Fred Agwu, Associate Professor at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos, discusses with Senior Correspondent,ISHAYA IBRAHIM, Nigeria’s standing as Africa’s leading light, its fight against Boko Haram and the pressure by the United Nations on the country’s gay rights stance.
How much is the Boko Haram insurgency affecting Nigeria’s international rating and the volume of investment flow into the country?
Fred AgwuYou are talking in quantitative terms here. Talking about rating and volume of investment flow, I don’t have the data. Talking about rating, it is no news that Nigeria’s image has been badly hit for a very long time. The insurgency is just a new dimension to the image problem. We have had image problem resulting from other sharp practices that some of our nationals are associated with, particularly the 419 syndrome. Concerning foreign investment flow, of course you should expect that any environment where you have instability, foreign investment will hesitate to be there. Even if foreign investment will be there, it is not going to be the type of investment that is substantive enough, that is long-time-oriented, like investments in manufacturing. Of course, you know that foreign investment these days do not go into manufacturing in third world countries, particularly countries where you don’t have infrastructure, where you don’t have political stability.
Is it that Nigeria is not soliciting the help of allies to help fight the Boko Haram insurgency or that we feel we can do it alone, because we have not seen our foreign allies giving us a hand in this fight?
Nigeria is soliciting. I think in September last year when the President addressed the United Nations, he did request for assistance. He mentioned that Nigeria would need assistance from the international community in fighting Boko Haram. But we should be careful about the kind of assistance we talk about here. What Nigeria is saying is not that there should be a coalition of forces that will come and assist its Army. The type of assistance Nigeria is talking about, in respect of the insurgency in the North East, is the cooperation of our neighbours, particularly Cameroun, Niger and Chad –neighbouring countries from where some of these insurgents infiltrate the country. That is one area.
Another area Nigeria is asking for assistance is intelligence. The strength of any fight against terrorism is essentially predicated on the power of intelligence. If your intelligence is weak, you cannot discover the insurgents. But if you have a very strong intelligence, you should be able to preempt them by meeting them at the source and disabling them, and not allowing them to take off with any plan they have.
Do you think we are getting this support from our neighbours, given that these terrorists move in and out of these countries to attack us?
The support is not there yet as it should. I know there are certain frameworks that have been put in place in terms of collaboration. This collaboration is not yet strong enough. Remember, it is not long ago that the President lamented that part of the reasons the fight against Boko Haram has not yielded the anticipated result is because, first, we don’t have the right to pursue them into foreign territory; second, they are embedded in the civilian population. To pursue a terrorist organisation to a foreign territory can only be possible with a formal agreement between the country pursuing and the country into which they run – It is called the right of hot pursuit. At sea, this right is not negotiable; it is automatic. But if it is to happen on land, you must negotiate it. But there is a sense in which it is also not negotiable on land. In Customary International Law, every state has a responsibility to make sure that its territory is not used to endanger the political stability, sovereignty as well as political and territorial independence of another state. For instance, Cameroun has a duty under Customary International Law to make sure its territory is not used to attack Nigeria. And Nigeria has a right of self-defence, if such attack happens. But that right of self-defence must be limited to attacking those terrorists and not attacking the state. Unfortunately, these terrorists get embedded in the civilian population. They don’t have any camp you can easily target. When they attack Nigeria and move into Cameroun, for instance, they dissolve into the civilian population. So it becomes difficult to attack, the way the United States would attack Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. The point I am making is that if a country is incapable of preventing its territory from being used to endanger the safety, public order, the political independence, sovereignty or territorial integrity of another state, the victim state has a right of response. But that right of response must be limited to attacking those terrorists in that territory; not, for instance, hitting public infrastructure. But if a country is unable to prevent its territory from being used and it is reluctant to give the victim state the right to respond by way of signing an agreement that will facilitate the right of hot pursuit; that should be termed a hostile act. If Cameroun allows its territory to be used by Boko Haram to attack Nigeria and Nigeria requests for the right that will guarantee its armed forces to pursue them to Cameroun and Cameroon refuses to sign such an agreement, Nigeria should take it as a hostile act against it. It is a serious condition that Nigeria can take to the United Nations Security Council to say Cameroun is not cooperating with us in dealing with this insurgency in the North East. As at the moment, I cannot say that we are getting this cooperation from our neighbours. But at the level of intelligence, they are at the same level with us; they don’t have superior intelligence. It is only the western world that can afford us assistance at the level of intelligence, providing us with assistance to bolster our intelligence capacity and even help us with logistics and resources. If we talk about dealing with Boko Haram, we don’t have the capacity to use a drone. We don’t have this unmanned aerial vehicle like the United States, for instance, to help us survey and track down these insurgents. That is the level at which we can say extra African powers, western powers can come in and help us.
We were at the forefront in the war against apartheid in South Africa, but when Nelson Mandela died, we were not given the podium. Also, Nigeria was the major volunteer in sending peacekeeping troops to many troubled spots in the continent. But some of these countries have become hostile to our nationals, with reports of Nigerians been killed indiscriminately. Is it that we are not vocal with our policy thrust of citizen diplomacy or is Nigeria losing its leadership role in Africa?
