Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism: A New Geopolitical Landscape 9811633711, 9789811633713

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Fred Aja Agwu

Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism A New Geopolitical Landscape

Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism

Fred Aja Agwu

Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism A New Geopolitical Landscape

Fred Aja Agwu Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) Lagos, Nigeria

ISBN 978-981-16-3371-3 ISBN 978-981-16-3372-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To all anti-globalists, populists and nationalists across the world—minds like the United States’ President Donald John Trump who discounted globalism at the 2019 United Nations General Assembly, UNGA, and declared that “if you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty and if you want peace, love your nation” because “the future does not belong to globalists; it belongs to patriots”—it is important to be conscious of the African (Igbo) communalist maxim (credited to Chieka Ifemesia in Chinweizu’s Anatomy of Female Power (2005: 132) that proclaims “ife kwulu, ife akwudebe ya” (if something stands, another thing stands by it) because “som di bu ajo afa” (I’m alone is a bad name). In fact, among the Zulu in South Africa, this African maxim translates to “Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu” (a person is a person because of other people). In other words, life is all about solidarity. It is not all or absolutely about the Western maxim proclaimed by Descartes in “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore, I exist). Although

globalization has its fair minuses, it is today really inescapable. Thus, anti-globalism, populism and nativistic nationalism are not viable routes for humanity.

Preface

The objective of this book is to define how globalization, populism and nationalism have influenced the foreign policy of nations, from Europe, through the United States, to the Far East (with China) and the region of Africa with the African Continental Free Trade Area and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). For a very long time, the world has been globalizing, making globalization the hallmark of global politics. But with the contradictions of globalization, there has consistently been an encroachment of anti-globalization, populism and nationalism. Although the malaise of anti-globalization, populism and nationalism has been in existence in many regions of the world, particularly in Western, Russia and the Far East (with China), its onset in the United States robustly began recently with the emergence of trumpism and the brazen display of White supremacism. In this twenty-first century, the four years of trumpism that started with the election of the United States’ President Donald Trump led to the overriding and the strengthening of the influence of populism and nationalism in many parts of the whole world, particularly in Europe and the Americas as countries began to take back their sovereignty from globalization—from President Donald Trump of the United States to President Jair Messias Bolsonaro of Brazil, among others—which started enormous international tensions across the world. The Brazilian Bolsonaro himself is a far-right Brazilian Portuguese. The sway of populism and nationalism made the year 2020 what some critic described as an annus horribilis—what with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in the twilight of 2019 (the month of December 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic was reminiscent of the 1918-1920 Spanish Flu that happened just one hundred years ago. The year 2020 marked the anti-globalization, populist and nationalism recorded in the United Kingdom with the latter’s effective exit from the European Union on December 31, 2020. But it was poetic justice that the populist Donald Trump himself, with his Hitlerite, narcissist and authoritarian manner—who defined political power in an interview with Bob Woodward as fear—was also, in an anti-populist revolt in the United States, voted out of office with the election of Joe Biden Jr. Trumpism twice reached its populist heights in January 2021. First, President Trump, on January 2, 2021, aggressively attempted to overturn the Biden election results by calling the Georgian Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, on phone and urging him to help vii

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“find 11,780 votes”, the number that President Trump would need to defeat the President-elect Joe Biden in Georgia. Trump also suggested in that phone call that there would be nothing wrong with Raffensperger saying that he recalculated the votes. Second, on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, President Trump, in his populist denial of that electoral defeat, egged on his right-wing extremist supporters to kow-tow to his conspiracy theory about the election and storm the Capitol building (Capitol Hill), an invasion that temporarily disrupted the congressional certification of the Electoral Votes that made the former Vice-President (Senator Joe Biden Jr.) the US’ President-elect on November 3, 2020. It was an invasion that on all accounts, amounted to President Trump’s incitement of insurrection against democracy, and which prompted the Democratic Party’s controlled House of Representative to impeach him the second time on January 11, 2021—a distinctive odium that Trump would bear as the only United States President that was twice impeached in a single term. The foregoing is a brief foreground that introduces this book on Globalization, populism and nationalism in an era of anti-globalization. The book comprises ten chapters and a postscript. It opens with the submission that although foreign policy is guided by the national interest, states have generally found (in addition to other political and socio-cultural considerations) unanimity in an international interest that is engineered by economic considerations. But this globalization-driven international rapport between countries is clearly threatened by the Western nations that seem to impose their liberal values around the world, thus, prompting the rise of anti-globalization, populism and nationalism in both the Western and non-Western nations. Anti-globalism, populism and nationalism inspire protectionist policies that harm cordial or harmonious foreign policies. Nationalism itself is a worse-off calculus in this regard because, once awakened, according to Francis Fukuyama, nationalism represents such an elemental force in history that it is unstoppable by other forms of attachment like religion and ideology; this is so much so that it can ultimately vanquish other weak ideological reeds like communism and liberalism. And as an elemental force of history, when nationalism is conflated with nativism in the context of a nation-state that comprises many nations, it becomes significantly different from patriotism and can even inspire fissiparous tendencies. This is the context in which nationalism, in cahoots with anti-globalism and populism, constrains foreign policy in this increasingly anti-globalizing world. It is against this background that this book talks about the dialectical contradictions of globalization, which is oxymoronic in the sense of globalization’s promotion of both interconnectivity and at the same time populism and nationalism—the latter (populism and nationalism)—rejecting the practice of outsourcing. It is in the context of globalization’s capacity to promote interconnectivity, populism and nationalism that it can promote the fear of the Thucydides Trap between the United States and China. The inherent argument in countries taking back their sovereignty in populism and nationalism is that globalization promotes the imposition of Western values on the rest of the world. It is this perceived inherent imposition of Western values by globalization that promoted the perception of globalization’s exclusivity and hence,

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the rise of populism and nationalism. It is insisted here that the inherent resentment of globalization has not only led to the rise of the “occupy movement”, it has also indicted migration, especially those migrants moving from the peripheral developing countries to the metropolitan countries. Thus, it is in this oxymoronic nature of globalization that its paradox resides—its capacity for the promotion of interconnectivity as well as nationalism and populism. In Brexit, this book is also an amplification of the anti-globalization fact that it was the anxieties that were provoked by global inequality and exclusion that derailed the ideals of the European Union (EU), especially the perception among the original member states that the organization was no longer serving its purpose; and that it had rather become “a transfer union, a vast scheme to redistribute funds from the prosperous countries to emerging markets”, particularly the funds to those countries that had either emerged or were previously in the orbit of the defunct Soviet Union. It was this contradiction that provided the background for the eruption of discontent and the foundering of the EU as a community. The discontent in the EU did not only cause the growth of populism and nationalism in the United Kingdom, it also heightened the agitation for Brexit and the resultant referendum that led to the leave campaign group narrowly winning in the referendum. The nationalist and populist tendencies in Brexit—illustrated by the EU limiting the UK’s access to its financial services industry while the UK was not succumbing to the EU fishing in its territorial waters—were all maximalist points of view that not only made the Brexit process harder, they actually tended to promote the possibility of a Brexit fantasy. This book also emphasizes the point that Trumpism and its apologists have failed to justify the racial chauvinism and intolerance in President Trump’s pretences about globalization because his inclination had tried to bring ruin to the principle of multilateralism and the global cohesion that are inherent in globalization. Ironically, it is the same way that globalization is a threat to itself by leaving many peoples and nations behind in poverty that it has served as a unifying force in using multilateral institutions to fight the concerns about its exclusivity. It has been contended in this book that the gutting of the reputation of globalization and liberalism, especially in the emergence of President Trump, was what apparently cemented the rise of nationalism, populism and anti-globalization sentiments around the world. Anti-globalists, nationalists and populists were reflected in the lone wolf terrorists that were up and about with religious and nationalist zealotry—like the individual far-right extremist in Leeds (England) that, in June, 2016 (while shouting “Britain first”), murdered the British politician, Jo Cox in pursuit of the Brexit cause. There were also extremists like Mevlut Mert Altintas, an off-duty police officer who, in late December 2016, in Ankara (Turkey), shot and killed the Russian Ambassador to Turkey (Andrei Karlov) at an art gallery while shouting “don’t forget Aleppo”, the northern Syrian city whose eastern part that was occupied by rebels was seized by the Syrian government. In the United States, there was also Steve Bannon, an avowed campaigner for the spread of populism around the Western world, who was reportedly determined to “pull off a similar anti-establishment revolution in the EU and get eurosceptics from all corners of the union to vote into the European Parliament, those that would take back control by way of exiting the European Union”.

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This book emphasized the point that Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump, and the Russian President Vladimir Putin, were among those that fueled populist forces both within and outside the European continent, using such critics as Italy’s Matteo Salvini and France’s Marine Le Pen. Indeed, Matteo Salvini had vowed to an Italian audience that “he would seize back control of their lives from the European Union’s faceless bureaucrats”; and chanted “Italians first!” to the admiration and loud cheers of the people. Even the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, and the Dutch nationalist—Geert Wilders—were admirers of Steve Bannon’s populist project in Europe. Also emphasized in this book is the point that even before Donald Trump emerged in the United States presidency with his White supremacist traits, chauvinism, nationalism and populism, there was already chauvinism and a strong aversion to globalization in many countries around the world. This prevalence of nationalism and populism was a common denominator that existed at a scale that was never seen since the end of the Second World War, especially in those “great and rising powers” like Russia, China, Turkey, India, and many European countries—countries where many of the leaders and the common folk were “simultaneously in thrall to various sorts of chauvinism”. The emergence of the nationalist President Trump was what necessitated the United States’ many trade wars, especially Washington’s weaponization of trade in its foreign policy. In expounding the idea that is predicated on the notion of America’s exceptionalism, the argument in this book is that the Trump presidency had tried to shatter this myth of America’s exceptionalism—from trouncing America’s capacity to purvey standards at the level of race relations, to the country’s capacity to abrogate sexism, and, indeed, the failure of Hillary Clinton’s Presidential ticket—an aspiration that was geared toward gender political equity in America that Donald Trump’s candidacy obviously betrayed. There was also President Trump’s inability to accept the outcome of the 2020 presidential election as well as his inspiration of an insurrection against Capitol Hill. All these incidents trumped the exemplary character of America’s democratic practice. As illustrated in Russia and North Korea, not even America’s diplomacy was spared the Trumpian depredation and narcissism. In diplomacy, President Trump was reputedly “impulsive and self-indulgent”— always chronically “thinking that he has the flair to broker a breakthrough [in every diplomatic challenge] all by himself”. This book makes the point that the Trump presidency was an adumbration of an imperial presidency and a “scofflaw” (flouter of laws)—in which he willfully defied subpoenas and frustrated proceedings in his first impeachment trial. It is, therefore, the conclusion of this book that the Trump presidency was a contradiction that unsettled America’s exceptionalism. Domestically and internationally, as Carl Bildt, the former Swedish Foreign Minister put it, the Trump presidency exhibited the end of the West as we know it because it was an empty political propaganda, a sort of Trumpocalypses that signaled America’s retreat to isolationism and the realization of its national interest at the expense of very vital global or inclusive interests.

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The argument purveyed here is a guide on how to cure anti-globalism, populism and nationalism. This book argues that the globalizing world is inevitable and unstoppable. But its greatest challenge—the challenge of moving globalization forward—is the imperative of devising its correct speed and direction so that globalization would not be totally dismissive or denigrate the strong currents of nationalism that have developed in the world over the centuries from Westphalia. In other words, the safeguarding of globalization should also include the preservation of national sovereignty within its context in such a manner that would continue to protect the vulnerable that feel left out by globalization. This book has also argued that the world of internationalism or globalization is a post-industrial economy in which the young, educated and technologically savvy populations move around the whole world with active employment, while the indigenous populations with little or no education are left behind. As a post-industrial economy, the era of globalization has also witnessed the dominance of the virtual economy, the dominance of the middle-man-oriented economy, a crisis in manufacturing that has led to the emergence of casino capitalism, and the dominance of robots. For these reasons, preserving globalization and combating populism and nationalism also entail the building of a post-modernist world that would protect the vulnerable. This book also argues that a completely new fractured globalizing world is now apparently in place; and that there has been created, a geo-political order that is dramatically fueled by populism and nationalism; and which stock in trade is demagoguery, deception, lies (exemplified by Trump’s alternative facts) and all manner of geo-political intrigues. This new geo-political landscape is replete with trade wars and geo-politically controversial elements like the Belt Road Initiative (BRI)—issues that are chaotic and capable of stoking the furnace of tension, a little miscalculation of which can trigger some global or regional conflicts. The possible conflicts aforementioned are epitomized by the risk of the “Thucydides trap”, caused by the emergence of China (buoyed by its economic prosperity) and Russia (that is restoring its hard power after the collapse of the Soviet Union). The attendant atmosphere of global competitions was what amplified these emergent powers’ heightening of the age-long bilateral or unilateral multilateralism, which the developed countries had been practicing. It was also in this new geo-political context that the Russian President Putin hosted the African Heads of State at a two-day Summit in the southern Russian city of Sochi. As the summit was beginning on Wednesday, October 23, 2019, Russia landed two nuclear-capable bombers (two Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bombers) in the South African Waterkloof air force base in Tshwane—a mission the Russian Ministry of Defence said was designed to increase Russia’s influence on the African continent and, indeed, nurture military ties with South Africa. It was also in Sochi that Nigeria and Russia inked on the sidelines, a deal which was to let Russia supply Nigeria with 12 attack helicopters (the Mi-35 attack helicopters)—a weapon that would allegedly enable Abuja to bolster its resolve to defeat the Boko Haram insurgents and other bandits wreaking havoc in different parts of the country. The Sochi summit, being the first Russia-Africa summit, was part of Kremlin’s desire to win business and restore

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Moscow’s influence that had faded after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. And, in the midst of President Trump’s kinetic or gung-ho foreign policy, China has been equally compelled to up its ante in the BRI. This book is also a statement on how China’s populist aid to Africa, which has been predominantly touted as an assistance in infrastructural development, has helped to fuel the continent’s huge international debt profile. China does this primarily with the use of loans rather than grants. Like in other places around the world, China’s scheme was succinctly provided by Abhinav Singh who argued that Beijing’s “modus-operandi is fairly simple—enter a country on the pretext of development activities, hand out fishy loans with exorbitant interests rates, and when the state fails to pay it, capture the territories, buy off the important senators and people of the country; and before the public know, China has encircled the country from all side”. As already stated above, this book argues that the vast majority of China’s global official development finance comes in the form of loans rather than grants. It has also maintained that only a minority of those loans are concessional while the core sources of this Chinese development financing come from its state-owned policy banks—the Export-Import Bank of China (EXIM Bank), and the China Development Bank. This book is also pivoted on the fact that the importance of China’s state-owned commercial banks as major oversea lenders grew under the BRI; and this has given rise to the fact that the BRI initiative has generated debt sustainability problems on the African continent as it has done elsewhere around the world. The contention is that with the BRI, China is actively seeking to push African countries into debt problems in order to extract geo-political concessions. It is equally the contention of this book that China, in its populism, has loaned more money to the world than the richest 32 nations as it has rapidly rolled out its BRI to build new roads, ports and rail lines in Africa, as in other developing nations, thus, extending its reach across the world. Drawing from the position that populism and nationalism induce the perception of international relations as a zero-sum game (and as such creates interesting times for the capacity for international coalescence on basic values), this book has outlined how, after Nigeria had seriously contributed to the setting up of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), it became riven by protectionism and lost momentum in its implementation because of the protectionist fixation. Although Nigeria had tried to downplay its protectionism by reaching out to the rest of the African continent in December 2019 with the announcement of its visaon-arrival policy for those carrying African passports, the visa policy was a policy termed “too little too late” because other African countries like Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia and even Cote d’Ivoire had been on it. The biggest irony here was that Nigeria that claimed to be opening its skies to all Africa through this visa policy had got its land borders closed. It was because of Nigeria’s protectionism that it garnered clear opposition from many countries in its ambition for the headship of the AfCFTA, leading to the emergence of South Africa’s Wamkele Mene as the AfCFTA’s Secretary-Generalconsensus-candidate. It was for Nigeria’s protectionism, although it was the African continent’s largest economy when the AfCFTA was created, that the country was

