Director-General, Nigerian Institute for International Affairs (NIIA) Prof. Eghosa Osaghae, in this interview with ASSISTANT EDITOR BOLA OLAJUWON, speaks on why Nigeria’s resilience gives hope to the world in the face of numerous challenges; the institute’s new focus on Nigeria’s foreign policy as well as how external factors shape global challenges and new orders.
Congratulations on the 60th anniversary of the NIIA. If you look back, how can you rate the contribution of the NIIA to the formation and implementation of the Nigerian diplomatic agenda or foreign affair policy?
The NIIA is the country’s foremost think-tank. And what the NIIA has done over the years has been to first meet its statutory obligations as a government strategic resource for foreign policy, and as an advisory on international affairs. I am sure the NIIA has superbly met the expectations, because it has moved very strongly in the direction of not only looking at matters of foreign policy and international affairs, but also how they interface with issues of the domestic environment. I’m sure that every practitioner of foreign policy and international politics recognises that you cannot have foreign policy, if you don’t have a formidable and stable domestic environment. So, the NIIA has done that very well.
I am sure that in the memory of Nigerians, NIIA comes across as an agency that has been at the forefront of policy-making, in the forefront of global interventions, and in the forefront of making Nigeria and Africa relevant to global discussions. This is not only at an intellectual level, but also, as you say, at the diplomatic level. This is in consonance with what the founding fathers of NIIA had in mind at its foundation in November 1961. It’s on record that the late Prime Minister of Nigeria, Alhaji Tafawa Balewa thought of the NIIA as an institute that was going to bring the world to Africa and Africa to Nigeria, and Nigeria to Lagos in that, Lagos was going to become the window through which the world was going to envision Africa and engage Africa. The NIIA has very consciously done things to first promote the national interests of Nigeria, within the framework of the changing dynamics and developments in the global arena.
You would know that in the 60s, the years of Africa’s emergence as a continent of value, and very strongly so, was when Nigeria asserted its leadership roles on all fronts, but one of the things that seriously pedigreed Nigeria’s claim to fame was the fact that Nigeria had very eminent state persons, great international civil servants, the super permanent secretaries that we had. All of them who were active in the Bretton Woods Institutions – the IMF and World Bank and others. And that took us through the 70s, through the 80s until structural adjustment and neo-liberalism took over. So, if you look at the progression from the point of independence to the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s and even the early 1990s, you will see that the NIIA was very prominent in the whole firmament of policy-making.
Today, there’s talk of the Concert of Medium Powers, which Bolaji Akinyemi, one of the most distinguished Directors-Generals of the NIIA, contributed to the world at a time when the Cold War was raging and people were already beginning to imagine that the non-aligned movement was in decline. And so, he thought the concept of the notion of medium powers would fill in a gap that was beginning to evolve, the kinds of things that you will see with BRICS today. Those things led to the kinds of movements, even the ACP movements, the strengthening of the AU, and the emergence of the regional bodies all over Africa. All of those things came out of the notion of pursuing the notion of medium powers. Then, of course, there was Africa at a zenith in the early 1980s, when it was time to talk about openings of new perspectives that were Africa-centered and home-based.
This was a time when it was fashionable to talk about self-sufficiency, African solutions to African problems, notions of self-determination, when the West’s sovereignty reigned supreme and people were more interested in ensuring that Africa was able to do things for Africa, from Africans’ own perspectives and paradigms.
But again, Africa was looking for tentative frameworks for adjustment. And the NIIA was an integral part of that debate that led the Economic Commission for Africa to publish the African alternative to structural adjustment in 1985.
But the institute was at a period in decline…
The other day, somebody was saying to me that it would appear that by the 2000s, there was some kind of decline in the NIIA space; and I said, well, what didn’t go into decline in Nigeria? What happened in NIIA is not to be taken in isolation of what happened in other spheres of the country. We have had our season of anomy, recession; and the country gradually recovered. By the time we got into the present civilian democratic dispensation in 1999, it was a surer way to recover and I think that the NIIA has also recovered increasingly.
If you say NIIA has recovered, what are the indices?
