Nigeria-South African Ties: PMB’s Call for People-to-People’s Rapprochement, a Desideratum
Cyril Ramaphosa
INTERNATIoNAL
Bola A. Akinterinwa
Nigeria’s relations with South Africa have generally been fraught with irritants since 1994 when the political enslavement of Black South Africans was ended, at least, temporarily. Temporarily, because Black South Africans have little economic power, as White South Africans control the South African economy. Black South Africans suffer considerably from this situation and often wrongly hold foreigners, especially Nigerians legally residing in South Africa, responsible for their problems.
Apart from this, Black South Africans do not know much about Nigeria’s global leadership roles in bringing apartheid to an end. And true, most South Africans did not and still do not know the sacrifices made by the Government and people of Nigeria in tormenting the White Supremacists and compelling them to have eyes that see and ears that hear. The sacrifices made by Nigerians were not simply the forceful deductions from the salaries of all government workers to assist the liberation movements, which prompted the international recognition of Nigeria as a Frontline State in the struggle against apartheid, but also the instruction given to every Nigerian holding the National Passport to use whatever means available to him or her to fight apartheid and its agents. The instruction was printed in the inner back cover of the old Nigerian passport. If South Africans are not much aware of the commitment of the Nigerian people to the freedom of black South Africans, the reasons cannot be far-fetched: as explained by the South African government, there used to be two wings of the African National Congress during the anti-apartheid struggle: national and international wings. Nigeria related more with the international wing, but not to the knowledge of the national wing.
In fact, when Brigadier-General Buba Marwa was Nigeria’s High Commissioner to South Africa, he drew attention to one radio-television discussion programme during which it was said that Nigeria engaged in the anti-apartheid struggle only for economic motivations. With this horrible thinking, no one should be surprised if there is always heightened hostility vis-à-vis Nigerians in the country. This factor alone largely explains the need for a better rapprochement between South Africans and Nigerians and why President Muhammadu Buhari (PMB)’s call for a people-to-people’s engagement in the relationships of the two countries is a desideratum.
Cyril Ramaphosa’s Visit and PMB’s Call
Without scintilla of doubts, Nigeria-South African relations have witnessed development from the ordinary level of bilateralism to the level of Strategic Partnership and currently to that of Bi-National Commission (BNC). Bilateral ties have a general character. Strategic collaboration requires joint planning and harmonization of views. In both bilateral and strategic partnerships, only senior government officials are involved in negotiations. At the level of Bi-National Commission, discussions are generally held at the level of Vice Presidents and Presidents. The Tenth Session of the Nigeria-South African BNC took place on Wednesday, 1st December 2021 in Abuja, Nigeria, with the receiving, and visiting, president participating. Thus, a BNC is necessarily a summit and the crescendo of bilateral consultations. And like any summit, consultations had already taken place at the level of the plenipotentiaries and then the Ministers before the engagement of the two presidents.
During the summit, PMB called for greater emphasis on people-to-people relations. The call, though significant, was only towing the line of what the South Africans had already embarked upon, and this observation is quite evident in PMB’s own statement. In the words of PMB, ‘some of the challenges identified during the last BNC have not been completely addressed. We need to ensure that our people-to-people relations are enhanced to a point where there would be no need for unhealthy competition.’ PMB noted further that, ‘in this regard, we need improvement in educational and scientific cooperation, mines and energy resources, transport and aviation, tourism, youths exchange programmes, trade and investments, and military cooperation.’
How do we explain the inability to address all the challenges identified during the 9th session of the BNC? Is it because of force majeure or lack of political will to address them? For sure, Nigeria’s foreign policy under PMB has always been most unfortunate because the foreign policy makers always ignore the situational and environmental reality of other foreign policies in Nigeria’s foreign policy and strategic calculations. For instance, PMB does not want an unhealthy competition, implying that he is not opposed to competition for as long as it is healthy. In the conduct and management of international relations, it is the protection of the national interest that takes priority, nothing else. Unfortunately, too, the quest for protection of the national interest is also necessarily conflicting, because international politics is a conflict system. Consequently, the quest to protect one’s national interest often requires engagement in intrigues. For instance, there is absolutely nothing that the US Government cannot do just to protect the life of an American citizen.
We posit here that there is no way Nigeria can avoid an unhealthy competition and one illustration will suffice here. One major reason why there has been much controversy on Africa’s permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) is the question of whose candidature should be considered: South Africa or Nigeria? In this regard, African leaders initially wanted five seats to enable every region of Africa to have a seat, but which could not sail through, even following the Ezulwini (Swaziland) Consensus. The international community wants to consider the possibility of only two seats and out of the two seats, the United States wants Egypt to be given one, meaning that the other seat should be contested for by Nigeria and South Africa.