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sidelined in that continental economic diplomacy. Nigeria bided and failed in hosting the AfCFTA’s Secretariat—a Secretariat it could have naturally hosted because of the pivotal roles it performed in the creation of the trade deal. But Abuja lost the Secretariat because of its foreign policy tergiversation and prevarication in not endorsing the agreement on time; the reason for which it lost hosting the Secretariat to Ghana—a reputedly pro-trade and reformist country— thus, losing all the diplomatic cachet and economic benefits that come with being the home of such a major international economic institution. It is the conclusion of this book that the anti-globalism, populism and nationalism that caused protectionism in Nigeria’s foreign policy was exacerbated by the “tunnel vision” that is embedded in the country’s foreign policy; and that this protectionism has equally ruined the “manifest destiny” in Nigeria’s Africa policy as well as the value of a robust continental coalescence in Africa in the African Union and other sub-regional platforms like the ECOWAS. This book iterates and reiterates the point that in this era of increased globalization, populism and nationalism, Nigeria and the ECOWAS face a dilemma in “Francafrique” and Morocco’s aspiration to become a member of the West African regional economic organization. In respect of Francafrique, France has continued to extend its colonial and now imperialist policy in Africa in such a manner that it has converted the so-called independence of its erstwhile colonial African states into a “foul neocolonial schemes” that has left these Francophone African states with “a confiscated” or “perverted sovereignty”. It has been stated in this book, too, that one of the “unique and absolutely fascinating political phenomena” that France has used to roll back Francophone African countries independence is the Francafrique—“a symbolic gentleman’s agreement” that requires “the continuous subjugation of these supposedly independent African states like Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Gabon”, among others, as neocolonial states that France keeps “a tight rein” upon and ensures that their leaders or Presidents put the resources of their countries at France’s disposal. The Francafrique is like an osmotic pressure between France and its former African colonies that are intended to puppeteer each and every one of these African states that were former French colonies—just to ensure today that each and every one of them will always consider France’s interests first before its own “national interest”. Any independent French African country that tries to resist this subjugation is deemed to be uppity. France’s subjugation of its African former colonies with the CFA is a recurrent risk that the 15 ECOWAS countries that Nigeria putatively gives leadership faced when they decided to adopt the Eco monetary union as a common currency. To Nigeria and the Anglophone ECOWAS countries’ greatest surprise, the Francophone countries precipitously renamed their CFA Franc as the Eco, making the bid for the ECOWAS eco a shambles. It was utterly difficult for France to permit its Francophone countries in West Africa to abandon the CFA, a colonial linkage that ensured that France took about $500 billion annually from the Francophone countries. And in respect of Morocco joining the ECOWAS, the venture is considered here as a minefield. This is because there is regionally a geographic impossibility in

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Morocco joining the ECOWAS since the former has no physical propinquity with the latter. In fact, the implications of Morocco joining the ECOWAS were to defeat the consciousness in Nigeria’s rejection of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union (EU) in this era of an upswing in anti-globalism, nationalism and populism. But more importantly, the ECOWAS treaty, including the organization’s aspirations in security matters, does not cohere with Morocco’s intention since there is no convergence in security interests between the parties. This book also reiterates Ernesto Zedillo’s argument that those developing countries that decided to globalize were strictly those that seemed to be having better economic performance not only in terms of growth but also in terms of fighting poverty. But this is a hard call for Africa and the developing countries around the world in an atmosphere of populism and neo-liberalism. In this neo-liberal dilemma, Ivor Ichikowitz added that although Africa finds itself in a powerful position as the new world order of populism and protectionist are solidifying, it has all the ingredients needed to make the big leap into sustainable prosperity, but this will only be possible if it must read the tea-leaves accurately to be able to do so. The tea-leaves that African countries must read accurately here are the current global movement of widespread nationalism; the ongoing trade war between the US and China; and the destabilizing Middle East, among other myriad of seismic geo-political shifts that have created uncertainty in economic stability around the world. In this anti-globalist, nationalist, populist and neo-liberal climate, Africa is not just crisis-prone, it also has this unenviable historical reputation of being a battleground that has equally witnessed the so-called “new scramble”, a form of economic colonization that optimizes the so-called “foreign direct investment (FDIs) initiatives”. These FDIs, among others, also include the infamous “China Safari”—the multilateral projects in resource extraction and infrastructure development that China has used the BRI to put the continent in a debt trap. It was this prevalence of the climate of nationalism, protectionism and populism that made Nigeria to overreach itself by shutting its land borders in other to protect its local producers against the smuggling of Thai and Vietnamese rice relabeled as local produce in neighboring Benin Republic and Togo but injuring Nigeria’s interests in the ECOWAS and the AfCFTA. Apart from the burden of neo-liberalism, the other challenges that Nigeria and other African countries have to surmount in other to survive globalization, nationalism and populism include the problems of corruption, the problem of bilateral or unilateral multilateralism; and the supremacy of the developed nations’ interests, including that of the United States, irrespective of the existing regime—Republican or Democratic. It has also been pointed out in this book that the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the creative destructiveness of globalization. In the pandemic, a strong duel was witnessed in the context between live and livelihood. The pandemic has also played the ironic, if not cruel, role of projecting interconnectivity and protectionism around the world. Among other contradictions, the protectionism that the pandemic

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created was seen in the COVID-19 “vaccine nationalism” in which the rich countries were hoarding or appropriating the vaccines while the poor ones were unable to provide their frontline health workers and other vulnerable groups with the vaccines. In the postscript of this book, the answer to the question about solving these anti-globalization, nationalist and populist problems can only be found in an international system that permits the prevalence of international interests over and above the national interest, for the contrary is a serious threat to international peace and security. In other words, to solve the problems of globalization, globalization must be actively defended while the inherent inequity in the international system, the inability (because of the surge of nationalism, populism and protectionism) to forge a global governance structure that is all-inclusive enough to control, regulate and ensure stability in the international system, must be eradicated. Globalization must also be conducted with appropriate international regulations. The solution to the inequity in the international system must include both the developing countries and the oppressed in the developed countries because the global governance system is so inherently rigged and vilified that even within the developed countries, the oppressed habour cynicism and pessimism against things like outsourcing because they perceive it to be taking jobs away from them and further tilting the global economic regime against them. Because populism and nationalism portray international relations as practically a zero-sum game in violation of the rules—rules like sovereign equality and territorial inviolability—the international system today seems very chaotic and far removed from the rules of multilateralism. With the defeat of President Trump, with President Biden haven taken office, America’s assumption of global leadership in the rebuilding of multilateralism is highly expected, even though Biden is not reconsidering the bilateral or unilateral multilateralism that has kept Africa and other underdeveloped countries down in exploitation. But President Biden has stood up to Russia’s President Putin as well as China’s human rights records (in their first meeting in Anchorage, Alaska), among other global concerns. This book would not have been possible without the immense support of my family. For this reason, I thank all of them for their sacrifice. I am also grateful to my publisher, Springer, for its great support. The editorial team of my publisher was very critical for the publication of this book. In this regard, I am immensely grateful to Alex, Arulmurugan, Ellen, Umamagesh and Ameena for their great work, especially in coordinating the input of the reviewers and ensuring that the book was published after being well arranged and edited. For all of this, I am very grateful. Lagos, Nigeria April 2021

Fred Aja Agwu, Ph.D.

Also by Fred Aja Agwu

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9)

United Nations System, State Practice and the Jurisprudence of the Use of Force (2005). World Peace through World Law: The Dilemma of the United Nations Security Council (2007). National Interest, International Law and Our Shared Destiny (2009). The Law of Armed Conflict and African Wars (2011). From Rebellion, Insurgency to Belligerency: The Niger Delta Oil War in International Law (2011). Themes and Perspectives on Africa’s International Relations (2013). Nations Among Nations: Uneven Statehood, Hegemony and Instrumentalism in International Relations (2016). Armed Drones and Globalization in the Asymmetric War on Terror: Challenges for the Law of Armed Conflict and Global Political Economy (2018). Africa and International Criminal Justice: Radical Evils and the International Criminal Court (2020).

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Contents

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Introduction: The Paradox of a Globalized, Populist and Nationalist World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 The National Interest in Globalization, Populism and Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 Race/Nationalism and the Supremacy of America’s National Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Nationalism and Populism as a Protectionist Theory . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Nationalism Betrayed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.5 The Fear of Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.6 Populism and Nationalism Occur When Global Dysfunction Betrays Soft Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.7 The Demonization of Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Globalization, Populism and Nationalism in the Making of Brexit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 UK and Undermining the European Union Ideal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 The Brexit Debacle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 The Danger of Brexit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 The Politics of a No-Deal Brexit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Special Place in Hell for Brexiteers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

57 57 59 69 72 77 93

Globalization, Populism and Nationalism in the Making of Trumpism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 The Emergence of Trumpism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 A Trumpian Apology: Any Rhyme or Reason? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 Convergence and Global Sway of Populism and Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Populism, Nationalism and President Trump’s Trade War . . . . . . 3.5 Trump’s Weaponization of Trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 1 4 7 12 13

95 95 107 111 123 135 139 xix

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Trumpism Explodes the Myth of America as City on the Hill . . . . . . 4.1 Exceptionalism and America as City on the Hill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Has Trumpism Trumped America’s Exceptionalism? . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Trumpism, Electoral College, Victory, Impeachment and Acquittal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Trumpism, Minorities and Alternative Facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Trumpism as a Cuban-Americanlash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Nationalism and Monarchical Conservatism in Trumpism’s Rise of the ISIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Trumpism as a Contradiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Globalization, Populism and Nationalism in Regional and New Geopolitical Landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.1 Preface to Regional Hegemony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 A Gung-Ho Trump . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Trump Kinetic Policy Against Allies, Frenemies and Rivals . . . . 5.4 A US/Turkey Snafu Too Far . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.5 China’s BRI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.6 Critique of Strategic BRI and China’s Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.7 President Trump’s Threat to the Dollar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.8 ‘The Dire Strait of Hormuz’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Globalization, Populism and Nationalism in Sino-Africa Relations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 The Debt Trap . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Pompeo and Tillerson Alarmed and ‘Going in All Guns Blazing’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Fear of the Political Culture of Authoritarian Politics . . . . . . . . . . 6.4 China’s Post-Modernism Apes “Francafrique”, Not ‘Father Christmas’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.5 China’s Subversion of Democracy and Good Governance . . . . . . 6.6 The Question of the Sino-Nigeria Currency Swap . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Globalization, Populism, Nationalism and the African Continental Free Trade Area . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 Nigeria’s Niamey Endorsement of the AfCFTA in Protectionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 AfCFTA and the Absence of a Free Movement Regime . . . . . . . . 7.3 AfCFTA: The Failure of Nigeria’s Protectionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Populism and Epistemic Challenges in Foreign Policy . . . . . . . . . 7.5 Weak Epistemic Link: When the Town Influences the Gown . . . . 7.6 Nigerian/South African Populism as Threat to Continental Coalescence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

141 141 143 148 157 163 164 170 173 175 175 179 182 184 187 189 203 212 216 219 219 241 245 246 248 256 260 261 261 281 287 297 305 310 339

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9

Globalization, Populism, Nationalism and the ECOWAS Regional Efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Francophone Policy Undermines the Eco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 In Diplomatic Flat-Footedness in the ECOWAS Moroccan Minefield . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 The Impossibility of Morocco’s Membership of the ECOWAS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Morocco’s Quest and itsImplication for ECOWAS Treaty . . . . . . 8.5 Morocco in the ECOWAS Conception of Regionalism . . . . . . . . . 8.6 Morocco and the ECOWAS Treaty Accession Clause . . . . . . . . . . 8.7 The Incompatibility of Morocco with ECOWAS Security Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.8 Resisting the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . COVID-19 and the Contradictions of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 COVID-19 and the Creative Destructiveness of Globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 COVID-19 and the Unraveling of Sino-africa Relations . . . . . . . . 9.3 COVID-19 and Enforcing Interconnectivity Amid Protectionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 COVID-19: Between Life and Livelihood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

10 Multilateralism in the Age of Neoliberalism, Globalization, Populism and Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.1 Nigeria and the Burden of Neo-liberalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.2 In Neo-liberalism and Corruption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.3 The Exchange Rate Cul-De-Sac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.4 Africa Ill-Stared by the Backlash of Populism and Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.5 Africa in ‘Bilateral [Unilateral] Multilateralism’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10.6 Ill-Fated by Foreign Interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xxi

341 341 354 356 358 361 362 364 367 371 373 373 380 384 400 405 407 407 408 419 421 424 431 435

Appendix: Postscript . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 437 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 481 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483

Abbreviations and Acronyms

5G ACA ADB AfCFTA/ACFTA AfD AG AGOA AIIB AMLO AMU AON APC APFFLON AQI AQIM ARCAN ARM ASEAN ASEN AU AU-ECOSOCC AWA BASA BBBWI BCSA BNC BOT BP Brexit BRI BRICS

5th Generation network Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) African Development Bank African Continental Free Trade Area Alternative for Germany [A Euroskptic party] Action Group Africa Growth and Opportunity Act Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador Arab Maghreb Union Airline Operators of Nigeria All Progressive Congress Africa Association of Professional Freight Forwarders and Logistics in Nigeria Al-Qaeda in Iraq Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb Association of Retired Career Ambassadors of Nigeria An international telecom firm like the Panasonic Association of Southeast Asian Nations Association of Economists and Statisticians of Nigeria African Union African Union Economic, Social and Cultural Council African World Airlines Bilateral Air Service Agreement Build Back Better World Initiative Bilateral Currency Swap Agreement Bi-National Commission Build Operate and Transfer British Petroleum Britain exit Belt, Road, Initiative Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa xxiii

xxiv

CBN CCECC CDB CDC CEPI CET CFA CFTA CIA CNN CoDA COVAX COVID-19 CPI CPTPP CRS DACA DAPL DG DMO DNC DPRK DRC DRR DSTV Eco ECOWAS ECWA EFCC EFF EGF EJIL EMA EMT EPA ETLS EU EXIM FAA FBI FCT FDI FEC

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Central Bank of Nigeria China Civil Engineering Construction Company China Development Bank Centre for Decease Control Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation Common External Tariff Colonies Francaise d’Afrique Continental Free Trade Area Central Intelligence Agency Cable News Network Coalition of Dialogue in Africa The pillars of access to COVID-19 formed by WHO et al to ensure access to COVID-19 vaccines whenever produced Coronavirus Disease 2019 Corruption Perception Index Comprehensive Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership Corporate Social Responsibility Deferred Action on Childhood Arrival [Obamacare] Dakota Access Pipeline Director-General Debt Management Office Democratic National Committee Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [North Korea] Democratic Republic of Congo De-radicalization, Rehabilitation and Integration Digital Satellite Television West Africa’s proposed common currency Economic Community of West African States Evangelical Church Winning All Economic and Financial Crime Commission Economic Freedom Fighters Eurasia Group Foundation European Journal of International Law European Medicines Agency Economic Management Team Economic Partnership Agreement ECOWAS Trade Liberalization Scheme European Union Export-Import [Bank of China] Federal Airport Authority Federal Bureau of Investigation Federal Capital Territory [in Nigeria] Foreign Direct Investment Federal Executive Council

Abbreviations and Acronyms

FIFA FIRRMA FOCAC FSA G-20 G-7 G-8 GATT GAVI GDP GERD GIPC GMO GNA GOP GPRS GPS GSA HIPC HIV ICBC ICBM ICC ICJ ICPC ICT IFFs IFP IIF ILO ILS IMF INSTEX IOM IPOD IRA ISIS or ISIL ISIS ISS ISWAP JCPOA KORUS LCCI LGBT

xxv

Federation Internationale de Football Association A 2018 law that policed foreign investment in Silicon Valley Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Free Syrian Army Group of twenty countries Group of seven countries Group of eight countries General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade The COVID-19 Vaccine Alliance that controls the COVAX Gross Domestic Product Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Ghana Investment Promotion Council or Commission Genetically Modified Organisms Government of National Accord Grand Old Party [US Republican Party] Global Positioning Radio System Global Public Square General Services Administration Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Human-Immunodeficiency-Virus Industrial Commercial Bank of China Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile International Criminal Court International Court of Justice Independent Corrupt Practices Commission Information and Communication Technologies Illicit Financial Flows Inkatha Freedom Party Institute of International Finance International Labour Organization Instrument Landing System International Monetary Union A New payment system designed by Germany, Britain and France to bypass the dollar dominance International Organization for Migration Indigenous People of Biafra Irish Republican Army Islamic State of Iraq [Syria] or Islamic State of the Levant Islamic State Iraq and Syria Institute of Security Studies Islamic State West Africa’s Province Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (Iran deal) South Korea-United States Free Trade Agreement Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industries Lesbians, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender

xxvi

MAGA MAN MCC MDAs MFA MNJTF MPs MTN NAC NAFDAC NAFTA NATO NDDC NGOs NIEC NIIA NIL NLC NMA NOTN NPC NPSA NRGI NSIA OAU OBOR OECD OPED PAC PBoC PDP PEPFAR PM PPB PPE PRC PSA PTF QANON R&D R2P RBG RCEP RCEP RECs

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Make America Great Again Manufacturers Association of Nigeria Metallurgical Corporation of China Ministries, Departments and Agencies Ministry of Foreign Affairs Multinational Joint Task Force Members of Parliament Mobile Telephone Network National Action Committee National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control North America Free Trade Area North Atlantic Treaty Organization Niger Delta Development Commission Non-Governmental Organizations Nigerian Independent National Electoral Commission Nigerian Institute of International Affairs Nigerian Immigration Services Nigerian Labour Congress Nigerian Medical Association Nigeria’s Office for Trade Negotiations Northern People’s Congress Nigerian Political Science Association Natural Resources Governance Institute Nigerian Society of International Affairs Organization of African Unity [now the AU] One Belt One Road [the BRI] Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Opinion/Editorial Presidential Advisory Council People’s Bank of China Peoples Democratic Party An African presidential initiative by George W. Bush for AIDS Prime Minister Public Procurement Bureau Personal Protective Equipment [COVID-19] People’s Republic of China Production Sharing Agreement Presidential Task Force A discredited far-right conspiracy theory group in the US Research and Development Responsibility to Protect Ruth Badel Ginsburg Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Regional Economic Communities