The glory of the NIIA has never been lost. Glories never get lost. Glory is our reference point and they are ebbs and flows. They rise, they go down and they rise and rise again. What things made up the indicators that were considered when we talk about the golden years of the NIIA? It’s a robust intellectual and scholarly culture. It’s an environment that is filled with very rigorous academic work that has the research, interrogations, examinations, reviews and so on. And the NIIA has always gone by its work through researches – cutting-edge researches, sometimes in partnership with similar bodies elsewhere. It has scholars who have seminars every week; we have our journals, we have our policy papers, we have our round-tables, we have our colloquiums, and we have our public lectures. Now, these are the more conspicuous indicators that you can see, the rest of it, of course, is what feeds the following policy process and that is not for public consumption.
Today we are trying to see how we can increase the more conspicuous public sides of the NIIA. So, one of the greatest anchors of the NIIA’s fame and global record is the library. And that library never disappeared anywhere. You may know that the NIIA library is the depository for all of Nigeria’s agreements and treaties. And they are there. The NIIA has a press library, which is the best of its kind in the world. And I say that very decidedly because we’ve had inquiries from outside the country; we’ve had people visiting to understudy and to familiarise themselves with the operations of the press library. Even the Library of Congress that also has press library has come around to seek partnership with the NIIA…
What has changed in NIIA?
Today, we are in the age of digitisation. The NIIA has also been involved in capacity-building and skills acquisition, skills impartation, diplomacy and statecraft. And those are not things that would be for immediate public consumption. The NIIA has discharged all of those responsibilities. So as the world has become more complex, as the dynamics have changed very dramatically, in many instances, the challenges of the NIIA have also become even more enormous. But let me say that today, there has been, if you like, a large assemblage of both state and non-state institutions and agencies that seem to do things that are similar to what the NIIA monopolised for a long time. So, all those things considered, you will say, has the NIIA had the resources to cope with these challenges? That’s where you will begin to talk about the capacity of the institute.
At 60, what are the critical challenges the NIIA is facing, apart from funding of its research activities?
Well, funding seems to be the all and end-all of everything, because it is said that if you have the resources, there are really no boundaries and there are no limits to what you can do. So, funding has always been a critical issue. But everyone who manages this scarcity would know that you can never get enough to do all that you want to do. So, we make efforts all the time to see how we can diversify our funding sources, and how we can have smart partnerships with development partners, and how we can raise funds, through competitive grants, and so on.
Now, you’re asking, are there other challenges? Yes, of course, part of the very serious challenge is in the area of even human resources. If you look across the country today, you will see that there’s been some decline in the quality of overall capacities in our universities and tertiary education sector. The NIIA itself is not exempted from this, coupled with the fact that we have serious restrictions and limitations, in terms of how many researchers we can have on board. Those things can be quite challenging. And we have to think of how to do all that is required of us with even more severely limited capacities, in terms of the researchers that are available on ground and so on.
But we recognise that in today’s world, it is difficult for institutions to go just like countries to go the whole hog alone. There’s a lot you can do with partnerships. And that’s one vista we have identified and which we are pursuing very vigorously. We will see that there is a challenge of infrastructure; dilapidation is what comes with age. There is really very little you can do about that. There’s infrastructural regeneration, which the NIIA needs. For instance, the NIIA needs upgrading in several areas, especially the facilities that we have. This is a jet age, where things change very rapidly. We have a strong ICT unit, but it can always be better. We need capacities in that area, even in the operations of our library, the conventional libraries where you have what they call the books, the hardware. But the modern library is soft, it’s “e” (electronic) driven by the latest in the ICT world. So, all of these things challenge us, but the thing about challenges is that they give you targets that you have to meet.
Apart from the changing dynamics of what you are bringing on board, we also realised that you have been youth-compliant in terms of imbibing the right attitude of peace and conflict resolution in youths. You have many interns, who are youths. What is behind this method?
