canvass certain economic reforms. True, we need all the help we can get from outside and truer still we cannot afford to antagonize the West. However, it is not as if we are completely at their mercy. Power in a global information age, as Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard University argued in The Economist (March 23, 2002), is, after-all, like a complex three dimensional military, economic and transnational non-governmental – chess game and not even America as the world’s only super-power, has a monopoly of all three dimensions.

The lesson of the success of some, if not all, of the so-called Asian Tigers, and of the potential of China as the next super-power, which the president himself acknowledged, is that swallowing Western prescriptions hook, line and sinker, and adopting their agenda blindly as we seem to do, are veritable paths, not to salvation, but to damnation.

Finally, since the president knows that the key to success abroad is sound policies at home, and since he also knows that the secret of sound domestic policies lies in fiscal discipline, transparency and accountability in governance, he should focus his economic reforms on these areas rather on privatizing our assets and deregulating our economy. As he himself suggested in a recent interview in the African Economy newsmagazine (September/November, 2004), public ownership and efficiency are not necessarily mutually exclusive. “In France ,” he told the magazine, “about 43 percent of their GDP comes from public enterprises, which are efficiently managed. If Nigerian Airways has been well run why would I want to privatize it?”

It may be a tough act to follow, but there is no reason on earth why we cannot emulate the French at home, so that Nigerians will be only too willing to identify with the goals and strategies of their government abroad.