Abbreviations and Acronyms

RGB RMB RoA RSA RUGA SAATM SADR SAP SARC-COV-2 SARF SCC SCO SDGs SDR SGF SGR SIRA SSA SWIFT TAC TANA Forum TI TICAD TPP TTIP UAE UEMOA UK UKIP UN UNCAC UNCTAD UNECA UNESCO UNGA UNHCR US USA USAFRICOM USMOA USSD WAEMU WAIFEM WAMI

xxvii

Ruth Bader Ginsburg Renminbi [or Yuan, Chinese currency] Rules of Origin Republic of South Africa Rural Grazing Area Single Africa Air Transport Market Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic [party in Western Sahara] Special Access Programmes The coronavirus (COVID-19) virus Southern African Relief Fund Shanghai Cooperation Council Shanghai Cooperation Organization Sustainable Development Goals Special Drawing Right Secretary to the Government of the Federation Standard Gauge Railway Society of International Relations Awareness Senior Special Assistant The dominance payment system that the US uses the dollar Technical Aid Corps Forum on the state of peace and security in Africa Transparency International Tokyo International Conference on African Development Trans-Pacific Partnership Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership United Arab Emirates Union Economique et Monetaire Quest Afraicaine United Kingdom United Kingdom Independent Party United Nations United Nations Convention against Corruption United Nations Conference on Trade and Development United Nations Economic Council or Commission for Africa United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization United Nations General Assembly United Nations High Commission for Refugees United States United States of America US Africa Command United States, Mexico and Canada United States Dollars West African Economic and Monetary Union West African Institute of Financial and Economic Management West African Monetary Institute

xxviii

WAMZ WEF WHO WIV WTO WWF ZESCO ZTE

Abbreviations and Acronyms

West African Monetary Zone World Economic Forum World Health Organization Wuhan Institute of Virology World Trade Organization World Wildlife Fund Zambian Power Company A company blacklisted and refused the dollar

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Paradox of a Globalized, Populist and Nationalist World

1.1 The National Interest in Globalization, Populism and Nationalism In an atmosphere of increased globalization amidst anti-globalism, nationalism and populism,all of which breed authoritarianism and protectionism, it has now become very tiresomely difficult for the community of nations to simultaneously purse the international interest and the national interest. The objective of foreign policy as a branch of in ternational relations—other branches are international law, international political economy, international politics, and international organizations1 —is the actualization of the national interest. The pursuit of this national interest is guided by several theories—one account estimates these theories to be one hundred and forty eight.2 These theories can build both the domestic and the international environment 1 See

McLean (1996, p. 247), see also Weber (2001, 2005, 2010, 2014, p. 2), and Agwu (2009, p. 97). 2 Some of these theories include Absolute advantage, absolute gains, anarchy, appeasement, Asian values, autarky, balance of power, balance of threat or balancing, bandwagoning, billiard ball model, bipolarity, Bretton Woods system, buckpassing, bureaucratic politics of governmental politics model, chainganging, clash of civilization, classical realism, coercion, Cold War, collective security, commercial liberalism, commons (tragedy of), concert of Europe, constructivism, core and periphery, Cuban Missile crisis, cultural relativism, customs union, defence, democratic peace theory, dependency theory, détente, deterrence, Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), Economic Interdependence, Economic Sanctions, Emissions Trading, Ethnic Cleansing, European Union, Feminism, Export-led Growth, Free Rider, Free Trade, Free Trade Agreement/Area (FTA), G20, G7 &G8, GATT, Glasntnost and Perestroika, Global Warmings, Globalization, Groupthink, Hegemonic Stability Theory, Hegemony, Human Rights, High & Low Politics, Human Security, Humanitarian Intervention, IAEA, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), ICC, ICJ, Idealism, IMF, Import substitution industrialization, Interdependence, International Organization, Just War Doctrine, Kyoto Protocol, League of Nations, Leviathan, Liberal institutionalism, Liberal internationalism, Liberalism, Linkage, Long Peace, Marxism, Mercantilism, Millennial Development Goals, Multilateral Treaties, Multipolarity, Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), Nation, State, and Nation-state, National Interest, Nationalism, NATO, Neoconservatism, Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), Non-discrimination, Non-tariff barriers © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0_1

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1 Introduction: The Paradox of a Globalized, Populist …

within which nation-states operate. And this multitude of theories falls within a continuum that can be dichotomized into the sub-structure and the superstructure.3 In the case of the superstructure—in Karl Marx’s deification of matter in his classical dialectical formulation of the relationship between matter and motion4 — the mind (or motion) is “a reflection of the objective reality around it, with the human thought just being a mere product of matter, of the objective being”.5 In pursuit of the assertion that all theories of international relations can be accommodated within the continuum between the extremes of the substructure and the superstructure; and that the substructure (matter) determines the superstructure (motion), a recourse can be made to the fact that Karl Marx himself wrote that “the ideal … is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind and translated into forms of thought”.6 This determinant of the superstructure by the substructure can be put differently in the assertion that “our minds contain concepts of the things and phenomena we encounter in the world”; that, as Lenin would say that “thoughts are copies, reflections, photographs of reality”.7 Because of the foregoing Marxian sub-structural orientation of the superstructure, expectations would ordinarily have been that the national interest would be pursued with little if any cognizance of values—that is, that its quest would be dominated by material interests shorn of ideals or values8 in a manner that vindicates the assertion that in international relations, there is no permanent friend or permanent enemy, only permanent interests. This saying was (NTBs), Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Nuclear Proliferation/Non-Proliferation, Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), Outsourcing & Offshoring, P5 (Permanent five members of the UN Security Council), Peace Enforcement, Peacebuilding, Peacemaking, Peak Oil, Peloponnesian War, Positive-sum, Power Transition, Pre-emptive War, Preventive/Preventiative War, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Protectionism, Rational Actor model, Realism, Realpolitik, Relative gains, Relative Power, SALT &START, Secure second strike capability, Security competition, Self-help, Soft power, Sovereignty, Stability/Instability Paradox, Stag Hunt, State of Nature, State of War, WTO, ZeroSum or Fixed-Sum, World Health Organization, Washington Consensus, Waltz’s “Three Images” of International Relations, Unipolarity, Unitary Action model, United Nations, United Nations Security Council, Two-Level Game, Treaty of Westphalia, UN General Assembly, etc.; see “International Relations Theory”, wiki-dickinson.edu/index.php/inte, available at http://wiki.dickinson.edu/index. php/international-relations-Theory (last visited on April 2, 2018). 3 See H. Assisi Asobie, “Decision-Making Model Revisited: An Analysis of the Application of Theories and Models of Foreign Policy Decision-Making to the Study of Nigeria’s Foreign Policy”, in Akindele and Olusanya (1990, pp. 5, 7, 17–20). 4 See Spirkin and Yakhot (1971, pp. 28–33). 5 See “Karl Marx: the deification of Matter”, available at http://alexei800.wordpress.com/2014/11/ 19/karl-marx-human-society-absolute-mind/ (last visited on April 14, 2018); and “Marxian Philosophy”, available at https://www.allaboutworldview.org/marxist-philosophy.htm (last visited on April 14, 2018; see also “Historical materialism”, available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicalmaterialism (last visited on April 14, 2018); and “Dialectical materialism”, available at https://en. m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical-materialism (last visited on April 14, 2018). 6 See Yakhot and Spirkin (1971, p. 40), op. cit. 7 Ibid, p. 39. 8 See Agwu (2009, pp. 457–460), op. cit.

1.1 The National Interest in Globalization, Populism and Nationalism

3

demonstrated by Russia and Saudi Arabia when, despite being “longtime adversaries over geopolitics and military operations in the Middle East”, they surprisingly bonded in 2018 to reshape the global oil market.9 But again in 2020, the lure of the national interest made them to part ways again on the price of oil when they could not use their collective market power to put a floor under oil prices by limiting their production.10 That collective power broke down when the Saudis, in response to slowing demand for oil, wanted to cut production further to keep prices stable; but the Russians adamantly disagreed and wanted to produce more.11 Peeved, the Saudis moved to teach Russia a lesson by themselves producing more oil and drowning the market with an added 2.6 million barrels of crude oil per day, cutting the price for their customers in Europe that was a crucial market for Russia’s oil industry.12 It was thereupon that an oil war began between the two countries.13 Although “the bad blood between the two countries dates to the former Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979”, Russia and Saudi Arabia “staked out opposing positions over the war in Syria, and over Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East”.14 But surprisingly, they managed “to put aside a history of political distance or even political animosity to find common cause around economics”, engineering “significant production cuts to mop up an oil glut that had been keeping energy prices low for years.15 This economics-driven rapport between two mutually sworn frenemies was considered “one of the most interesting geopolitical developments to happen in the last few years”.16 But this is, however, an uncommon case in contemporary international relations, especially with the regular incidences or attempts by the West (to the chagrin of many non-Western countries) to impose its democratic values and notions about human rights17 ; the attempt to impose homosexuality around the world18 ; and 9 See

Uri Berliner in “Why are Gas Prices Up? These Frenemies Get Some of the Blame”, available at https://www.npr.org/2018/04/30/606208266/why-are-gas-prices-up-these-frenemiesget-some-of-the-blame (last visited on April 30, 2018). 10 See Bremmer (2020a, p. 13). 11 Loc. Cit. 12 Loc Cit. 13 Loc. Cit. 14 See Uri Berliner in “Why are Gas Prices Up? These Frenemies Get Some of the Blame”, available at https://www.npr.org/2018/04/30/606208266/why-are-gas-prices-up-these-frenemiesget-some-of-the-blame (last visited on April 30, 2018), op. cit. 15 Loc. Cit. 16 Loc. Cit. 17 See Agwu (2009, pp. 460–463), op. cit. 18 See Agwu (2016, pp. 352–359, 361–364). When in April 2018 Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari visited the British Prime Minister Theresa May during the countdown to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), the Prime Minister asked Nigeria and other Commonwealth nations to rethink the ban on same-sex marriages; see Sam Eyoboka, Johnbosco Agbakwuru & Luminous Janamike in “Have rethink on law against same sex marriage, PM May tells Nigeria, others: we’ll pre-empt Buhari’s reaction—Ja’afaru; As CAN, PFN kick”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, April 18, 2018, p. 8.

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1 Introduction: The Paradox of a Globalized, Populist …

now, the prevalence of the ideals or values of nationalism and populism in foreign policy.

1.2 Race/Nationalism and the Supremacy of America’s National Interest It was for purposes of the national interest—the geopolitical, economic and strategic calculations—that during the Cold War, when the Congo was actively on the ChessBoard of the East/West intrigues that an African–American, Ralph Bunche, who was one of the “senior UN officials directly involved in the Congo operations (both in the Secretariat and on the ground”), and who “had an influential role in advising the Secretary-General”, could not help to solve the Congo problem objectively but clearly acted in America’s national interest.19 The American national interest under reference can trump or supersede any ideological or racial consideration. When the United Nations’ two military operations to halt Katanga’s secession failed because of the presence of Belgian and mercenary forces (prompting the then Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, to embark on his ill-fated trip “to Ndola to meet with the Katangan province leader, Moise Tshombe, to negotiate an end to the Katangese secession”), Ralph Bunche was one of the Western diplomats that, determined to perpetuate the division/tension for the sake of their national interests, cabled their home offices expressing worry and resentment over the plan of the UN Secretary-General.20 Of course, Dag Hammarskjold died in that plane crash.21 An African–American “intelligence agent in the Office of Strategic Services—the WW II spy agency that preceded the CIA”—Ralph Bunche manifested the worrisome incapacity of the African Diaspora in the United States to do for the continent what the Jewish Diaspora in that country does for Israel.22 This was essentially because “Ralph Bunche’s interaction with Patrice Lumumba” highlighted “a mismatch” that was not just “due mainly to clashes in their personal chemistry, suspicion on both sides and miscommunication” that “escalated into a relationship characterized by animosity and mutual contempt” (as Henning Melber argued23 ); but also, as Susan Williams explained, ostensibly because of Ralph Bunche’s determination to secure for his nation’s interest in the heat of the Cold War nuclear arms race, the “Congolese mine called Shinkolobwe (in Katanga, the southern province of Congo), which “produced uranium that was vital to the development of America’s atomic bomb project in WW 2, and which was used to build the atomic bombs that were dropped in Japan in August 1945”.24 19 See

Melber (2017, p. 21). p. 23; see also Gavshon (1963, pp. 37, 113). 21 See Melber (2017, pp. 20–23), op. cit. 22 See Agwu (2013, pp. 203–204, 209–210). 23 See Melber (2017, p. 21), op. cit. 24 See Williams (2017, p. 25), op. cit. 20 Ibid,

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It was for the sake of the irreducibility of America’s national interest in the face of nationalism, geopolitical, strategic and national security interests that the African– American Obama administration that was of the Democratic Party became frightened (less by human rights concerns and more by the Trojan Horse syndrome in the Nigerian armed forces, those that could betray these weapons into the hands of the enemy, replicating their horrifying experience in Iraq with the ISIS25 ) and blocked Nigeria from buying arms from the West, forcing Abuja to turn to Pakistan, China, and Russia for war planes and other arms.26 The American foreign policy establishment had been swayed by the likes of Jean Herskovits in a very partisan way to deemphasize the war on terror in Nigeria.27 This was despite the fact that with the al-Shabab in Somalia, the Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the Jama’a Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin in Mali (Al-Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb), Africa had become the next battleground against jihadist terrorists after the defeat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria28 ; so much so that in Nigeria, the ISIS (now called the Islamic State of West African Province (ISWAP) now audaciously attack the convoy of the Borno State Governor in broad day light.29 Interestingly, it was the Trump Presidency that Nigeria and the rest of Africa were jittery about that eventually approved the sale of arms (fighter planes) to Nigeria for the prosecution of its counter-terrorism operations30 —a report that was personally confirmed by President Trump himself in the Time’s (New York) story that the US President “even brings up his effort to ensure that an African leader, from a country he declines to name, can buy American military equipment despite decades-old human rights concerns”.31 Before then (that was earlier in 2011), an African–American President Obama had played along with a NATO intervention scheme under the United Nations to bomb and disorganize Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, paving the way for President Gaddafi to be “hounded and killed like a dog by surrogates of a deceitful NATO”32 — Gaddafi, who was then reputedly at the forefront of African renaissance at the level of the transformation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to the African Union (AU). In addition, it was under President Obama that rather than the US 25 See

Agwu (2016, pp. 500, 603,924–938), op. cit. “Nigeria turns to Pakistan, China, Russia for war planes, others—Air Chief”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, December 5, 2016, p. 39. Apart from refusing to sell arms to Nigeria, citing Leahy Law, President Obama also blocked Nigeria from getting these arms from third parties; see also Nnnanna (2017, p. 31). 27 See Agwu (2013, pp. 404–424), op. cit. 28 See “Jihad’s next battleground: The fight against Islamic State is moving to Africa”, The Economist, July 14th–20th 2018, p. 33.s. 29 See “ISWA’s attack on Gov Shettima’s convoy”, Vanguard Comment, Vanguard, (Lagos), Monday, February 18, 2019, p. 18, op. cit. 30 See “Counter-terrorism: U.S. to sell fighter planes to Nigeria”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, April 11, 2017, p. 8. 31 See “Trump After Hours: From where the 45th President works, eats and sleeps, everything is going just great”, Time (New York), May 22, 2017, p. 38, op. cit. 32 See Ankomah (2016, p. 14). 26 See

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granting Africa increased access to trade and aid, attempted to impose the culturally contentious same-sex marriage on some African countries33 and ratcheted up military activities on the continent with some 60 Africom bases, including about $100 million drone facility in Niger Republic, including the militarization of the Sahel region.34 However, despite the French and the entire Western nations’ intrigues, deceit and selfish motivation in their counter-terrorism operations in Africa,35 President Obama’s ratcheting up of military activities in Niger proved to be a blessing in disguise for the African continent’s counter-insurgency efforts because, alongside the Barkhane (France’s counter-terrorism operation in the Sahel that costs the French Taxpayer some $700 m a year36 ), Africom had conducted raids and drone strikes from Somalia to Libya. And the combined counter-insurgency efforts of both the France’s Barkhane and the U.S. Africoms had ensured that not only were about 150 jihadists captured or killed in Mali and Niger by September 2018 alone, the militant jihadist groups were kept scattered and, thus, denied the territory for more permanent bases.37 The West’s military presence in Africa was so entrenched that even beyond the Obama presidency, an American airbase was being built in Agadez while the French continued to help “the [Sahel’s] G5, a regional counter-terrorism force comprising troops from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger” as well as bolster the large UN force in Mali.38 This was apparently after Nigeria had felt that it was spreading itself thin with its participation in several peacekeeping operations around the world and consequently withdrew its forces from the UN force in Mali in order to boost its capacity to fight the Boko Haram at home.39 But President Obama’s unpopularity in some quarters in Africa on account of his government’s militarization of the continent was such that pressure was mounted on the Nelson Mandela Foundation to withdraw an invitation to him when he was scheduled to travel to South Africa in July 2018 to deliver an annual lecture on “Renewing the Mandela Legacy and Promoting Active Citizenship in a Changing World” that marked the late anti-apartheid icon’s birth centennial.40 The objection to former President Obama delivering the lecture was predicated on the fact, according to the Cage Africa advocacy group, that during his eight-year tenure as president and commander-in-chief of the US army, he was directly responsible for a massive

33 See

Agwu (2016, pp. 352–360), op. cit; see also Nnnanna (2017, p. 31), op. cit. Makar (2017, p. 47), op. cit; see also Keenan (2017, pp. 36–41), op. cit. 35 See Agwu (2016, pp. 698–700), op. cit; see also Agwu (2013, pp. 73–78), op. cit. 36 See “Sahel or high water: French forces are playing a greater role in fighting jihadists”, The Economist, September 22nd–28th 2018, p. 29. 37 Loc. Cit. 38 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 39 See Agwu (2016, p. 700), op. cit. 40 See “Activists call Nelson Mandela Foundation to withdraw Obama invite”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/a3c51ce0-b41b-3bc9-bbb3-d82bb2173a15/ss_activistscall-nelson-mandela.html (last visited on June 26, 2018). 34 See

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expansion of US military operations in Africa, including special operations and drone attacks—actions that “Mandela would surely have stood against”.41 It was also for purposes of stimulating America’s geopolitical, strategic and wider national security issues that a Republican President, George W. Bush, according to Steven Gruzd, defied all expectations to become “one of the best [US] Presidents for Africa over the last 25 years”—setting up programmes like PEPFAR (a Presidential initiative to combat AIDS that was adjudged successful), instituting “the millennium challenge account which rewarded good governance with aid and investment from the United States”, and visiting “Africa more often than Bill Clinton or Obama did”.42 But it must be recognized that due to the chauvinistic disposition of President Trump, and his “America first” mantra, the U.S. attitude to many countries (including African countries) surely changed during his presidency. The change in turn significantly required the re-jigging of the philosophy of foreign policy for many African countries, including Nigeria’s; which was to, perforce, involve the continent’s Diaspora policy, not only with respect to African countries nationals in Diaspora, but also with respect to the black people all over the world, both in the United States where President Trump’s antics spelled doom for minorities and elsewhere around the world. But this re-jigging did not ostensibly happen because African countries did not have the requisite cohesion in the African Union (AU); and they did not have ostensible individual national capacities to make any difference. As will be seen later in this book, Africa lies week in the globalized world, pressed down further by neoliberalism,populism and nationalism of the rest of the developed countries that have eventually institutionalized bilateral or “unilateral multilateralism”.

