West Africa and comatose Nigeria

credit: OKEY C. IHEDURU

businessday.com

In 2000, President Abdullahi Wade of Senegal stated that the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) without Nigeria was preferable, a view shared by many Francophone elite. Remarkably, 2000 was a hopeful time in Nigeria’s foreign relations as former president Olusegun Obasanjo had spent his first year in office repairing Nigeria’s international image soiled by almost two decades of military dictatorship.

The on-going drama at Aso Presidential Villa showcasing a comatose (‘resting’) president and country has re-opened the debate about whether West Africa would, indeed, not be better of without Nigeria. The annual summit of the Authority of ECOWAS could not hold in 2009 and had to be postponed twice in 2010. Nigeria’s constitutional crisis is like a dark cloud, overshadowing recent gains in democracy and regional economic recovery and security.

In the past, the Francophone West African Monetary Union or the Union économique et monétaire oust-africaine (UEMOA)—the CFA Franc zone—states reluctantly lived with the dilemma of whether to abandon ECOWAS or to stay for the attraction of close formal and informal economic cooperation with Nigeria. With about 150 million inhabitants and its oil and military power, Nigeria is, in theory, as strong as the other fifteen ECOWAS member countries put together. Nigeria could also count on Ghana, a fellow Anglophone partner, and the two economies accounted for 60 per cent of the sub-regional gross domestic product. France had also abandoned three decades of check-mating Nigeria’s influence; Nigeria had by 1990 become its largest trading partner in the region.

Nigeria’s economic stagnation of the 1990s resulting from its ‘transition without end’, however, conflicted with the regional aspirations of politically and economically rebounding Ghana. Until Obasanjo’s second coming, there was growing speculation that Ghana might join the CFA Franc zone. Members of UEMOA, like Ghana, had implemented more transparent economic reforms, including devaluing their common currency—the CFA Franc—in anticipation France joining the Euro zone. Ghana would benefit from the possibility of the French Treasury acting as an ‘agency of restraint’ on the Ghanaian authorities’ notorious ‘right to self-destruction’ through bad economic policies.

While Nigeria-led military interventions ended the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, by 2000, its regional power had seriously eroded. Its ‘oil diplomacy’ and ‘big brother’ role of the 1970s now paled in significance to the ‘bad neighourhood effect’ Nigeria was having on other West Africans. The stench of its massive corruption, political instability, and its often highly educated criminal and drug-trafficking networks inundating its neighbours, was more noxious than the stench of death in the region’s wars.

Few seasoned observers were therefore surprised by President Wade’s unguarded outburst in May 2000. Indeed, Nigeriaphobia of today or of yore is symptomatic of the persistent Anglophone-Francophone rivalry fanned earlier by France and which have bedeviled most regional integration experiments in the sub-region. However, the real terrifying nightmare for our neighbours on the road to prosperity and stability is Nigeria’s tendency to predict disaster and head for the precipice, only to pull back more battered than ever. On the eve of Nigeria’s 2007 devil’s election, a perplexed Ghanaian minister pleaded: ‘Please beg those Nigerians for all our sakes to stay cool and calm. We don’t want a disaster that will damage us, too.’ A politically and economically failed state cannot provide legitimate leadership at home or abroad.

Nigeria’s confused political elite probably is unaware of on-going shifts in regional interaction that could soon sideline the country. First, Nigeria’s relationship with Ghana has never been translated into greater priority in our foreign policy. Nigeria has quarreled more with Ghana over the ECOWAS Common External Tariffs (CETs) than with any other ECOWAS country. The recent near-collapse of Nigeria’s banking system due to regulatory failure and obscene corruption has further dampened enthusiasm for the West African Monetary Zone which Ghana reluctantly agreed to join in 2000. The 2004 debut of its currency, the ECO, has now been shifted for the umpteenth time to 2014.

On-going closer ties between the two countries is private sector-driven, e.g., the Ghana-Nigeria Chamber of Commerce, as Nigeria’s investments in Ghana reach over US$1.6 billion or ten per cent of Ghana’s annual budget. Interestingly, these Nigerian investors in Ghana (as well as in other West African countries) are refugees from infrastructural collapse, suffocating taxation, corruption, and unprecedented insecurity in their homeland.

A stable Nigeria may no longer be necessary for stability and economic rejuvenation in the sub-region. Except for Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, most of the region is more stable and more economically prosperous than Nigeria. Almost every West African country has now struck oil, with Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal scheduled to commence oil-exporting in a few years. Most of these hitherto non-oil producing countries have more oil refining and energy-generating capabilities than Nigeria. Any attempt to reaffirm Nigeria’s regional power through military intervention is sure to either topple the thieving clan of civilians or finally embarrass our increasingly fractured and tribalized military.

As UEMOA once more becomes an attractive option for Ghana, the dream to rid ECOWAS of Nigeria no longer seems a remote possibility. Why put up with this endless anomie?