More interestingly, going by the conditions of eligibility, Nigeria is most qualified than South Africa and Egypt. Egypt is both an African and Arab country. There are international pressures to have the Arabs permanently represented on the UN Security Council, but the Arabs do not constitute a ‘region’ by UN definition. This partly explains why the United States is pushing for the candidature of Egypt, primarily because of their strategic needs. In the same vein, South Africa only acceded to both recognized national and international sovereignty in 1994. Even though Egypt and South Africa contribute more to the UN in terms of assessed dues, none of them has contributed more to the UN in terms of UN peacekeeping operations than Nigeria.
Thus, the international community, and particularly the United States, has been promoting South Africa internationally to the detriment of Nigeria’s interest. Does Nigeria expect South Africa to dance to the whims and caprices of Nigeria in this case? Nigeria’s policy makers should stop engaging in excessive dreams. Realpolitik is the order of the day in international negotiations. Nigeria’s foreign policy should not in any way be allowed to become beggarly. When considering the issue of a permanent seat, it should be for Africa south of the Sahara. Nigeria has been the main defender of Africa in her capacity as the terra cognita of the highest number of black people in the world. The Permanent Seat should be for the Black people of the world, in the same manner that the United States wants a seat for the Arab World. There can be a seat for the Arabs, but it must never be a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. There is no way in the foreseeable future that the struggle for such a seat would not be an issue. In fact, it already generated a diplomatic row at the level of Nigeria-Egyptian relations.
Additionally, PMB applauded President Ramaphosa for initiating the Nigeria- South Africa Youth Dialogue which is expected to be inaugurated soon. PMB sees the Youth Dialogue as another veritable instrument for bilateral interaction and creation of shared values and aspirations. In this regard, if President Ramaphosa had already initiated the Youth Dialogue between Nigerian and South African youths, PMB’s call for enhancement of people-to-people relations at the summit cannot but be a reaffirmation of and support for President Ramaphosa’s initiative. PMB is only towing the lead of his counterpart
What is significant about the call for people-to-people relations and the expectation of the use of the Youth Dialogue as another veritable tool in the promotion of Nigeria-South African relations is that the two presidents are talking about citizen diplomacy, the second track of diplomacy. This is precisely what Chief Ojo Maduekwe, an astute politician and former Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, has advocated and called Citizen Diplomacy. In strengthening official ties between Nigeria and South Africa, citizen diplomacy has also become a desideratum.
Citizen Diplomacy as a Desideratum
Diplomacy, especially as an art, is one of the techniques of negotiation and relationship in multi-track diplomacy which includes citizen exchanges, international business negotiations, contacts and exchanges between religious leaders and followers, public opinions, and communication programmes. Citizen diplomacy is the engagement or involvement of the citizen in official diplomacy in various ramifications. The main rationale of citizen diplomacy is to assist in the attainment of foreign policy objectives.
In the context of Nigeria’s citizen diplomacy, Chief Ojo Maduekwe sees it as the centrepiece of Nigeria’s foreign policy which must meet the country’s development aspirations. In his eyes, citizen diplomacy requires that Nigeria’s diplomatic missions engage the Nigerian community abroad and the Nigerian Diaspora and to render to them quality consular and other services as a matter of rights, duties, and obligations. And perhaps more significantly, Chief Ojo Maduekwe posited that foreign policy making and implementation should be democratized to involve Nigerians in various climes rather than leaving it to a small circle of experts and practitioners alone. He suggested in addition the ‘diplomacy of consequence,’ that is the principle of reciprocity and rejected the criminalization of Nigerians based on despicable conduct of a few Nigerians. From the conceptual perspective of Chief Maduekwe, citizen diplomacy is all encompassing in terms of the scope of possible assistance to official diplomacy which is generally considered as track-one diplomacy while citizen diplomacy is seen as the second-track diplomacy.
The irritants in Nigeria’s relationship with South Africa are basically generated by the two peoples of South Africa and Nigeria. Hostility often begins at the level of South Africa and then the people of Nigeria respond in the spirit of retaliation. Xenophobic attacks on Nigerians in South Africa are cases in point. There were reported cases of xenophobic attacks against Nigerians and other Africans in 1998, 2000, 2008, 2009, 2013, and 2020. One untenable rationale for the attacks, apart from the national wing of the ANC not knowing what other African countries had done for South Africa during the anti-apartheid era, was the statement credited to the Zulu King. He said that all foreigners should leave South Africa because they were responsible for the economic adversities in his country. Nigerians were particularly accused of not only taking the jobs of South Africans but were also taking their wives.