1.3 Nationalism and Populism as a Protectionist Theory Like globalization,nationalism is a recognizable theory of international relations.43 But the same (that is, the attribution of the character of theory) cannot be said of populism—the nearest that populism can come to be called a theory of international relations being when conflated with nationalism at the level of the objective of foreign policy; that is, in being a zero-sum game.44 The nationalist and the populist are archetypal protectionists who only seek globalization only if globalization will actualize their national interest over and above the interests of others; or at best, in the

41 Loc.

Cit.

42 See “What a Trump Presidency means for Africa”, a CNBC Africa’s interview with Charles Stith

and Steven Gruzd, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, December 2, 2016, p. 33, op. cit. 43 See “International Relations Theory”, available at http://wiki.dickinson.edu/index.php/internati onal-relations-Theory (last visited on April 2, 2018), op. cit. 44 Loc. Cit.

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typical zero-sum calculation, if the gains of globalization are proportional or going to be proportional to the losses if any loss should be recorded at all.45 But in addition to this (as has been made evident in this book), nationalism and populism are hostile to migration on account of their fear of terrorism; and they are xenophobic in vindication of their protectionism.46 In other words, nationalism and populism inhibit the constructive flow of international interaction in a globalizing world of shrunk borders and increased speed in transportation and communication. For populism in particular, there are debates in the academia that sound an alarm, on the one hand, that its rise poses a threat to the stability of liberal democracies; but on the other hand, there is a contradicting response that populism is actually “a sign of democratic resilience, providing a necessary corrective that will help address popular grievances, curtail the excessive power of elites and make political systems more democratic”.47 However, irrespective of the disagreement on the two sides of the spectrum on the importance of populism, this debate has been resolved by a bouncing empirical submission “that populist rule—whether from the right or the left—has a highly negative effect on political systems and leads to a significant risk of democratic erosion”.48 Experience (with the rise of populism in countries like the United States, Brexit– United Kingdom with Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament, Hungary, Turkey and in other places around the world) has indicated that with populism, “the world is in the midst of a democratic recession that threatens to set the cause of liberty and self-determination back by many decades”.49 In places where populists have taken on tremendous powers, such countries have moved away from liberal democracy (and internationalism or adherence to multilateralism) towards populism.50 In Africa as far as the dysfunction of populism is concerned, although “populists say they oppose the establishment and are taking up the people’s cause; the skill of African populists ensconced in the political and business elite is to promise convincingly to fight the vested interests of both the ousted colonial elite and the international capitalist system”, but they eventually betray this expectation by infusing themselves in the establishment and beginning to cause the same depredation the establishment had been causing to public institutions and people’s aspiration.51 It was this betray by populism that caused the former President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, to sit 45 Loc.

Cit. the essential nature of nativist or nativistic nationalism, see Uri Friedman in “What is a nativist? And is Donald Trump one?”, The Atlantic, April 11, 2017, available at https://www.the atlantic.com/international/archive/2017/04/what-is-nativist-trump/521355/ (last visited on July 12, 2020). 47 See Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk in “The Populist Harm to Democracy: An Empirical Assessment”, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, available at https://institute.global/insight/renewingcentre/populist-harm-democracy (last visited on September 16, 2019). 48 Loc. Cit. 49 Loc. Cit. 50 Loc. Cit. 51 See “What to watch in 2020: Populism: On the backfoot”, The African Report, No. 110, January/February/March, 2020, p. 38. 46 For

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morose in the dock as he and his allies faced multi-pronged judicial indictments in a manner that suggested that populism was on the wane—at least in South Africa.52 In South Africa, many politicians that were forced from office and power with former President Jacob Zuma were all primed for prosecution as an indication that the delusions of populism certainly wears thin with time; and this prosecution in South Africa was also inclusive of an opposition leader, Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) who—“by turns a cheerleader for, then fierce opponent of Zuma”—also faced “court time in 2020 on charges of illegal use of firearms”.53 What happened to populist Jacob Zuma in South Africa was reportedly the standard playbook of Zimbabwean Robert Mugabe and Namibia’s Sam Nujoma, even though their populism took a couple of decades to wear thin.54 Sometimes, populism does not work well for successors in Africa. For instance, although the former Zambian leader (Michael Sata) was hugely effective in winning support from workers on the Copper belt for economic nationalism, his successor’s (President Edgar Lungu) efforts to initiate Sata’s tactics failed, left “his regime hobbled by corruption and debt”.55 Tanzania’s John Mangufuli and Kenya’s Raila Odinga are allegedly in Michael Sata’s populist persuasion; but it was strongly agreed that “Mangufuli’s obsession with crushing dissent and Odinga’s artful opportunism may work against them” in future.56 This was the same way that the Liberian “ex-PSG footballer, George Weah, won Liberia’s presidency on the populist playbook—fighting the establishment allies of outgoing leader, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—but” had to struggle in political power.57 In fact, although theafricareport newsmagazine may not be entirely right on this account, the defeated Nigerian billionaire (and presidential aspirer in the 2019 elections, Atiku Abubakar) was also deemed a populist that was relishing comparisons with Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi.58 Thus, populists are everywhere in the world and clearly inflict serious damage on those institutions of democracy that the political system needs to sustain itself; and this explains why populists sometimes lasts longer in office; they often leave in dramatic circumstances; they are far more likely to damage democracies; they frequently erode checks and balances on the executive; and they attack individual rights.59 As mentioned above, populism is often extolled by its defenders as always

52 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 54 Loc. Cit. 55 Loc. Cit. 56 Loc. Cit. 57 Loc. Cit. 58 Loc. Cit. 59 See Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk in “The Populist Harm to Democracy: An Empirical Assessment”, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, available at https://institute.global/insight/renewingcentre/populist-harm-democracy (last visited on September 16, 2019), op. cit. 53 Loc.

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acting to “curtail the excessive power of elites”.60 This might have, perhaps, underlined the decision of The Economist, to declare that one of the quintessential exemplifications of populism is the Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who, according to the magazine, embodies “the politics of muscular nationalism and the resentment of elites long before such populism became a global force”; but now counting “among his friends and allies such nationalists as Donald Trump and Narendra Modi, not to mention European ones from Viktor Orban in Hungary to Matteo Salvini in Italy”.61 When in New York he addressed the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September 2019, the United States’ President Donald Trump discounted globalism and warned that “if you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty and if you want peace, love your nation” because “the future does not belong to globalists”.62 This was the umpteenth time that President Trump’s rhetoric in favour of nationalism and national sovereignty (and against globalism) was occurring in his presidency, such that it was no longer shocking to anyone because it had been heard before.63 Populism as a pattern in modern politics exemplifies “the rise of talented politicians and a long success based on a perplexing mixture of … cynically sowing division”.64 Anti-globalism, nationalism and populism were simply running deep and creating divisions in many regions of the world. When Egypt took the dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD65 ) to the United Nations Security Council, Ethiopia heightened its nationalism as it baulked at Cairo’s demand that it [Addis Ababa] lowered its intransigence.66 The Ethiopian Foreign Minister, Gedu Andargachew, in repudiating the UN multilateral framework over the matter,67 also declared that the UN would be intervening in Ethiopia’s internal affairs.68 The declaration that issues about the GERD were Ethiopian’s internal affairs that were inconsistent with multilateralism was not true because although Ethiopia and Egypt were not signatories or parties in the Convention on the Law of NonNavigational Uses of International Watercourses that was concluded by the United

60 Loc.

Cit. King Bibi: a parable of modern populism; in Israel, as elsewhere, politics is a perplexing mix of sound policy and the cynical erosion of institutions”, The Economist, March 30th–April 5th 2019, p. 13. 62 See Jen Kirby in “Trump goes to the United Nations to argue against everything it stands for— again”, Vox, available at https://www.vox.com/2019/9/24/20881781/unga-trump-speech-2019-nat ionalism-sovereignty-again (last visited on September 25, 2019). 63 Loc. Cit. 64 See King Bibi: a parable of modern populism; in Israel, as elsewhere, politics is a perplexing mix of sound policy and the cynical erosion of institutions”, The Economist, March 30th–April 5th 2019, p. 13, op. cit. 65 See Brown (2020). 66 See Hendawi (2020). 67 See Meseret (2020). 68 News report in Aljazeera on June 20, 2020, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) between 8 and 9 am local time. 61 See

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Nations in 1997, the principles of this Convention are now considered to be an accurate representation of a jus cogen—a peremptorily binding customary international law.69 The same nationalist favour that Ethiopia exhibited in its repudiation of globalism or multilateralism in respect of the GERD also happened in Israel in respect of Netanyahu’s overt alignment with America’s Republicans and the evangelical right, which endangered the bi-partisan pro-Israel consensus in Washington that used to be the traditional foundation of Israel’s security.70 In the United States, President Trump used his populist and nationalist remarks “to make the case for his “America First” style of diplomacy that puts nationalism ahead of multilateral efforts”.71 It was as a result of his “America First” that President Trump pulled the United States out of several international agreements, including the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal; and even continued to warn Iran and China, lamenting China’s membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO), a system he said Beijing was gaming.72 Thus, nationalism and populism has become President Trump’s schtick (or special trait), which was not shocking anymore but had shown “just how much of an outlier” the United States (under his presidency and that of other US leaders of his ilk) had become.73 President Trump and his ilk had constructed the world as one in which populism and nationalism were the future while multinational cooperation and mutual trust were the past.74 President Trump’s populism and narcissistic troll went gaga on October 7, 2019—while tweeting his choice to pull out US troops from northeast Syria before the Turkish Military’s so-called “Operation Peace Spring” against the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (that was an American-backed militia)75 — when he declared “if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the economy of 69 Article 5 of this Convention prescribes “equitable and reasonable” utilization and participation of the riparian states exploiting a watercourse; while Article 7 imposes on them an obligation not to cause “significant harm” to other states sharing the watercourse. These are multilaterally imposed obligations that foreclose such nationalist projects like the GERD, and which ensure that international watercourses like the blue Nile are equitably used to attain optimal and sustainable benefits to the riparian states like Ethiopia, Egypt and the Sudan; for these and other views on the GERD, see Fadi Farhat in “Is Ethiopia’s GERD in breach of international law?”, The Arab Weekly, Friday, July 10, 2020, available at https://thearabweekly.com/ethiopias-gerd-breach-intern ational-law (last visited on July 11, 2020). 70 See King Bibi: a parable of modern populism; in Israel, as elsewhere, politics is a perplexing mix of sound policy and the cynical erosion of institutions”, The Economist, March 30th–April 5th 2019, p. 13, op. cit. 71 See Ayesha Rascoe in “Trump to U.N. General Assembly: The Future does not belong to Globalists”, the NPR Politics Podcast, available at https://www.npr.org/2019/09/24/762351729/presidenttrump-to-address-u-n-general-assembly (last visited on September 25, 2019). 72 Loc. Cit. 73 See Jen Kirby in “Trump goes to the United Nations to argue against everything it stands for— again”, Vox, available at https://www.vox.com/2019/9/24/20881781/unga-trump-speech-2019-nat ionalism-sovereignty-again (last visited on September 25, 2019). 74 Loc. Cit. 75 See Roache (2019, p. 11).

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Turkey”.76 This was the extent to which populism can be devastating in its promotion of unilateralism and negative impact on multilateralism.

1.4 Nationalism Betrayed When on October 23, 2018 at a Texas midterm election political campaign rally, the United States’ President Trump renounced globalism (saying that “a globalist is a person who wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring much about our country”)—and describing himself as a “nationalist”,77 his declaration was greeted with a fireball of controversies.78 But President Trump was right in his assertion of the countervailing power of nationalism over globalism. This is because: … once awakened, nationalism represents such an elemental force in history that it is unstoppable by other forms of attachment like religion and ideology, and will ultimately vanquish weak reeds like communism and liberalism.79 Being an elemental force of history that can be conflated with nativism, nationalism is significantly different from patriotism, especially in the context of a nation-state that comprises many nations. So, not least in the fireball of controversies that trailed President Trump’s campaign declaration in Texas was the intervention by Jack Holmes who invoked the legendary British theorist, George Orwell, and other great statesmen in history to affirm that “not only are nationalism and patriotism not the same, the gap between them is not some difference of degree; they are often wholly contrasting emotional forces”.80 Jack Holmes recalled that Orwell wrote that “patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally”; but “nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power”.81 The French President, Emmanuel Macron, also “used the culmination of a ceremony commemorating the 1918 Armistice” to clarify that “patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism [as] nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism”.82

76 See

“For the Records”, Time (New York), October 21–28, 2019, p. 6.

77 See Jack Holmes inn “President Trump just called himself a ‘Nationalist’. Here’s what it means—

and why it’s so dangerous; Nationalism is not patriotism. Just ask George Orwell”, available at https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24103912/donald-trump-nationnalist-george-orwell/ (last visited on November 15, 2018). 78 Loc. Cit. 79 See Fukuyama (1992, 2006, p. 268). 80 See Jack Holmes in “President Trump just called himself a ‘Nationalist’. Here’s what it means— and why it’s so dangerous; Nationalism is not patriotism. Just ask George Orwell”, available at https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a24103912/donald-trump-nationnalist-george-orwell/ (last visited on November 15, 2018), op. cit. 81 Loc. Cit. 82 See Gregory Viscusi and Helen Fouquet in “Nationalism is a betrayal of Patriotism”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/macron-denounces-nationalism-trump-looks-120715336.html (last visited on November 11, 2018).

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In the zenith of the conflation of nationalism and nativism, “nations have pursued self-interest more frequently than high-minded principle, and have competed more than they have cooperated”.83 Thus, in the heat of the passion that the contradictions of globalization has generated in today’s world, nationalism, especially when juxtaposed with populism, has come to assume a very suggestive and even out-rightly negative meaning. Unlike in the past, in places like Africa during the anti-colonial struggles, nationalism was celebrated because to be nationalistic was synonymous with heroism and patriotism, nationalism is now associated with ideological dystopia— the rejection of globalization and liberalism, the manifestation of extremism in the mould of “white-supremacism”, nativism, and populism. It is becoming increasingly attractive and even customary to distinguish nationalism from patriotism—with nationalism seen as a likening for one’s nation irrespective of what it does (weather good or evil)—the making of fetishism of the state, the deification and the worship of the state; while patriotism is seen as the pragmatic or rational likening of one’s nation only for the good things it does.84 But the question then is what gave rise to the widespread antipathy towards globalization— the rejection of liberalism and the rise of populism and this negative conception of nationalism, especially in liberalism’s fortresses in the United States and Europe?