First is that the knowledge that we seek, the one we produce, the one we propagate has to be transmitted across generations. Part of the limitation we find in many institutions in our country is that when they aged, the institutions disappear. So, we need to build continuous capacity, so that we can have things that we are able to transmit from generation to generation. That’s the overall principle. But it’s also because we have a duty to expose our youths to the kinds of things that are now in very short supply in our country. We have many young people who don’t have the basic knowledge that you will need to function in the area of International Affairs or in foreign policy. We don’t have young people who have the tools to engage, to understand, the complexities that we’re dealing with.
So, for instance, there are many young people in Nigeria, who consider the super powers to be so benevolent, that each time we have domestic issues, even of accountability, and human rights and so on, they expect that the U.S. and other European countries would come to do things for us. It tells you that we need to re-frame our youths. And that’s why, we expose the youth to things that emphasise the value of nationalism, patriotism, and of love of country.
The world sees Nigeria in its greatness, because of the kinds of citizens that we have had. I mean, the world knows Nigeria through the literary giants that we have had: the Chinua Achebes, Soyinkas, Chimamandas – all these great writers. And then in religion, we have the Catholic Church, Islam and great scholars of Nigerian origin. The Biden’s administration is building its government with no fewer than four to five Americans of Nigerian descent who are making waves. Not to mention the sports world and what our people have become. Everywhere, contrary to what we think, we are seen as a great country, we are seen as a leader in Africa.
Do you think that the assertion can stand the test of what is obtainable with the way Nigerians are being treated abroad, and even our diplomats?
Now, you might ask, what has changed? When you increasingly get involved in some of the, let’s call them, more perverse phases of globalization, where you find people in irregular and illegal migrations across borders, find people in child trafficking, you find people in these things that have become a global problem; they are push and pull effects. Quite naturally, those things can be understood. But things change the complexion of the perceptions that people have, and so on. I give you one example, in America, it is believed that Nigerians are very smart people; very intelligent, and highly respected. For that reason, in the rest of Africa, you will hear things like if Nigeria has not spoken, Africa has not spoken. And that’s the reality of the case.
Nigeria has managed so far, to prove itself to be so highly resilient, that the world outside thinks it has a lot to learn from how Nigeria has behaved. For instance, Nigeria is about the leading country in the world with an almost 50-50 balance between Christians and Muslims.
There’s no other country in the world that approximates that. There will be problems every now and then, but it’s the resilience and the ability to overcome these things. How many countries have fought civil wars and survived? America is one of the better examples to show that countries can come out of civil wars even stronger. So, I think that if we all have the understanding that makes the world envy Nigeria, we would be the better for it.
What is your position about the issue of the youths abusing the government and writing negative things about the country? Don’t you think that this may also have an implication with the way the world sees the country?
No, no, no. The world itself has, fortunately, a better understanding of the circumstances. There are many scholarly frames that explain why people revolt – the effects of relative deprivation, the effects of extreme poverty and so on. For instance, there is a theoretical perspective that attributes aggression to frustration. These things are known. So, if, increasingly, youths go to schools and schools are closed for extended periods, they manage to graduate and they are not immediately able to find jobs and so on; if people would rather go to die in the Mediterranean waters than remain here and so on. These things are not the original condition of the country. These are contingent outcomes, and the point is, how can we mitigate them? How can we reduce them? I think that what the youths have done, the anger of the youth, is a way of knocking on the door. Parents know when children are not happy; sometimes they can go to the extreme, to say what they want to say.
However, the youth must not allow themselves to be driven by violent extremism, to be driven by cultism, and to be driven by what has become Yahoo Yahoo industry.
Do you think the issue of kidnapping, banditry, cyber-crime and corruption have any effect in the way the world sees us?