Before then, institutional xenophobia already existed in South Africa. In 1913, the Immigrants Regulation Act was promulgated to ensure the exclusion of unwanted people. The Indians were specifically targeted. Besides the 1924 Township Franchise Ordinance was done to deny Indians residing in the country of municipal franchise. It was as from 1994 when the Nelson Mandela administration started to put in place policies of national cohesion and inclusiveness and that several thousands of Africans wanted to seek greener pastures in South Africa that South Africans also began to show hostility to the influx of foreigners. In fact, several hundreds of Nigerians were expelled in Zimbabwe for engagement in drug trafficking and the expellees opted to go to South Africa.
If we consider that, between December 2017 and September 2019, thirty-nine of the eighty-nine Nigerians killed in South Africa were slain by other Nigerian compatriots over drug-related disputes, if we also reckon with the fact that there were 300,000 to 400,000 Nigerians living in South Africa, and not less than 10,860 of them were serving jail terms and more than half of this 10,860 were convicted for drug offences, there can be no disputing the need for better understanding between South Africans and Nigerians as a first step in facilitating official diplomacy to the advantage of the two peoples. The two peoples need to have tȇte-à-tȇte conversations on issues dividing them and militating against development of official diplomacy.
The story of the controversy of yellow fever vaccination card is another kettle of fish entirely. In March 2012, the South African Immigrations Service deported 125 Nigerian travelers at the Oliver Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg. They had valid entry visas, but purportedly for non-possession of yellow fever vaccination cards, they were denied entry. The Nigerian government retaliated and the South African Deputy Foreign Minister, Mr. Ibrahim Ibrahim, had to apologize officially to Nigeria. In the same vein, Professor Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Laureate, a well-known international scholar, was also mistreated and barred from entering South Africa, even though he went there on the invitation of a South African institution. He was later apologized to. The story of the then Nigeria’s Minister of Aviation, Mrs. Kema Chikwe, was not different. She was asked in 2001 to get the yellow fever vaccination and be quarantined in 2001.
From the foregoing, one major factor in the official relationship is the absence of people to impact positively on official ties. When the Federal Government of Nigeria instructed that all telecom providers should register all their subscribers, the MTN did not comply with the lawful directive but opted to undermine the directive. MTN was fined $5.2 billion. Put differently, the MTN was required to delist all subscribers with improper SIM (Subscribers Identification Modules), but MTN did not comply. And true enough, 5.2 million MTN customers’ lines were not registered. This was the reason for charging a fine of $1000 for each unregistered SIM which amounted to $5.2bn. The fine was later reduced to $3.2bn, thanks to diplomatic intervention after which the MTN was compelled to begin to register all SIMs.
Without jot of gainsaying, the MTN is Nigeria’s largest telecoms provider with not less than 280 million subscribers, which qualified the MTN to be the eighth largest mobile network in the world and the largest in Africa. Of the more than 20 countries where the MTN is actively engaged, the company generates one-third of its revenues from Nigeria, from the Nigerian people. Consequently, the importance of the need to give priority to people-to-people engagement in the bilateral transactions of the two countries cannot but be a desideratum.
We agree with the idea of a South Africa-Nigeria Youth Dialogue as initiated, and we commend PMB for also appreciating President Ramaphosa’s good effort. However, focus should not be simply on the youths in both countries. Emphasis should be on dialogue of professionals, young or old. Many youths on both sides do not know much of the bitterness of apartheid. South Africans keep historical records but the same cannot be said of Nigeria. We once asked the Government of Nigeria to fund research into Nigeria’s roles in the dismantlement of apartheid. It has been to no avail. But when Professor Alaba Ogunsanwo observed that there is little regard for Nigeria in Southern Africa, in spite of Nigeria’s efforts at de-apartheidisation, that streets were named after Frontline States but not after Nigeria, and that, even at the protocolar levels, when Nelson Mandela died, Nigeria’s name was nowhere, Nigerians only complained bitterly, but to no avail. Any country that relegates history into oblivion must expect to be disregarded and unremembered in the future.
To be reckoned with in international politics, one must have a record of achievements and reassert oneself when not properly acknowledged. Therefore, a bilateral dialogue between professionals in various disciplines should be encouraged. This is what can mitigate unhealthy rivalry, as professionals are the advisers of governments. Friendship and hostility begin in their minds. The professionals should begin to work closely towards securing the two Permanent Seats to be earmarked for Africa whenever the international community is ready to democratize the UN system.