1.5 The Fear of Globalization When the United Nations turned 50 years in 1995, the then Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, was asked to state the most critical changes that the world should prepare itself for; his response was that it would be global problems like the role of globalization of financing, the problem of the environment (including the Amazon forests in Brazil), the problem of drugs, and the problem of the “boat people”; that is, the millions of people, especially from Africa, migrating to Europe.85 But, unfortunately, in the words of Boutros-Ghali: The average man feels insecure on account of this globalization. So, his reaction is to turn to his roots. Thus, fundamentalism. What you have in your American Congress now is a kind of fundamentalism: the United Nations is a foreign body: it’s a kind of conspiracy—the foreigners are our enemy, etc. You find this in the Muslim world. You find this in the Hindu. And then, the problem of you, the media.86

Conceptually, globalization is the situation in which the world is progressively “molded into a shared social space by economic and technological forces”—the 83 See

Kissinger (1994, p. 19). distinction was asserted by one of the interlocutors in the CNN programme—The Lead— anchored by Jake Tapper, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria), circa, between 20 and 28 October, 2018; this is also the position by Serene Jones on the CNN programme, Amanpour, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria), Monday, November 29, 2018, between 7 and 8 pm. 85 See Ferrer III et al. (1995, p. 44). 86 Loc. Cit. 84 This

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closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world, especially because of the reduced costs of transportation and communication.87 The idea of “uniting” the various groups of the world is a shared sense of globalization—“the increasing integration of national societies and the economic, social, ecological, and [the resultant] political changes”.88 It is this type of integrative power that is intrinsically inherent in globalization that made Joseph Schumpeter to describe it as a process of “creative destruction”—that is, some sort of “a capitalist dynamic that brings both good and bad at the same time”.89 Another illustration of the process of “creative destruction” of globalization was illustrated by the fact that as the world’s peoples were drawn more tightly together through trade, capital flows, and information technologies, a growing sense of anxiety was equally breaking out; and as consumers, this integrative process gave humanity access to a larger quantity of new and better products; but as workers and producers, globalization brought greater competition and less job security; and as citizens, globalization challenged traditional values and ways of life while upsetting the ecological balance.90 As a matter of fact, it was this same element of creative destruction that lead to climate change, especially the process of upsetting the ecological balance between animals and man, which a cartoonist illustrated as having jumbled up the balance between nature and humans in such a manner that was responsible for animals causing flu with pandemic potentials.91 It is an oxymoron to talk about a globalized world that is at the same time populist and nationalist in nature. But this oxymoronic fact is paradoxically one of the defining characteristics of the global environment that has now completely roiled the relations between nations in the second decade of the twenty-first century—what with Brexit in 2016 and the election of President Donald John Trump in the United States. The globalizing world has grown completely contentious—a contestation over the desirability or otherwise of globalization in the face of increased global inequality that has betrayed the fact that the benefits of the phenomenon have not been all-inclusive. Globalization has become very unequal and shred of inclusivity. In other words, globalization defines inequality and the lack of inclusiveness that led to its resentment and the rise of the “occupy movement” that flared up in Europe, the United States, Asia and the Middle East.92 The “occupy movement” was later followed in 2019 by a widespread public protest around the world because of “unequal times”, ranging from the demonstrations in Hong Kong to preserve the city’s autonomy within a repressive Chinese political system; in Algeria and Sudan 87 See

Agwu (2018, p. 266). Kishore C. Dash, Patrick Cronin, and C. Roe Goddard (2003); Introduction, in Dash et al. (2003, p. 1). 89 See Kishore C. Dash, Patrick Cronin, and C. Roe Goddard (2003); Introduction, in Dash et al. (2003, p. 2), op. Cit. 90 Loc. Cit. 91 A “new flu virus with ‘pandemic potential’ had also been found in pigs in China”, see “Pocket Cartoon”, the Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 3, 2020, p. 5. 92 Agwu (2018, pp. 263–264), op. cit. 88 See

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on the issue of frustration with decades of dictatorship; in Ecuador, Nicaragua and Haiti on the issue of poverty and bad governance; and in Iraq and Lebanon on endemic corruption.93 This was irrespective of the fact that globalization had so tangled the world and grandly elevated migration, so much so that in Europe, under the Shengen arrangement, international borders had become quite seamless. In fact, the most dramatic in Europe at the moment was the 500 km border (enhanced by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998) that separates Northern Ireland from the Irish Republic, a border that is literally invisible because of its political significance imbued in it by the Good Friday Agreement that ended the Irish question and conflict depends on it.94 Consequently, that 500 km border became so soft (not a hard border) and lacking in control that humans and goods move freely without any form of inhibition.95 But globalization was not seen to be working for all—the developed and the developing nations. The forces of globalization were ostensibly obsessed with capitalist interests. This had spawned a backlash in the rise of populism (the extreme right ideology) and xenophobia. Behind the populist movements were those individuals and right wing political groups that were highly protectionist and nationalist to the extent that they are tough on multilateralism and trade.96 These populist forces were disdainful of free trade, with a zero-sum view the world while highly contemptuous of rivals.97 It was for this reason that in the United States, for instance, these populists, represented by President Trump and his one-time chief populist strategist, Steve Bannon, were severely critical of moderate opponents, jettisoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and the Paris Climate Change accord; and would want to screw up China’s One Belt One Road as well as going after “the elite in Silicon Valley and Wall Street” for being a “bunch of globalists who have forgotten their fellow Americans”.98 They were also ruthlessly anti-immigration, favouring hard borders over open borders and “sanctuary cities”; and blaming immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, for America’s security problems as well as crimes99 ; hence, the controversial travel ban.100 Evidently, globalization has created an atmosphere of

93 See

Bremmer (2019a, p. 29); see also “Protest in Lebanon: Message not received; a surge of public anger sends Lebanon’s politicians reeling”, The Economist, October 26th–1st November 2019, p. 36. 94 See “Brexit and the Irish question: Borderline solution”, The Economist, December 2nd–8th 2017, p. 12. 95 Loc. Cit. 96 See Bill Powell in “From war with North Korea to deadly ISIS attacks, Trump Generals are protecting America from its enemies—and perhaps the President”, Newsweek, August 25–September 1, 2017, p. 22. 97 See “Gone but not forgotten: Donald Trump has shed his populist chief strategist—but will not abandon his ideas”, The Economist, August 20th, 2017, p. 34. 98 Ibid, p. 33. 99 See Powell (2017, pp. 20–21), op. cit. 100 See “Gone but not forgotten: Donald Trump has shed his populist chief strategist—but will not abandon his ideas”, The Economist, August 20th, 2017, p. 34, op. cit.

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fear and exclusion. This much was stated by the American author and winner of the Man Booker prize, George Saunders, when he said that: … we live in a strange time, so the question at the heart of the matter is pretty simple … Do we respond to fear with exclusion and negative projection and violence? Or do we take that ancient leap of faith and do our best to respond with love? And with faith in the idea that what seems other is actually not other at all, but just us on a different day.101

Thus, it was globalization that sowed the seed that germinated into this populist frenzy. About the only thing that analysts are united about globalization is in its definition as something that reduces the world into a shared social space as well as something that brings about the closer integration of countries and peoples by dint of faster means of transport and communication. Beyond this aspect of conceptual unity, every other conception of globalization is fractured by ideological dissensions, ranging from the conservative, through the moderate, to the radical view of the phenomenon. One of the dissensions inhere in Joseph Stiglitz’s submission that globalization has brought about some “enormous reduction of the costs of transportation and communication”102 ; a claim that Chinweizu has rebutted because this reduction is relative because the poor can hardly afford the reduced costs.103 Although globalization has some intrinsic benefits—like in the efforts of international organizations like the United Nations that use it as a vehicle to promote world peace; or the efforts of some of its specialized agencies like the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the World Health Organization (who) using it to promote the agenda of “decent work” and the improvement of human health respectively104 (globalization also promotes the improvement of health around the world, especially in the developing world where Joseph Stiglitz observed that no one, as a matter of fact, would “want to see their child die, when knowledge and medicine are available somewhere else in the world”105 —yet, this is only if people can afford it, as globalization impoverishes or makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer; which is part of the very most contentious aspect of its character. It is also noteworthy that it is the same way that globalization spreads health benefits that it also speedily spreads health risks (like the Ebola and other diseases106 ) with the shrink in travelling time as a result of the technological facilitation of air travel. So, it is in the character of globalization that it paradoxically fosters benefits and risks, “integration and polarization” at the same time, which makes it something that is intrinsically ideological and can crystallize or lend itself to some three fundamental levels ideological formulation: the conservative, the moderate, and the radical ideological formulations.107 In the conservative or status quo formulation 101 See

Cain (2017, p. 33). Stiglitz (2002, 2003, pp. 9–10); see also Agwu (2016, p. 341), op. cit. 103 See Chinweizu (1987, p. 285); see also Agwu (2016, p. 342), op. cit. 104 See Stiglitz (2002, 2003, pp. 9–10), op. cit. 105 Ibid, p. 10. 106 See Agwu (2016, pp. 833–871), op. cit. 107 See Seteolu (2004, p. 5); see also Agwu (2016, pp. 337–372), op. cit. 102 See

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of globalization, it is “the collectivization of global interest and destiny, cultural diffusion”, arising from free flow of persons, cultures, ideas and finances, the end of history and geographical restraints, and the triumph of capitalism and neo-liberalism; all of which have led to increased production, trade, investment, consumption and development.108 The moderate or globalist ideological attitude to globalization (which is coterminous with the conservative perception) is espoused by those globalists who see the phenomenon functionally as liberation from “the tight grip of statist nationalism”, the transformation of state power and world politics, and the deepening of global interdependence.109 Even the functional argument about globalization being critical to combating authoritarianism and oppression as the eyes of global authorities are everywhere by dint of the world having shrunk into a shared social space cannot be taken too far. This is because the intrusion of global politics and the divergences of national interests have often led the global community into ignoring such calamities and human tragedies as the Rwandan genocide, the massacre in the Balkan, the tragedy in Syria, and the ISIS’ genocide against the Yazidis without the world batting an eyelid—all of which, in short, are synonymous with the collapse of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P110 ) as minorities are oppressed everywhere in the developing and even in some developed world, in spite of globalization; and despite the U.S. drawing a red line.111 It was because of the high-wire domestic politics in the United States that, aided and abetted by the US Congress, President Bashir al-Assad successfully violated that US red line with impunity; for President Obama’s request for authorization to use force was not approved by the Congress.112 In fact, the “red line” the United Nations itself drew with the so-called principle of R2P was so miserably violated in Syria that a damning 54-page report (that drew on interviews with current and former UN officials, humanitarian workers as well as Syrians in besieged areas) by the Syrian Campaign, a pro-opposition advocacy group, “signed by over 50 Syrian civil society organizations, accused the United Nations of abandoning its neutrality and talking with the Bashir al-Assad regime in such a way that “tarnished its legacy and enabled the regime’s brutal starvation sieges on opposition-held territory”.113 At home in the United States, “paralyzed by the legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan, the West held back”114 as the US Congress in particular refused President Obama the authorization to use force to enforce the red line; and in the United Nations, Russia 108 See

Seteolu (2004, pp. 5–7), op. cit. p. 6. 110 See Agwu (2009, pp. 427–432), op. cit. 111 See Agwu (2016, pp. 736–751), op. cit. 112 See Broder (2015), published in a special Newsweek edition, “Killing ISIS: America’s all-out assault on a global threat”, 2016 (undated), p. 25, op. cit. 113 See “UN accused of taking sides in Syrian conflict”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, June 17, 2016, p. 51. 114 See “The fall of Aleppo: Vladimir Putin’s victory, the West’s failure; and a warning of what happens when interests triumph over values”, The Economist, December 17th 2016, p. 11, op. cit. 109 Ibid,

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remained the cog in the wheel. In fact, “as the fighting became entrenched” and “the need to intervene grew, month by bloody month” with “the risk and complexity of intervening” growing faster, “Russia joined the fray, acting without conscience and to devastating effect” in a manner that ensured the destruction and fall of Aleppo, reducing Eastern Aleppo that was held by the moderate rebels to dust, shelling civilians, hospitals and schools, and practically bludgeoning the citizens, gassing and inflicting them with starvation.115 Just as in the destruction of cities like Grozny, Dresden, and Guernica while the world practically watched, Aleppo was destroyed, leaving behind, once again (like in the Rwandan genocide of 1994), another instance of the failure of the “Responsibility to Protect” because national interests had triumphed over values.116 This was the intrusion of global politics and the divergences of the national interest under reference in action, not only because of the United Nations system’s congenital betrayal of statecentrism—its weakness towards the nation-state (since, formed by nation-states, only states have formal representation therein, and it can only treat matters that are presented by the nation-state)—but also because of Russia’s influence, having (as seen in the preceding chapter) torpedoed unanimity and deployed its strong-arms tactics in the conflict in favour of the Assad regime. It is, therefore, a historical fact that even with the progressively globalizing world, and owing to the divergent national interests of nations, the international community has always been found wanting whenever it comes to this responsibility to protect. For instance, when Major-General Romeo Dallaire, the force commander of the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (a peacekeeping force) “learned about an arms cache that was intended to be used to exterminate the Tutsi”, he unsuccessfully “sought permission from the UN Secretariat to raid the cache and recover the arms”. Before the United Nations era, it was in this same manner of shirking the responsibility to protect that the League of Nations ignored the cable that was sent by the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Geneva, Gerhart Riegner, alerting “about the Nazi’s plot to use prussic acid to exterminate the European Jews”; with the League, thus, doing “little or nothing to prevent the genocide that was about to happen, or to stop it when it eventually started”.117 So, with or without globalization, bad things happen despite the supposed continuous prying eyes of the international community that the phenomenon had wrought. This implies that globalization has the paradoxical capacity of depriving some people while leveraging others. Although globalization has many benefits to it— even when these benefits are controversially relative to economic status—it is the economic aspect of its consequences that is most inimical, particularly the pushing for the liberalization of the capital markets in the developing countries, “the elimination of the rules and regulations in many developing countries that are designed to stabilize the flow of volatile money into and out of the country”.118 Nearest to the economic 115 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 117 See Bagudu (2007, p. 8). 118 See Stiglitz (2002, 2003, pp. 9–10), op. cit. 116 Loc.

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in the contested and controversial nature of globalization is the cultural contestations as the West tries to dominate others; like in attempting to foist homosexuality—the sub-culture of the community of Lesbians Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT)— on other people whose culture is intrinsically averse to it119 ; all in the name of globalization. It is only when a peaceful contestation of some of the ideas advanced or propagated in globalization (like liberalization and homosexuality, amongst other) is made impossible that the rise of populism is made inevitable; or the violent contestations by terrorists and criminals begin to take root. The resistance to globalization by terrorists is exemplified by the resistance to foreign presence in some Arab cities, often premised on the allegation that Islamic holy sites are desecrated on account of cultural differences.120 Globalization fosters severe limits to national politics and sovereignty; so much so that many nation-states and individuals have practically taken up the cudgel in trying to redress some of its inherent injustices—hence the omnipresent fear and real incidences of terrorist attacks. But despite some of the intrinsic dysfunctions in globalization, the European Union (EU) maintains a dubious if ambiguous position on the phenomenon. A glimpse at the characterization of globalization vis-à-vis the complexity of the world by the EU document on global strategy might further the appreciation of the fact that a lack of an opportunity to meaningfully engage in peaceful ideological contestations and maintain a separate frame of reference from what those that benefit the most from globalization dish out or ram down the throat of others contribute a great deal to hostile international relations, some of which culminates in terrorist activities by transnational groups. The EU global strategy paper states as follows: Globalization shapes our world for good and ill. It has given rise to an unprecedented degree of global connectivity and surges in human mobility. This has an impact on issues including migration, citizenship, development and health. On-line connectivity opens opportunities for political participation and business, but also for economic and financial crime, terrorism and trafficking. Markets are increasingly connected. Greater connectivity in Europe was highlighted by the Eurozone crisis. It shows how deeply linked we are and that we need to tackle economic problems together through deeper integration.121

For the complexity of the global environment, the document states that: Global power shifts and power diffusion bring an end to single power dominance. Around the world, emerging powers are rising in global rankings; different regions display different configurations of power. Globally, power is spreading beyond the nation state towards a network of state, non-state, inter-state and transnational actors. Traditional multilateralism faces a delicate challenge: emerging countries want to reform the post-World War II architecture—yet opposing existing global governance mechanisms has been easier than creating new ones.122 119 See

Agwu (2016, pp. 352–368), op. cit. Agwu (2018, pp. 57–58), op. cit. 121 See “A Global Strategy for the European Union”, available at https://europa.eu/globalstrategy/ en/global-strategy-foreign-and-security-policy-european-union (last visited on Wednesday, May 25, 2016). 122 Loc. Cit. 120 See

