Abstract:
This volume is a masterful contribution to the study of Nigerian foreign policy.
It is dedicated to two distinguished Nigeria specialists, Anthony Kirk-Greene and
Gavin Williams, and comprises seventeen chapters structured into five thematic
parts. Eight of the contributors were former students of the dedicatees. As
Adebayo Adedeji (the former executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission
for Africa) accurately puts it in his foreword, this volume is a significant contribution
to the development of a long overdue ‘foreign policy architecture capable of meeting
the challenges posed by contemporary international realities’.
In Part One, Adekeye Adebajo sets out the ambitions and central argument of
the book in a stimulating discussion that also explains the reference to Jonathan
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in the title. In Swift’s tale, Gulliver encounters a
community of tiny and treacherous Lilliputians who humiliate and incapacitate him
by staking him out with ropes as he lies spreadeagled and exhausted on the beach
where he has been shipwrecked. Adebajo argues that ‘Nigeria, the most populous
and one of the most powerful states in Africa is a Gulliver; and the Lilliputians have
been Nigeria’s leaders whose petty ambitions and often inhumane greed – like the
creatures in Swift’s tale – have prevented a country of enormous potential from
fulfilling its leadership aspiration and development potential’ (p. 2). The ‘big men’
of post-colonial Nigerian politics come out of this account looking pretty small.
The entire book critically explores the concept of a pax-Nigeriana – a regional
hegemonic ideology based on a combination of hard and soft power akin to the
pax-Americana and pax-Britannica. This is intended to epitomize Nigeria’s selfdeclared
international leadership ambitions in Africa since independence. It further
employs the concept of ‘concentric circles of national interests’ to assess the different
influences (domestic, regional, external) that have shaped Nigeria’s foreign policy. As
the study demonstrates, the establishment of a pax-Nigeriana has been frustrated,
largely by the effects of Lilliputian domestic politics. The litany of contradictions
on the domestic front (prebendal corruption, impoverishment of the masses, tyranny,
crumbling infrastructures, highly politicized communal/resource conflicts, economic
regression, disorder, and a culture of impunity) has undermined the plausibility and
reputation of Nigeria’s claim to be a regional policeman. Several chapters in the second
section (by Raufu Mustapha, Ibrahim Gambari, Oladapo Fafowora, Alade
Fawole, and Ike Okonta) illustrate the crippling setback inflicted on an emerging
pax-Nigeriana by such Lilliputian domestic politics.
Available at: https://academic.oup.com/afraf/article/109/435/345/61715