You have asked many questions at a go. Let us take them one after the other. Is Nigeria losing its leadership role in Africa? I would say no. Nigeria still has a leadership role to play in Africa. But this leadership role is being challenged. Unfortunately, the challenge is coming from no other place in Sub-Saharan Africa than South Africa, the very country we helped extensively during its fight against the obnoxious apartheid regime. So, we still have that leadership obligation because we have the human and natural resources. We have the advantage of a good geographical location; we are a maritime nation. So, the challenge we have is to build local capacity. The indices of power are varied. You can talk about population, natural resources, geographical location, and the capacity of your military. All these are indices of power. But the extent to which you can instrumentalise all these indices of power and make them work for you depend on you because you can have all of them at your disposal, but if you don’t harness them effectively, they will not be of any use. Our peculiar domestic challenges – the challenges of nationhood, national security, and that of our economy – are making it difficult for us to assert ourselves the way we should in the international community. The kind of respect and support Nigeria as a regional influential should be getting from fellow African countries is not coming effortlessly. During the last election into the UN Security Council, it was The Gambia that put forward its candidacy against Nigeria, though Nigeria carried the day. But that was not expected from The Gambia, given that Nigeria is the so-called regional hegemon. In North America, whenever the United States indicates interest in anything at the UN, for instance, you don’t see any other country, be it Canada or Mexico, coming to also put forward its candidate. In South America, Brazil is the unchallenged leader. In other part of Asia, you have China. This is the way it works. It does not mean that lesser countries should not have their way sometimes. But the point is, when a regional influential has interest over something, if it is truly a regional influential, countries that are enjoying from the largesse of that regional superpower should not be seen to be against it or working against its interest the way many West African countries work against Nigeria’s interest, both at the UN and at the African Union (AU).
How is our citizen diplomacy working?
This talk about citizen diplomacy, I don’t understand it the way it is used in the media. What we know in the academia as citizen diplomacy is called Track 2 diplomacy – informal diplomacy. That is to say, where an engagement of formal diplomatic structures does not yield much, informal diplomatic structures can be used. Sometimes, members of the civil society that can be mobilised to contact their counterparts in other parts of the world and see how they can agree on ways to resolve certain issues. That is the way Track 2 diplomacy works. When you try to say that by the use of citizen diplomacy in the popular press, you are trying to imply that every diplomacy must protect its citizens.But that is the traditional task of diplomacy! If you donot work for your citizens, what is your diplomacy working for? Diplomacy works for the national interest, and the national interest is the interest of the citizens. It is a given that every diplomacy works for the citizen. You cannot just say this is citizen diplomacy, as if there could be diplomacy that is not for the benefit of the citizen. But after all this exertion, you see Nigerians being attacked elsewhere, it is a different kettle of fish. The whole thing comes back to state capacity and the management of the foreign policy of a country. For instance, if the dominant western powers have their citizens attacked anywhere, they have a way of responding. That response will be robust and unambiguous, and will send a clear message to those people and their government that it will not take lightly any assault on its citizens. That is deterrence. But when your citizens are attacked and you don’t respond unambiguously, you don’t respond strongly in defence of their welfare, then you are creating room for such attacks to continue. I am not saying that Nigeria should go to war if its citizens are attacked elsewhere. But diplomatic messages could be sent; clear warning could be sent that we are not going to condone any attack on our citizens. That is the way such attacks could be prevented. Some of these attacks are not planned by the state; they are attacks by hooligans against Nigerians. Some of them are clear cases of xenophobia like in South Africa when some South Africans think that Nigerians were coming to take their jobs. Such things are inevitable. It is now incumbent on the Nigerian government to be in constant contact with the South African government and impress it on the South African government or any other government, for that matter, that they should take extra effort to ensure the safety and wellbeing of Nigerians in their country.
The UN and other Western countries have said they would put pressure on Nigeria and ensure that it rescinds its stance on homosexuality and recognise gay rights. Is this not interference with our domestic politics?
It is interference in Nigerian domestic affairs, and it is one area that Nigeria has responded the way it should. Globalisation or no globalisation, the attempt to homogenise human values in the image of western values and foist it on less-privileged countries is not acceptable. The UN is acting ultra vires by getting involved in this gay marriage debate, and that tells you the true nature of the UN. The UN in itself is non-existent. It is the interest of the hegemonic powers, interest of the west, particularly the five permanent members, that drives the UN. So when you hear the UN saying something, it is not the UN as an abstraction; it is the voice of the critical and assertive domineering permanent members. The point I am making here is that the western powers are overreaching themselves by trying to be insensitive to our peculiar values and wanting to impose their own values on us.
What about the threat of withdrawal of aid by these foreign powers?
Foreign aid is not what we need to develop. What we need to develop is access to critical markets in the west. It is not even foreign investment, because when these foreign investments come, they serve the interest of the foreign investors. The foreign investors do not invest in critical sectors of the economy that will see us being lifted out of poverty. When they come here, they invest in oil. In Nigeria, for instance, how many manufacturing industries are running because of foreign investment? Oil is not a sector that can lift us. Agriculture is it, solid minerals is it. But they will not go into such areas because of political considerations, because of considerations of profit. Foreign investment is the movement of capital, and capital is not charity. Capital is out to make profit. The same goes for foreign aid. Sometimes when they give us foreign aid, they give us impossible conditions like allowing gay rights that will contaminate our society.