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Whereas the first passage above from the EU strategy paper mainly outlines the benefits of globalization, the second passage captures the complexities of the global environment within which globalization thrives, highlighting the resistance by some emergent actors that aspire to the re-ordering of the scheme of things, a situation that leads to fear of the so-called “Thucydides trap”.123 The Economist in its defence of globalization denounced those who propagate “the idea that globalization is a scam that benefits only corporations and the rich” as “the peddlers of protectionism and nativism”, arguing that with globalization, there has been “vast improvement in global living standards in the decades after the second world war …, underpinned by an explosion in world trade”; such that in the emerging markets in particular, “export-led growth and foreign investment have dragged hundreds of millions out of poverty in China, and transformed economies from Ireland to South Korea”.124 In the West, The Economist also maintained that with globalization, “exporting firms are more productive and pay higher wages than those that serve only the domestic market”; resulting, for instance, in a situation where “half of America’s exports go to countries with which it has a free-trade deal, even though their economies account for less than a tenth of global GDP”.125 Thus, The Economist concludes that unlike “protectionism and nativism” that in contrast hurt consumers and does little for workers; in globalization, “the worst-off benefit far more from trade than the rich”.126 Clearly downplaying the double edge nature of globalization and pushing ahead with its defence, The Economist took on the issues of foreign investment, migration and job loses inherent in the phenomenon, arguing in particular that “foreign direct investment delivers on competition, technology, management know-how and jobs”.127 For migration, the paper’s argument is that in addition to casting migration as a cultural threat, as an economic threat, and as a security threat to the UK during the countdown to Brexit, some British politicians “were too blithe about the pressures that migration from new EU members in Eastern Europe brought to bear on public services”, insisting that “migrants improve not just their own lives but the economies of host countries”.128 Of course—clearly in defence of globalization—the out-going US President Barack Obama reminded in his farewell speech that rather than the next wave of economic dislocation coming from overseas, “it will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes many good, middle-class jobs obsolete”.129

123 See

Agwu (2018, pp. 281–282), op. cit. “Why they ’re wrong: Globalization critics say it benefits only the elite. In fact, a less open world would hurt the poor most of all”, The Economist, October 1st 2016, p. 9. 125 Loc. Cit. 126 Loc. Cit. 127 Ibid, pp. 9, 56. 128 Ibid, p. 9. 129 See “Full Text of President Obama’s Farewell Speech” in Chicago on January 10, 2017, available at http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/BL-WB-67205?responsive=y (last visited on January 11, 2017), op. cit. 124 See

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But instead of blaming out-sourcing and the advent of more sophisticated but cheaper technologies (the automated or robot economy, or even migrants130 ) for the displacement of workers and occasioning job losses, The Economist on its part, puts the responsibility for joblessness on those countries that are not doing enough “to tackle these downsides”; like the United States, which “spends a paltry 0.1% of its GDP, one-sixth of the rich-country average, on policies to retrain workers and help them find new jobs”.131 Unfortunately, according to the paper, politicians like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton did not offer any concrete policy propositions during their campaigns to remedy the situation.132 But in his memoir, Barack Obama wrote thus: … I’m convinced that the pandemic we’re currently living through is both a manifestation of and a mere interruption in the relentless march toward an interconnected world, one in which peoples and cultures can’t help but collide. In that world—of global supply chains, instantaneous capital transfer, social media, transnational terrorist networks, climate change, mass migration, and ever-increasing complexity—we will learn to live together, cooperate with one another, and recognize the dignity of others, or we will perish. And so, the world watches America—the only great power in history made up of people from every corner of the planet, comprising every race and faith and cultural practice—to see if our experiment in democracy can work.133

1.6 Populism and Nationalism Occur When Global Dysfunction Betrays Soft Power To put it unambiguously, the rise of nationalism and populism is primarily caused by the dysfunction of globalization and liberalism. In support of this proposition, it will be germane to fall back on the work of Eric X. Li. In an article entitled “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s Concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, Eric X. Li, the Shanghai-based venture capitalist and political scientist, revisited Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power—“a unique source of power” that entails the use of its three categories (culture, ideology and institutions) “to do things and control others … to get others to do what they otherwise would not”.134 Drawing on this concept, Li recalled that Joseph Nye, the American political scientist and former Clinton’s administration official had argued this idea in the 130 Newsweek,

in a story anchored by Kelvin Maney, screamed on its cover page as follows: “The Robot Economy; Forget immigrants. Is this your replacement? Newsweek, December 9, 2016, pp. 28–35. 131 See “Why they ’re wrong: Globalization critics say it benefits only the elite. In fact, a less open world would hurt the poor most of all”, The Economist, October 1st 2016, p. 9, op. cit. 132 Loc. Cit. 133 See Obama (2020, p. xvi). 134 See Eric X. Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, lecture at the University of Bologna, June, 2018; available at https://foreignpo licy.com/2018/08/20/the-riseand-fall-of-softpower/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_medium=email& utm_campaign=Morning%20Brief%20LiveIntent%208/23/2018&utm_keyword=Morning%20B rief%20OC (last visited on August 24, 2018).

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pages of Foreign Policy that “if a state can make its power seem legitimate in the eyes of others, it will encounter less resistance to its wishes”; in other words, “if its culture and ideology are attractive, others will more willingly follow”.135 This argument resonates in a survey by the Eurasia Group Foundation (EGF) that attests to the fact that although a part of the United States’ exceptionalism inheres in its liberalism and democracy, the American public opinion has come to accept that globally, democracy and liberalism has not carried the day because in countries like China and Saudi Arabia, remarkable economic successes have been achieved without following democracy and liberalism; and that even in these countries aforementioned, personal freedom and human rights are not universal values.136 So, the consequence of this reasoning is that in the United States’ public opinion, there is the belief that the country can promote its soft power values more effectively by realizing their highest forms (like domestic needs and the health of American democracy) at home than by selling or imposing them abroad.137 What is therefore redolent with Li’s argument is that the United States, the leader of the free world, had drawn immensely “on its soft power—its non-coercive power—to cement its leadership position in the world”—the foundation of the United States’ soft power being its “liberal democratic politics, free market economics, and fundamental values such as human rights—in essence liberalism”.138 The result was that “in the quarter-century that followed Nye’s conception of soft power, world affairs played out within the broad contours of his predictions” because “after the United States won the Cold War, American liberalism had unparalleled appeal around the world” as “everyone wanted to vote, everyone wanted jeans, and everyone wanted free speech—so much so that the political theorist Francis Fukuyama coined the phrase “the end of history” to capture the idea that [the] whole world was careening toward a political endpoint already reached by the West”.139 In celebration of the now transcendence or global appeal of liberalism, Francis Fukuyama wrote that the ascendancy of liberalism: … constitutes further evidence that there is a fundamental process at work that dictates a common evolutional pattern for all human societies—in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy. The existence of peaks and troughs in this development is undeniable. But to cite the failure of liberal democracy in any given country, or even in an entire region of the world, as evidence of democracy’s overall weakness, reveals a striking narrowness of view. Cycles and discontinuities in themselves are not

135 Loc.

Cit. Bremmer (2019b, p. 16). 137 Loc. Cit. 138 See Eric X. Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, lecture at the University of Bologna, June, 2018; available at https:// foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_med ium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20Brief%20LiveIntent%208/23/2018&utm_keyword= Morning%20Brief%20OC (last visited on August 24, 2018), op. cit. 139 Loc. Cit. 136 See

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incompatible with a history that is directional and universal, just as the evidence of business cycles does not negate the possibility of long-term economic growth.140

Fukuyama therefore exulted in the impressiveness that “the growth in the number of democracies … has broken out of its original beachhead in Western Europe and North America, and has made significant inroads in other parts of the world that do not share the political, religious, and cultural traditions of those areas”.141 In fact, “in the decades between the 1980 and 2010s, the number of liberal democracies … grew from around 100 to close to 150; the number of free market capitalist economies, based on rankings published by the Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation, grew from over 40 to close to 100; [and] never before in human history had so many countries given up so many old political and economic arrangements for one new system”.142 However, the dominance of the West’s soft power had begun to seem like an imposition; especially in the face of the United States retreat from the world (especially under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump with his “America first” fixation), the continued growth of nationalism,populism and what Bernard-Henri Levy called America’s abdication and the abandonment of the world to the five kings—the less liberal countries like Russia and China; and the emergence of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that was believed to be hankering after the resuscitation of the Turkish Empire and Iran, including, paradoxically, the rise of Sunni radical Islamism that is threatening to undermine liberal western values; thus making it hard to believe Francis Fukuyama’s celebration of the triumph of liberalism.143 In fact, the aversion to Western values, particularly the democratic system of government was so strong that immediately China began to implement its national security legislation in Hong Kong (which targeted secession, subversion and terrorism), it pulled from all Hong Kong libraries, all the books by pro-democracy figures.144 It is, therefore, certain that Western values have not transcended, as Francis Fukuyama had suggested. Apart from the continuation of the old American-Soviet Cold War in the Korean Peninsula,145 democracy itself (that America prides) is now increasingly undermined in many parts of the world by populism.146 But more 140 See

Fukuyama (1992, 2006, pp. 50–58). p. 50. 142 See Eric X. Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, lecture at the University of Bologna, June, 2018; available at https:// foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_med ium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20Brief%20LiveIntent%208/23/2018&utm_keyword= Morning%20Brief%20OC (last visited on August 24, 2018), op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 143 See Bernard-Henri Levy in “The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World”, available at https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250203021 (last visited on Wednesday, February 27, 2019). 144 See “Hong Kong security law: Pro-Democracy books pulled from libraries”, BBC News, July 5, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53296810 (last visited on July 5, 2020). 145 See Agwu (2009, pp. 508–524), op. cit. 146 See Bremmer (2019c, pp. 17–18). 141 Ibid,

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importantly, “three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union” and the celebration of the unipolar world, the so-called unipolar moment is now apparently over with the United States facing China, a vast rival that confidently aspires to be number one147 — although with the attendant fear of the Thucydides’ Trap. As it were, between China and the United States, “superpower relations have soured” as America complains that China is cheating its way to the top by stealing technology; and that by muscling itself into the South China Sea and bulling democracies like Canada and Sweden, China is becoming a threat to global peace”.148 On its part in this new Cold War and the threat of the Thucydides’ Trap, “China is caught between the dream of regaining its rightful place in Asia and the fear that [the] tired, jealous America will block its rise because it cannot accept its own decline”.149 In fact, this situation is so dreadful that it is now feared that “even if China and America stop short of conflict, the world will bear the cost as growth slows and problems are left to fester for lack of cooperation”.150 This is the reality that has completely negated the sense of Western triumphalism that Francis Fukuyama has propagated. Until now, soft power had increasingly been celebrated. In the place of soft power that Joseph Nye called it, Eric Li called the inherent attraction “the great conversion”. Other classical illustrations of this “great conversion” are as follows: In the realm of international relations … the United States led a drive to establish and enlarge international institutions that would support its new order, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. It also expanded its system of alliances to bring former competitors further into the fold. Things played out similarly in Europe, where the European Union played a role similar to that of the United States. For an entire generation, the world watched in astonishment as scores of countries voluntarily gave up increasingly large portions of their sovereignty to subject themselves to shared sets of rules based on the same liberal values. [The EU or] Brussels’ proposition dovetailed perfectly with Nye’s; all member states and potential member states wanted what the Western European core wanted. In fact, at one point, it seemed as though everyone wanted what Western Europe wanted: even Turkey, a large Muslim country with a very different culture and set of values, and Ukraine, which risked war with Russia in its attempt to join.151

But the so-called attraction in soft power was to be abused when President Trump fell back to hard power, apparently fixated on how hard power had reassured American allies in Asia, oblivious that soft power had also cemented alliances.152 In fact, Eric Li recalled that the lure of soft power or the great conversion was to become 147 See

“A new kind of cold war: How to manage the growing rivalry between America and the rising China”, The Economist, May 18th–24th 2019, p. 11. 148 Loc. Cit. 149 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 150 Loc. Cit. 151 See Eric X. Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, lecture at the University of Bologna, June, 2018; available at https:// foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_med ium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20Brief%20LiveIntent%208/23/2018&utm_keyword= Morning%20Brief%20OC (last visited on August 24, 2018), op. cit. 152 See “A new kind of cold war: How to manage the growing rivalry between America and the rising China”, The Economist, May 18th–24th 2019, p. 11, op. cit.

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so abused that it was even attended by what Kishore Mahbubani, a Singaporean academic and former diplomat, called a “Western Hubris”, within which “several things went wrong”.153 According to him, “the United States, and by extension Europe, grew so confident in the potency of their soft power that they went into overdrive, converting the rest of the world to their systems” … [as] America’s future prosperity relied on “promot[ing] democracy abroad”—an idea that “became even more extreme when President George W. Bush controversially proclaimed the United States “a moral nation”, saying that “moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place”.154 For Eric Li, “this was soft power on steroids”.155 In other words, the “confidence in the potency and legitimacy of soft power was so great that tremendous hard power was deployed in its name” with the Iraqi War as the most prominent example; there was also the intervention in Libya, with European support—cases (Iraq and Libya) that “the United States and Europe were left worse off”.156 In addition, “the hubris of soft power led to the illusion that soft power could somehow exist on its own”; which “underpinned the fatally mistaken belief that Iraq would automatically become a liberal democracy after Saddam Hussein was toppled”.157 But this was not to be. The reverse rather became the case—a burst, described by the German sociologist, Wolfgang Streeck, as “taking back control”.158 In Iraq, the “taking back control” instead of becoming a liberal democracy after the toppling of Saddam Hussein confirmed Samuel Huntington’s insistence in his The Clash of Civilizations that “so long as Islam remains Islam (which it will) and the West remains the West (which is more dubious), this fundamental conflict between great civilizations and ways of life will continue to define their relations in the future even as it has defined them for the past fourteen centuries”.159 And as happened in Iraq, Egypt after the Arab Spring also failed to yield liberal democracy. A free and fair election in Egypt after the Arab Spring produced President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, who moved against rather than build on the liberal democracy that catapulted him to the presidency.160 In North America and Western Europe, there was a backlash against globalization that culminated in the “taking back control”, which ultimately led to the rise of nationalism and populism“the rise of America’s Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor 153 See

Eric X. Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, lecture at the University of Bologna, June, 2018; available at https:// foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_med ium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20Brief%20LiveIntent%208/23/2018&utm_keyword= Morning%20Brief%20OC (last visited on August 24, 2018), op. cit. 154 Loc. Cit. 155 Loc. Cit. 156 Loc. Cit. 157 Loc. Cit. 158 Loc. Cit. 159 See Huntington (1996, p. 212). 160 See Agwu (2016, pp. 379–382), op. cit; see also Agwu (2018, p. 276), op. cit.

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Orban, or Italy’s Five Star Movement and the League”,161 among others in other places like The Philippines and even Turkey. The burst or “taking back control” that happened outside North America and Western Europe essentially indicated that liberal democracies as “products” did not “really suit the customers”.162 As Li further added to the above observation, “from the “third wave” democracies of the 1970 and 1980s, to the Eastern European states that rushed to join the EU and NATO after the Cold War to, most recently, the countries that weathered the Arab Spring, liberal democracy has had a hard time sticking”; bringing “about rather catastrophic outcomes for the people involved”.163 Li argued that “one theory” that explained “why … neoliberal economic revolution, which was part and parcel of the soft power era”, failed in these places was that it “weakened states instead of strengthening them”.164 Concerning globalization, Li argued that “the market was never a uniting force—the idea that it could be an all-encompassing mechanism to provide growth, good governance, and societal well-being was an illusion to begin with.165 In fact, Wolfgang Streeck had at a conference in Taiwan expressed the concern that “soft power globalization” was simply “outpacing the capacity of national societies and international organizations to build effective institutions of economic and political governance”; and that, “increasing debt, rising inequality, and unstable growth” was leading to “a general crisis of political-economic governability”—a crisis that “resulted in internal revolts on soft power’s home turf” like the United States where the “taking back control” has been dramatized with the election of Donald Trump.166 This taking back control has equally “resulted in anti-liberal governing majorities in Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Poland … among developed countries”.167 As Li continued to narrate, “the sorry state of soft power liberalism” was such that it also “had trouble holding on even in places where it should have had the best chances of surviving”.168 And equally built on a false understanding of soft power was the European project—that is, the European Union.169 For many decades as it were, Europe was essentially a free-rider in the soft power game—the United States being the guarantor of its security; and its economic well-being was also reliant on the U.S.-led global economic order; all supports of which are now under severe pressure, 161 See

Eric X. Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, lecture at the University of Bologna, June, 2018; available at https:// foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_med ium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20Brief%20LiveIntent%208/23/2018&utm_keyword= Morning%20Brief%20OC (last visited on August 24, 2018), op. cit. 162 Loc. Cit. 163 Loc. Cit. 164 Loc. Cit. 165 Loc. Cit. 166 Loc. Cit. 167 Loc. Cit. 168 Loc. Cit. 169 Loc. Cit.

