Musa Babayo and Nigeria's Economic Diplomacy

Nigeria’s foreign policy has evolved over the last decades into the unrecognizable relic of her foreign policy museum. In the years following her glorious contributions to the anti-imperialist struggles on the continent, there hasn’t been attempts at reinvigorating her “Africa as the centerpiece of Nigeria’s foreign policy” to meet contemporary realities, globalization, high modernity and the plurality of global politics- that is if it is accepted that the European Union and the BRICS states have pluralized international hegemony, power, politics and trade.

While many argue that General Babaginda first introduced economic diplomacy as a foreign policy response to our domestic debt crisis, it is important to draw attention to President Obasanjo, who in his second coming, pursued economic diplomacy with gusto and in a manner that made him look more like the fun-loving AJALA who travelled round the world in search of its pleasures than the president who searched for debt forgiveness everywhere.

It isn’t entirely correct to argue that General Babaginda first introduced economic diplomacy or that his economic diplomacy increased our Foreign Direct Investment (FDI).

I disprove the claim with three counter-claims. First, though General Babaginda showed vigor in the pursuit of his regime’s economy diplomacy, economic diplomacy as a foreign policy objective was also present during the regimes before his own. Second, the claim that General Babaginda’s economic diplomacy increased Nigeria’s Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is false. In fact, Nigeria’s FDI decreased during the SAP years of the diminutive General.

One point I must stress, here, is that while global investment created new but lucrative portfolio investment markets in the Asian Tigers during his era, thus narrowing out the Foreign Direct Investment in the African market, the ill-defined economic diplomacy objectives and the repressive nature of his regime made our national economy the FDI graveyard.

A point to note here, as well.

Not that the Asian Tigers’ governance environment was better than ours, but it presented better and greater assurances of security of investment and returns on investment than our governance environment.

Third, the political component (with economy diplomacy as the other component) of foreign policy was in full throttle during the brief rulership of General Muhammed when the interests and the commitments of the Nigerian people to decolonization of Africa converged with the foreign policy objectives of the state.

Murtala Mohammed’s stated political interests and commitments created an acre of respect for Nigeria, but the acre didn’t translate into any discernible economic influence on the continent or elsewhere. The many years of Nigeria’s activist political diplomacy on the platform of the Non-Align Movement (NAM), Peace-Keeping roles in Liberia, Sierra-Leone and Sudan, though consistent with the foreign policy objectives enshrined in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1979 and 1999, did not produce any tangible benefits to Nigeria’s domestic economy, nor did it help to broaden Nigeria’s economic interests. Those who pulled the lever of power failed to highlight Nigeria’s domestic economic objectives as a nexus to her international co-operation and global peace commitments.

While they struggled to end wars and keep peace everywhere, they forgot that peace comes with the sharing of spoils of war.

Take the case of the interventionist roles Nigeria played in South Africa and Liberia, for instance. While Nigeria’s oil wealth was placed at the disposal of the African National Congress in its struggles against apartheid, no attempt was made to engage that anti-apartheid congress at the cultural and economic levels beyond the vainglory that support for anti-apartheid struggles brought. I could be wrong here, but there is nothing that suggests there was.

How else can one explain the horrendous xenophobic attacks on Nigerians in South Africa and the incessant harassments of Nigerians in Ghana, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, in spite of Nigeria’s huge history of commitment to the African Renaissance? But, why is it so? Why is Nigeria increasingly losing her global respect and prestige?

In his 2015 book, ‘Economic Diplomacy and Nigeria’s Foreign Policy’, Musa Babayo provides a brilliant and seminal inquiry into Nigeria’s economic diplomacy that will invariably shape our understanding of “economic diplomacy as policy instrument to promote  economic growth through non-oil exports and attract foreign investment into the Nigerian economy”. Babayo looks at the Babaginda era, but casts his scholarly eyes on the long road of the market that our country has long travelled since the introduction of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). Babayo doesn’t provide direct answers to the questions I posed in the foregoing paragraph, but he implicitly answers the “whys” in the chapter on “adjustment and growth crisis in Africa” and argues further that growth can only be achieved through domestic economic reforms. Here, for me, is the kernel of his brilliant scholarship and it is solely on the basis of connecting true domestic economic reforms to foreign policy objectives can economic diplomacy be centered, rightly pursued and correctly framed, no matter the foreign policy objectives many governments proclaim.

The scholar, Pantelis Sklias correctly captures the foregoing when he notes that “foreign policy is determined in large part by the stability and cohesion of domestic policy, particularly in fields which generate increased power for the state”. So, how is economic diplomacy possible in a chaotic domestic policy environment?

Hear Babayo: “An enabling environment is critical to economic growth…among the reasons for the relative failure of Nigeria’s economic diplomacy in achieving its economic goals was the uncertain internal political situation in Nigeria”. The fate of economic diplomacy doesn’t change either in an unstable democracy.

But, it is also possible to make small gains even in an unstable democracy as Babayo notes: “in the last few years, the Nigerian domestic economy has been stabilized. The process of recovery has been quite impressive. With an annual average growth rate of over 6 percent and a projection of 7 percent in the next few years, Nigeria is one of the fastest growing economies in the world”.

Babayo’s Economic Diplomacy and Nigeria’s Foreign Policy’ is an important contribution to the wider discourse on change. In the concluding paragraph of his book, Babayo argues that economic diplomacy is always a forgotten foreign policy tool when economic growth rates and prospects are brighter. Well, economic growth has taken the nosedive since this brilliant seminal was published last year and it is only imperative that President Buhari takes a look at Babayo’s scholarship in order to grasp the timeworn truth that economic outcomes depend largely on how well market forces are predicted and how they are understood. And it is by so doing that economic diplomacy can be deepened in the time of economic crisis.