We have now, not only the criminal and crime mobility, in terms of the technologies of the crimes, in terms of the personnel; we also have diffusion for all of these things. So, what happens in one country gets replicated in many other countries and so on. So, the point is, these things are not peculiar to Nigeria. It’s just that Nigeria now seems to be one of the receiving ends; you might say growth centres to some of these things. And the point is, why is it easy for our youths to embrace these things at all or to appear to be involved? It is because we have had several years of decay in many sectors. Like I said, over several years, our schools have not function the way they should, employments closing up, frustration, maybe, you can say, has increased in the land, and the geo-strategic and geopolitical location of Nigeria also make Nigeria a target for many of these things. When you talk of banditry, you will find that many people in Nigeria see it as alien. These are not things that we are used to and like the rest of the world, they are new formations that we are trying to understand and reconcile ourselves to. What has become obvious is that there is no way we can deal with some of these issues acting in isolation. We cannot go the whole hog alone. So, multilateral action, concerted actions are called for. So, I think that this is a phase in our evolution, especially our more recent evolution, economic progressions. Those kinds of things will pass, and it is remarkable that we have had interventions that are making a difference.
Are we getting gains from what we’ve really invested in bringing peace and harmony to the world, especially in places like Liberia, Sierra Leone and other countries? Even look at South Africa’s disposition to Nigerians. What’s your perspective?
When you talk of gains in profit and material terms, it’s like you think that what we did in all those times, in terms of our involvement in the search for peace in Africa and outside, was some kind of investment. When people say put your money where your mouth is, what you call the dividends of peacetime psychological operations, you build roads, you send peace teams, you send peacekeeping forces, you do all of these things.
The dividends don’t immediately come. But they are part and parcel of your greatness. They are part and parcel of what you call the soft power instruments of diplomacy. The goodwill, the believability, the credibility, your claim to fame and to greatness. When people say, what have you done? Those things are calculated in the kinds of things you have said; the sacrifices that Nigeria made in Liberia, for instance; those are sacrifices that Liberians can never forget, and the Sierra Leoneans have never forgotten.
You will recall that at a point in Liberia, we had a Chief of Army Staff who was a Nigerian. And don’t forget that in some countries, we had Nigerians as Chief Justices. These are dividends that you cannot put in Naira and Kobo terms. For instance, when South Africa was constituting a Presidential Committee on its economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was named Chair. I mean, that doesn’t come because South Africans are fighting Nigerians. But the perception of Nigeria, in all of these places, is a perception that is borne out not only of what Nigeria has done in the past but also of what Nigeria is doing. Africa does not joke with Nigeria, believe me.
In forums where voice is called for, they all line up behind Nigeria. And the reason is, Nigeria has a proven history of leadership, of credible leadership, of bold leadership, of leadership that would make many other African countries wish they belong to a country like Nigeria. And I think that goodwill more than compensates for all the things that you call the sacrifices that we have made and will continue to make.
Is the way Nigerians are treated abroad a reflection of the way Nigerians are treated in Nigeria?
This is a very smart question. Nigerians abroad and at home are the same people. Once, I attended a conference, and a gentleman of European stock came to me and said, that guy who is also a professor, is he a Nigerian? So, I said, yes, but why are you asking? He said, because he doesn’t behave like a typical Nigerian. So I said, how does a typical Nigerian behave? He said a typical Nigeria is full of confidence, overbearing and very forward. Now, this character of the Nigerian is true inside and outside. You haven’t found many more confident people who would let you know that you don’t take them for granted. And that can be properly reconstructed along more positive lines. The only other counterpart that I have seen with such a high degree of confidence is the American. And it’s a mark of vitality.
Now, how are Nigerians treated outside the country? I would hate to think that Nigerians are targeted. If one exhibits a kind of behaviour that is regarded as too bold, you can attract certain kinds of responses. Also, we notice that many of the people who go around the world claiming to be Nigerians are not.
Look at Nigerian sports people. I mean, in the NBA, in the United States, they are over 200 Nigerians, at all levels. Hakeem Olajuwon is one of the more revered people in the state of Texas. He’s is close to all the governors that have been there. Look at Joshua, the boxer; look at Mikel Obi and look at Jay-Jay Okocha. If you go through the list of all the athletes, you will find that our sports ambassadors have become some of the more formidable ambassadors that we have in the world. And they are highly respected. The Nigerian doctors are all over the world doing wonderful things. There are Nigerian professors. They are the ones who we should focus on. Those are the people that move our diaspora communities. It is those ones that we should continue to say, this is the true Nigerian spirit!