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making Europe to now face real challenges because President Trump is “now less interested in providing either—and focusing more on hard power”.170 So, for North America and Europe, the spread of the dysfunction in the steroid of soft powerthe hubris with which soft power was propagatedpointedly vindicated the truism in the saying that what goes around comes around. For a good couple of decades, according to Li, soft power, empowered by the internet and social media, really seemed unstoppable; as it was behind the numerous color revolutions that overthrew governments and dismembered states; with the West cheering when Facebook and Google spread the fire of revolution in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and Kiev’s Maidan—including African countries where the West habitually meddle in elections171 ; but it was not so happy when Russia used the same social media tools in a bid to subvert politics in the West.172 At the height of the confidence in its soft power, the West cherished the belief that the more open a society, the better; but today, the call for censorship of parts of the internet is heard routinely in some Western media and legislative chambers.173 Li said further that the internet giants are now under tremendous political and social pressure to self-censor their content—with many, including Facebook, YouTube, and Apple, doing so; indicating that the bedrocks of liberalism’s soft power—free speech—has fallen from favor.174 Now, under the populist and nationalist President Donald Trump, hard power is everywhere with the United States as the biggest player in the hard power game that is exemplified by fire and fury to North Korea, trade wars on everyone, the gutting of the WTO, and using domestic laws to punish foreign companies for doing business with a third country, amongst others instances.175 And as Fareed Zakaria wrote, “The continent [of Europe] is ablaze with populism; [and] these forces have taken control in Hungary, Poland and Italy and are steadily gaining ground elsewhere, including Germany and Sweden; it seems everywhere the fuel is the same: hostility towards strangers, foreigners, anyone who is different”.176 But as Europe increasingly looks like a deer in headlights, some of its leaders, including the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, now call for standing firm against Trump while others like the French President Emmanuel Macron are looking for

170 Loc.

Cit. the Nigerian 2015 elections, for instance, the West was accused of propagating and ensuring the eventual success of General Muhammadu Buhari’s candidacy in the Presidential election; see Agwu (2016, pp. 55–67, 516–530), op. cit. 172 See Eric X. Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, lecture at the University of Bologna, June, 2018; available at https:// foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_med ium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20Brief%20LiveIntent%208/23/2018&utm_keyword= Morning%20Brief%20OC (last visited on August 24, 2018), op. cit. 173 Loc. Cit. 174 Loc. Cit. 175 Loc. Cit. 176 See Zakaria (2018). 171 In

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peace.177 Of course, Russia on its own part is adroitly using its limited but still considerable hard power to achieve the most significant territorial gain—now compensating for the dissolution of the Soviet Union that President Putin had described as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the (20th) century”178 —by force since the end of World War II by taking Crimea from Ukraine and forcefully changing in Syria, the course of the civil war in that country in favour of the Assad regime.179 The era of soft power had clearly given way to a very dangerous hard power when “small hard powers” like North Korea emerged with its leader, Kim Jong Un, after being vilified by the Western world for so long, met US President Trump as an equal in the June 12, 2018 bilateral summit in Singapore.180 As it were, it was unlikely that Kim would have accomplished the feat of a summit with Trump as an equal had he not built the nuclear weapons; his hard power play had started paying off handsomely.181 But this is dangerous because for centuries, hard power politics had resulted in immeasurable human suffering because in the twentieth century alone; it had driven two world wars and a long Cold War that threatened to annihilate mankind.182 But Li invoked China’s “peaceful rise”—a grand strategy that he said was coined by Zheng Bijian some two decades ago—to claim that the Chinese can make a difference in this re-emergence of the culture of hard power.183 For some reasons, Joseph Nye apparently discounted China in his calculation on the dynamics of soft power—apparently because China “steadfastly refused to become a customer of Western soft power”, having “engineered its own highly complex transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy …, refused to allow the market to rise above the state …, rejected Western definitions of democracy, freedom, and human rights, and retained and strengthened its one-party political system”.184 Thus, “China rarely came up” in Joseph Nye’s analysis; and where it did, “it was either lumped in with the Soviet Union [now Russia] or brushed off as a country lacking any ability, hard or soft, to challenge Western dominance”.185

177 See

Eric X. Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, lecture at the University of Bologna, June, 2018; available at https:// foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_med ium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20Brief%20LiveIntent%208/23/2018&utm_keyword= Morning%20Brief%20OC (last visited on August 24, 2018), op. cit. 178 See Agwu (2009, p. 440), op. cit. 179 See Eric X. Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, lecture at the University of Bologna, June, 2018; available at https:// foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_med ium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20Brief%20LiveIntent%208/23/2018&utm_keyword= Morning%20Brief%20OC (last visited on August 24, 2018), op. cit. 180 Loc. Cit. 181 Loc. Cit. 182 Loc. Cit. 183 Loc. Cit. 184 Loc. Cit. 185 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine.

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But despite the fact that China had “integrated itself into the post-World War II international order by expanding deep and broad cultural and economic ties with virtually all countries in the world” and “is now the largest trading nation in the world and in history”186 ; yet, it is not in a position to shrink from populism and abandon the dangerous lure of hard power. China certainly cannot make a difference because locally, its excessive nationalism and Han-centrism are all very inhibitive factors.187 It has been reported that “China’s repression of a mostly Muslim minority has left the Western Xinjiang region that resembles “a massive internment camp”; a region where the Chinese authorities have reportedly “put more than 1 million Uighurs in internment camps and subjected 2 million more to “re-education” programmes”.188 Again, China cannot make a difference because internationally—as Eric Li himself unwittingly adverted to— the “tensions in the South China Sea”189 is a serious indictment to the so-called philosophy of its “peaceful rise”. And critics are still fearful that it might still “fall into a Thucydides trap, in which the strength of a rising power (China) strikes fear in the incumbent power (the United States)” in such a way that the collision might result in war and bloodshed as has been seen in some16 such cases Li said has been recorded in human history.190 Ultimately, the decline in the lure of soft power and the rise of hard power (evidenced in the sway of anti-globalism, populism and nationalism) speak to the decline of idealism—the liberal or multilateral world order that was constructed at the end of the Second World. Even for Brazil that had long “sought to influence the international order by relying on soft power” saw the populist President Jair Bolsonaro threatening to break with the past.191 The hard power approach to international relations in the populist and nationalism world is an atavistic throwback to the abhorrent past, a neutralization of that liberal worldview that was believed to be an antidote to unilateral power projection and protectionism that disrupted the pre-World War 1 and 2 World. The rise of populism across the globe and the consequent disavowal of globalism by President Trump at the 73rd General Assembly of the United Nations, expressed in his memorable remark that “we reject globalism and embrace patriotism; around

186 Loc.

Cit.

187 See “Who are the Chinese?; The upper Han: The world’s rising superpower has a particular vision

of ethnicity and nationhood that has implications at home and abroad”, The Economist, November 19th–25th 2016, pp. 21, 22. 188 See Nugent (2018, p. 7). 189 See Eric X. Li, “The Rise and Fall of Soft Power: Joseph Nye’s concept lost relevance, but China could bring it back”, lecture at the University of Bologna, June, 2018; available at https:// foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-soft-power/?utm_source=PostUp&utm_med ium=email&utm_campaign=Morning%20Brief%20LiveIntent%208/23/2018&utm_keyword= Morning%20Brief%20OC (last visited on August 24, 2018), op. cit. 190 Loc. Cit. 191 See Trinkunas (2018).

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the world, responsible nations must resist the threat to sovereignty”,192 a globalist and liberal world that the United States was supposed to be giving leadership, was a return to the norm of the jungle—a unilateralist power projection and the practice of protectionism (exemplified by the U.S. economic warfare with China) in which every nation cares only for itself while God is for us all. President Trump’s truculent denunciation of globalism and fetish embrace of patriotism at the United Nations General Assembly speech was apparently the reason that the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel who is reputedly “a close ally of Trump’s bugbear, Barack Obama while he was President”, warned him not to destroy the United Nations because “multilateralism was the solution to many of the world’s problems”.193 Chancellor Merkel’s admonition was consistent with that of the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ warning before President Trump took the podium at the UNGA that “today’s world order is increasingly chaotic”.194 Indeed, a world where the rule of hard power prevails is a disruptive world that is patently driven by the ideology of self-help rather than settled rule of international law. As already mentioned above, this is why The Economist warned that although “American hard power in Asia reassures its allies … President Trump tends to ignore how soft power cements alliances, too”.195 Although anti-globalism, populism and nationalism are also on the rise in Europe, but this emergent culture of unilateralism and hostility to multilateralism is where the European governments of Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and Theresa May diverged from the U.S. President Trump and were being put under pressure to look inwards and reconsider the excessive reliance on the United States—the hitherto leader of the Western or transatlantic alliance.

1.7 The Demonization of Migration Rather than blame the woes of his country on the deleterious aspects of globalization and increased automation, President Donald Trump was to clearly demonize migration in the unfortunate economic and security woes of the United States. During the 2017 United Nations General Assembly—which was President Trump’s first time of addressing the Assembly—he still stigmatized migration thus: For decades, the United States has dealt with migration challenges here in the Western Hemisphere. We have learned that, over the long term, uncontrolled migration is deeply unfair to both the sending and the receiving countries. For the sending countries, it reduces domestic pressure to pursue needed political and economic reform, and drains them of 192 See

text of President Trump’s speech at the 73rd General Assembly of the United Nations in New York at https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/full-text-donald-trump-s-address-at-the-2018-ungeneral-assembly-1.6509501 (last visited on September 29, 2018). 193 See “Merkel warns Trump against ‘destroying’ UN”, available at https://punchng.com/merkelwarns-trump-against-destroying-un/ (last visited on September 30, 2018). 194 Loc. Cit. 195 See “A new kind of cold war: How to manage the growing rivalry between America and the rising China”, The Economist, May 18th–24th 2019, p. 11, op. cit.

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the human capital necessary to motivate and implement those reforms. For the receiving countries, the substantial costs of uncontrolled migration are borne overwhelmingly by lowincome citizens whose concerns are often ignored by both media and government. I want to salute the work of the United Nations in seeking to address the problems that cause people to flee from their homes.196

The above prejudices were not the only problems of migration. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic “has already forced travel restrictions, accusations between governments, and a series of xenophobic attacks in multiple countries”.197 The problem caused by COVID-19 was intensified in many countries by the fact that “in any pandemic, the worst-case-scenario involves its spread into developing-world cities where huge numbers of people live, health care facilities are poor and millions lack the money to afford whatever care is available”, while in even the emerging markets countries, the pandemic takes a huge economic hit as a result of lost tourism from the tightening or restriction in migration.198 But beyond COVID-19, President Trump had also particularly vilified Nigerians and other Africans for abandoning their “shithole countries”199 and emigrating to the United States; as he reportedly, as ascribed to the New York Times, suggested that Nigerian immigrants, after seeing the splendor of the United States, would “never go back to their huts”.200 This controversy had hardly died down before another one erupted again; this time, President Trump referring to Haiti and African countries, during a bipartisan meeting on immigration, as “shitholes”.201 It was in President Trump’s fit of anti-migration hysteria that he prompted the United States Department of Homeland Security to, on June 16, 2017, rescind the expansion of the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrival (DACA)—an American immigration programme that was established by President Barack Obama in June 2015, and which (though, without providing a path to US citizenship) allowed some individuals who were brought to the United States illegally as children to receive a two-year period of deferred action from deportation and become eligible for work permit”.202 On September 5, 2017, the Trump administration eventually initiated a plan to phase out the DACA, “allowing Congress six months to pass the Dream Act, which would provide the path to citizenship for Dreamers under DACA that Congress had originally intended”.203 President Trump’s efforts to phase out DACA were so 196 See the transcript of President Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations, Tuesday, September

19, 2017; available at https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2017/09/19/read-text-presidenttrump-speech/4vlazWj8AsiRURrsqRN5lI/amp.html (last visited on Tuesday, September 19, 2017). 197 See Bremmer (2020b, p. 19), op. cit. 198 Loc. Cit. 199 See Woodward (2018, pp. 320–321). 200 See “White House denies report on Nigerians”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, December 25, 2017, p. 44. 201 See Woodward (2018, pp. 320–321), op. cit; see also “Hostility to immigration used to be found in both parties. No longer”, The Economist, January 20th–26th, 2018, p. 46. 202 See “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” in Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia. org/wiki/Deferred-Action-for-Childhood-Arrivals (last visited on May 4, 2018). 203 Loc. Cit.

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disruptive that “for six weeks, Selene Saavedra Roman, a flight attendant with Mesa Airlines and on a turnaround flight from Mexico, lived “a nightmare” after being detained at George Bush International Airport in Houston for allegedly ignoring a rule that the Trump administration implemented in 2017, barring people with DACA status from travelling outside the United States.204 The woman, Saavedra Roman, entered the United States from Peru 25 years earlier when she was only three years old with parents that did not have documentation.205 Although, according to her husband, David Watkins, she had put Mexico and Canada on her “no-fly-list”, the Mesa flight was the first time she was leaving the United States.206 Before the flight, she was concerned it would jeopardize her DACA status, which turned out to be valid when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials detained her despite her status of lack of criminal record, spending more than a month in the Montgomery processing center in Conroe, Texas, only to be released when her plight was noticed by Hillary Clinton who petitioned for her release.207 There was also President Trump’s highly contentious travel ban that was deemed targeted at Muslims,208 and which case went up to the United States’ supreme court.209 There was also the high drama associated with the caravan of Central American migrants that made their way across Mexico for over a month—some by foot, and some by bus and freight train—people who allegedly feared for their lives in their home countries, countries reportedly among those having the highest murder rate in the world.210 President Trump had vowed that this caravan of migrants would be turned away at the U.S. border.211 So, when on April 29, 2018, about 150 of the migrants reached the San Ysidro port of entry, the nation’s busiest, they were rebuffed on the ground that the port was at capacity.212 But the next day on April 30, a handful of them were allowed into the San Ysidro port to begin their asylum application process, a decision that President Trump eviscerated on Twitter as “openly defying our border”, describing it as an evidence of “how weak & ineffective U.S. immigration laws are”.213 This was not the end of the drama because shortly thereafter, the Trump administration began the implementation of its so-called “zero tolerance policy” on immigration, in which it began 204 See

Sarah Betancourt in “A nightmare’: flight attendant with Daca status held after flying for work”, The Guardian, March 23, 2019, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/apos-nightmareapos-flight-attendant-050011235.html (last visited on March 24, 2019). 205 Loc. Cit. 206 Loc. Cit. 207 Loc. Cit. 208 See Agwu (2018, pp. 45, 285, 301), op. cit. 209 See “Travelling banned: The Supreme Court seems inclined to uphold the president’s restrictions”, The Economist, April 28th–May 4th 2018, p. 37. 210 See photograph by Dhaliwal (2018, p. 12). 211 Loc. Cit. 212 Loc. Cit. 213 Loc. Cit.

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separating undocumented immigrant/refugee families entering the United States illegally at the Mexico border, isolating the parents for prosecution for the offence of illegal entry while putting their children aside in camps a policy that was widely condemned.214 The United Kingdom on its part was not left out in this hostility towards migrants. In this hostility, the British Home Secretary, Ms Amber Rudd, was accused of “misinterpreting Brexit as a vote for closing the borders rather than embracing a more global future”.215 Ms. Rudd had in 2016, demanded that employers in the United Kingdom published the lists of their foreign-born employees, a demand that flowed from Prime Minister Theresa May’s policy of creating a “hostile environment” that would “discourage illegal immigrants from staying in the country”; hence, pursuing “David Cameron’s target of reducing immigration to the tens of thousands.216 It was this policy that culminated in “the abysmal treatment of the “Windrush generation”—the “Caribbean migrants [from countries like Haiti] who came to Britain in 1948–71 and were now being “harassed in innumerable ways (including being threatened with deportation) because they can’t produce paperwork to prove they are British citizens”.217 What came to be known as the “Windrush Scandal” provided a historical opportunity for “African/Caribbean politicians in the House of Commons” to coalesce in a formidable pressure that culminated in the resignation of the Home Secretary.218 And like United States’ President Trump and the United Kingdom in the “Windrush affair”, the EU was also hostile to migrants. This hostility dates back to the era of Muammar Gaddafi, who “was a master of exploiting European insecurities and once claimed that Europe would turn into “another Africa” as a result of unfettered migration”.219 Since the collapse of the Gaddafi regime, the death of strongman Gaddafi himself and the descent into chaos of Libya where many migrants were stranded, were held in horrible conditions and openly sold in what New African described as “the shame of Africa’s new slave trade”,220 and despite the criticisms from human rights advocates, the EU was determined to go on preventing migrants, particularly from the Middle East and Africa, from setting off from the coast of Libya.221 Europe had always remained the destination of terrorists from the Middle East, In February 2019—at the height of the impending territorial defeat of the ISIS in its last physical stronghold in Baghouz Al-Fawquai in eastern Syria—the United States President Trump tweeted 214 See

“Anger mounts against Trump over child separation policy”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 19, 2018, p. 45; see also “Child migrant camps not like Nazi concentration camps”, Vanguard (Lagos), June 20, 2018, p. 39. 215 See “Amber Rudd is damaged by the Windrush scandal—but not fatally”, The Economist, April 28th–May 4th 2018, p. 30. 216 Loc. Cit. 217 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 218 See Goodwin (2018, pp. 44–45). 219 See “Fortress Europe”, New African, February 2018, p. 21. 220 See Collins (2018, pp. 14–17). 221 See “EU sticks to Libya strategy on migrants, despite human rights concerns”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 15, 2017, p. 44.

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that he would like to see those of them already captured put on trial in Europe as “the US does not want to watch as these ISIS fighters permeate Europe, which is where they are expected to go”.222 But the US President was, however, apparently oblivious of the fact that while the ISIS was being territorially defeated in the Middle East, its members (now known in Nigeria as the Islamic State West Africa’s Province, ISWAP) were now emigrating to the West African countries of Mali, Burkina Faso and the Lake Chad Basin countries of Nigeria, Chad, Niger, and Cameroun, where they had become a vicious monster now audaciously attacking on February 12, 2019, the convoy of a State Governor, Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State, in broad day light while on the 2019 general elections political campaign tour between Dikwa and Gamboru-Ngala highway, near the border with Cameroun.223 The EU’s determination to prevent as many migrants as possible from entering its borders exacerbated the atrocious conditions of the stranded migrants in Libya.224 As New African reported, “rather than provide safe, legal passage for migrants and asylum seekers wishing to enter Europe—to escape Libya—the European Union has opted for a strategy of securing its borders and actively working to keep migrants in North Africa or to repatriate them”.225 The consequence or “stark reality is that this leaves many stuck in the most appalling conditions and drastically increases dangerous illegal migration routes and smuggling activity”.226 Earlier in 2016, a deal between the EU and Turkey (meant to close a conduit used by terrorists to Europe227 ) “effectively closed one major migration route” for people from the Middle East and Africa.228 And in 2017, “Italy … led the EU’s efforts to curb sea crossings from Libya, supplying money, equipment and training for Libya’s border and coast guards, and striking deals with local groups in control on the ground in a country still largely lawless after the 2011 death of Muammar Gaddafi”.229 It was in this context that the EU switched from Mare Nostrum (a successful Italian rescue policy) to a new policy from 2014, known as Triton (named after the Greek messenger god of the sea), which has been identified as a crucial moment that established “undisputed mens rea [mental intention] for the alleged offences” that caused “the death of thousands of human beings per year, the refoulement [forcible return] of tens of thousands of migrants attempting to flee Libya and the subsequent commission of murder, deportation, 222 See

“Trump tells European countries to take, prosecute ISIS fighters …”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, February 18, 2019, p. 42. 223 See “ISWA’s attack on Gov Shettima’s convoy”, Vanguard Comment, Vanguard, (Lagos), Monday, February 18, 2019, p. 18. 224 See “Fortress Europe”, New African, February 2018, p. 20, op. cit. 225 Loc. Cit. 226 Loc. Cit. 227 See Agwu (2018, pp. 61–63), op. cit. 228 See “EU sticks to Libya strategy on migrants, despite human rights concerns”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 15, 2017, p. 44, op. cit. 229 Loc. Cit.

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imprisonment, enslavement, torture, rape, persecution and other inhuman acts against them”.230 The Mare Nostrum search and rescue policy that was launched in October 2013 was “in many ways hugely successful, rescuing 150,810 migrants over a 364-day period”.231 The only criticism of the policy in mid-2014 was on the grounds that it was not having a sufficient humanitarian impact and that there was a desire to move from assistance at sea to assistance on land.232 So, the “EU officials sought to end the Mare Nostrum in order to allegedly reduce the number of crossings and deaths”; but these reasons were not considered valid because the crossings were not reduced, but “the death toll was 30-fold higher”.233 The subsequent or succeeding Triton policy only covered an “area up to 30 nautical miles from the Italian coastline of Lampedusa, leaving around 40 nautical miles of key distress area off the coast of Libya uncovered” and also deployed fewer vessels”.234 However, it was true that the withdrawal of naval assets from the area, when not properly planned and announced well in advance—resulted in a higher number of fatalities”; and that the EU “did not shy away from acknowledging that Triton was an inadequate replacement for Mare Nostrum.235 The Triton policy introduced the “most lethal and organized attack against civilian population; even when the “European Union and Member States’ had foreknowledge and full awareness of the lethal consequences of their conduct”.236 There has been mass drowning; but as well as drowning, there have been forced return of an estimated 40,000 refugees, which allegedly left them at the risk of “executions, torture and other systematic rights abuses” in the militia-controlled camps in Libya.237 The “European Union officials were fully aware of the treatment of the migrants by the Libyan coast guard as well as the fact that the migrants would be taken … to an unsafe port in Libya, where they would face immediate detention in the detention centers—a form of unlawful imprisonment in which murder, sexual assault, torture and other crimes were known by the European Union agents and officials to be common”.238 Overall, the EU migration policies caused the deaths of “thousands civilians per year for so long; and produced about 40,000 victims of crimes within the jurisdiction of the ICC.239 In fact, to effectively smother the efforts of the humanitarian organizations operating in Libyan waters in order to assist with safety 230 See Owen Bowcott in “ICC submission calls for prosecution of EU over migrant deaths”, The Guardian, available at https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/jun/03/icc-submission-calls-for-pro secution-of-eu-over-migrant-deaths (last visited on June 3, 2019). 231 Loc. Cit. 232 Loc. Cit. 233 Loc. Cit. 234 Loc. Cit. 235 Loc. Cit. 236 Loc. Cit. 237 Loc. Cit. 238 Loc. Cit. 239 Loc. Cit.

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nets for migrants, the Italian government signed ‘a code of conduct’ that barred these humanitarian organizations from entering Libyan territorial waters or obstructing the Libyan coast guard’s operations that prevent the migrants from crossing into Italy and other EU countries.240 Although Libya continued to be lawless, the EU supported “Libya’s Prime Minister Fayez Seraj and allied militias who run migrant detention centers they have compared to concentration camps”—all to the consternation and disapproval of human rights groups, and which led to the Mediterranean crossings dropping from nearly 28,000 people in June 2017 to below 10,000 in August 2017, especially because the EU-supported Libya’s Prime Minister Fayez Seraj and the armed groups were stopping migrant boats from leaving.241 In this way, the EU strategy on migration was “very thin on the protection of human rights of migrants inside Libya and on the boats, and silent on the urgent need for alternatives to the arbitrary detention of vulnerable people”.242 Although the EU had tried to offset the criticism from human rights groups by providing this badly needed alternative in stepping up the financing of UN agencies for migration243 —the International Organization for Migration, IOM, and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR—in order to improve the condition of migrants inside Libya, it would not budge or try to change track on trying to restrain or keep them in Libya.244 This was to the chagrin of countries like Nigeria, which, owing to severe socio-political and economic challenges at home,245 —what New African described as “the African Elephant in the room” (“African nations falling behind in their ability to provide opportunities and basic services for their citizens”246 ) have many of its nationals as the major victims of the EU’s sadistic if unfriendly policy/restraint of migrants in Libya; and that migration has been an age-old indulgence of mankind from every nook and cranny of the globe.247 240 See

“Fortress Europe”, New African, February 2018, p. 21, op. cit.

241 See “EU sticks to Libya strategy on migrants, despite human rights concerns”, Vanguard (Lagos),

Friday, September 15, 2017, p. 44, op. cit. Cit. 243 In fact, according to the EU President, there was a proposal by Malta (which along with Italy, were the frontline states for migrants entering Europe) for the European Union to step up funding for the United Nations migration agency to return migrants stranded in Libya to their home countries further down sub-Sahara Africa. Malta’s proposal to the EU’s 28 leaders was aimed at facilitating the putting into practice, the agreements on new steps to stem African migration; particularly since the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimated that there were between 700,000 and one million migrants in Libya, and in which the IOM aimed to help about 7,000 of the stranded migrants to go back home; see “Malta: EU should pay more to return African migrants home”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Thursday, March 2, 2017, p. 41. 244 See “EU sticks to Libya strategy on migrants, despite human rights concerns”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 15, 2017, p. 44, op. cit. 245 See “Migration, deportation: Time for enduring action”, Vanguard (Lagos) editorial, Monday, September 11, 2017, p. 18. 246 See “Fortress Europe”, New African, February 2018, p. 21, op. cit. 247 See Agwu (2016, pp. 535–548), op. cit. 242 Loc.

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So, as testified to by Raphael Shilhav—the EU Migration Policy Advisor for Oxfam—there is a dichotomy in the EU’s response to migration: “on the one hand, they are working to improve detention centers and they’ve also increased their efforts to help the UN High Commissioner for Refugees; but at the same time, they work with the Libyan coast guard to prevent boats [of people] from leaving Libya, and that includes many trying to flee these conditions”.248 And there was also an Oxfam report that although the EU’s increased fund provisions actually provided support for the stranded migrants in Libya, a “considerable portion of funding is invested in security measures and border management” that “restrict migration along what is perceived as migratory routes towards Europe”.249 It was for reasons of these humanitarian violations—especially the fact that the EU was orchestrating a policy of forced transfer to concentration camps-like detention facilities [in Libya] where atrocious crimes are committed”250 —that the ICC planned a move against the organization. The allegations against the EU were categorized as “crimes against humanity” that have criminal liability within the jurisdiction of the ICC. Hence, Fatou Bensouda (the ICC prosecutor) mentioned that there would be inquiries (against the EU) into the “alleged crimes against migrants transiting through Libya”.251 It was also, perhaps, because of these harsh reports on the Europeans’ response to the conditions of migrants in Libya that there may be more than meet the eyes, the general EU reluctance to come to Oxfam’s rescue when the United Kingdom pulled the plug from its funding in the wake of revelations that some members of its staff paid prostitutes in Haiti for sex parties; revelations that were followed by similar reports about the aid workers in Chad.252 In the EU’s collusion with the local authorities in Libya to restrain migrants, it was ostensibly acting in cahoots with the other western nations that had steamrolled the United Nations to endorse NATO’s so-called “No-Fly-Zone” that air strafed Libya for “humanitarian protection of civilians”, mortally wounding Muammar Gaddafi and paving the way for his capture and assassination by the rebels forces. Today, Libya is practically a waste land without a centralized government or sovereign, having been territorially shared and controlled by armed gangs. But in the plight of Nigerian migrants in Libya, Abuja was to pay the price for its cloven-hoof and untidy diplomacy on that hapless country. The Nigerian diplomacy on the Libyan crisis was untidy because whereas the Nigerian Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador, Joy Ogwu, was approvingly voting for the imposition of the no-fly-zone, the Nigerian Foreign Minister, Odein Ajumogobia, was condemning the UN/NATO at home on account of the inherent double standard vis-à-vis Cote 248 See

“Fortress Europe”, New African, February 2018, p. 20, op. cit. p. 21. 250 See Owen Bowcott in “ICC submission calls for prosecution of EU over migrant deaths”, The Guardian, available at https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/jun/03/icc-submission-calls-for-pro secution-of-eu-over-migrant-deaths (last visited on June 3, 2019), op. cit. 251 Loc. Cit. 252 See Martin Farrer in “Oxfam pleads for charity amid sex scandal”, available at https://www. theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/12/monday-briefing-oxfam-pleads-for-charity-amid-sex-scandal (last visited on Monday, March 19, 2018). 249 Ibid,

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d’Ivoire that the West had turned a blind eye despite the civilian population there being also victims of brutality.253 Ambassador Ogwu was ostensibly unaware that the West would use NATO to hijack what was supposed to be a humanitarian protection and turn it into a scheme for the ouster and assassination of Gaddafi. But critics also queried Ambassador Ogwu’s judgment in supporting that UN Security Council Resolution that in addition to authorizing the no-fly-zone, inherently endorsed the allegation that Gaddafi was recruiting black Africans as mercenaries; a Resolution that actually “labeled these blacks as mercenaries” and deplored their continued flow into Libya.254 This aforementioned UN Resolution actually manifested the worst form of hypocrisy in international politics; for even the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) states that abstained from voting, did not make it explicit as required in international law,255 that their abstention was tantamount to a veto.256 It was a Resolution in which critics accuse Nigeria of maximum complicity in NATO’s destruction of Libya, so much so that even when the Nigerian government was talking about taking up the issue of the slavery of Nigerian stranded migrants with what passes as the Libyan government, the question was posed as to which of the five “governments” in the chaotic post-Gaddafi Libya, for everything depends on which armed gang (or glorified “government” controls a particular slave market— “the Government of National Accord, GNA, and the Islamist National Salvation Government (the two in Tripoli); the one in Tobruk; the new one around Sirte; or the one in Benghazi run by renegade General Khalifa?257 In supporting the destruction of the legitimate government of Gaddafi in Libya with its self-conflicted and hypocritical foreign policy on the crisis in Libya,258 Nigeria paid a heavy price for it with its citizens constituting the bulk of Africans that were enslaved in that country after the death of Gaddafi and the descent into chaos of Libya; chaos in which Africa migrants are commoditized and enslaved with such insensitivity that an Ingrid Essien-Obot, the acclaimed radical feminist and “pacifist humanist” would turn in her grave for the open commoditization of the female gender sensuality with an unrestrained sexual exploitation.259 The NATO destruction of Libya, the consequent chaos in that country that led to its inability to handle migration as well as the EU’s noxious strategy on migration was not helped by the recalcitrance of some European countries. In Italy, pervasive anger over the migrant crisis has been fueled in part by the fact that whereas the problem had eased elsewhere in Europe, it was growing more intense in Italy—with, in the first half of 2017, 10,000 migrants reaching Greece and Spain getting 6,000,

253 See

Agwu (2013, pp. 630–631). for instance, Lakemfa (2017a, p. 33). 255 See Agwu (2005, pp. 397–401); see also Agwu (2007, p. 58). 256 See Lakemfa (2017b, p. 31). 257 See for instance, Lakemfa (2017a, p. 33), op. cit. 258 Loc. Cit. 259 See Madunagu (2017, p. 17). 254 See

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while Italy was accepting a whopping 80,000.260 Worse still, under an EU quota system, the four eastern European EU member countries of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia were expected to accept about 11,000 refugees; but whereas Slovakia and the Czech Republic had taken 28 people, Poland and Hungary took none, meaning that these Eastern EU members had “refused to take even modest numbers of migrants”.261 This was irrespective of the fact that the European Court of Justice rejected appeals by Hungary and Slovakia, while the EU itself threatened to reduce subsidies if these countries failed to comply with the EU quota system on migrants.262 But like as happened in Italy, this situation had an intrinsic danger of further stoking the furnace of anger, populism,anti-globalization and anti-migration in Eastern European countries.263 As a matter of fact, the populists’ penchant for demonizing migration and perceiving immigrants (especially from the underdeveloped nations) as the source of all their countries’ domestic problems264 was very much reflected in the position on immigrants by the Italian populist politician and leader of the anti-establishment and euroskeptic Five Star Movement, Giuseppe “Beppe” Grillo.265 In fact, Giuseppe Grillo remarked after winning 32% of the vote in Italy’s March 2018 election that migration was a problem that must not be “left to oversized, dysfunctional nongovernmental groups” because immigration flows had to be controlled because Italians had to know “who comes into Italy”.266 Because the Italian shores had been where many of the migrants are put, the country had always remained very fierce—especially with France—in dealing with the migration problem.267 In a rare inter-governmental spat between Italy and France over Africa policy in early 2019, the Italian Prime Minister, Luigi di Maio, was to accuse France of “creating poverty in Africa” and, thus, being responsible for Europe’s migrant crisis that had put many African migrants on Italian shores.268 The Italian Prime Minister di Maio insisted that it was essentially due to France’s commitment to colonial practices—especially France’s control of the CFA franc— that it had been actively preventing its African ex-colonies from economic development, insisting that “I’ve stopped being a hypocrite talking only about the effects of immigration; it’s time to talk about the causes”.269 It must be recalled that it 260 See

Bremmer (2017, p. 9). Cit. 262 Loc. Cit. 263 Loc. Cit. 264 See Agwu (2016, pp. 535–548), op. cit. 265 See “Who’s Laughing Now?, Newsweek, May 25, 2018, pp. 12, 14. 266 Loc. Cit. 267 See Jon Henley, Angela Guiffrida and Kate Connolly in “EU migration row boils over as Italy and France trade insults: Austria calls for ‘axis of the willing’ to take action, and rifts widen in German coalition”, available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/13/italy-france-trade-insultsmigration-row-boils-over (last visited on Wednesday, March 6, 2019). 268 See “France ‘causing poverty’ in Africa”, New African, February 2019, p. 8. 269 Loc. Cit. 261 Loc.

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was because the Francophone African countries were completely held in economic thralldom by France—mandating them to deposit 65% of their national reserves in the French treasury and even causing a parity to exist between the CFA and the Euro, even when none of the CFA African countries can have a monetary policy of its own.270 African countries like Cote d’Ivoire under President Laurent Gbagbo that had attempted confronting this imperialism had been accused of uppity and forced out of office.271 The situation so degenerated that the Italian Prime Minister urged that “the EU should sanction those countries like France that are impoverishing African countries and are causing people to leave”.272 The Italian PM, Di Maio, maintained that “France was manipulating the economies of 14 African countries that use the CFA franc, a currency underwritten by the French Treasury and pegged to the Euro”; so much so that “if today we still have people leaving Africa, it is due to several European countries, first of all France, that didn’t finish colonizing Africa”.273 For him, “the European Union should sanction all those countries, like France, that are impoverishing African countries and obliging those people to leave” because “the place for African people is Africa and not at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea”.274 He insisted that Italy must be heard; and that “if we want to stem the departures (of migrants), let’s start addressing this issue, let’s start coping with it also within the United Nations, not only at the European Union level”.275 Another denouement in the migrant and refugee crises came soon after this new populist government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte came into office in Italy, for it rejected the MV Aquarium, a migrant/refugee charity rescue boat that was trapped in the Mediterranean Sea when it was barred from entering ports in Italy and Malta, “leaving the 630 on board, including 100 children and seven pregnant women, stranded at sea”.276 This was at a time that, following on US President Trump’s footsteps, the Italian Interior Minister was also declaring the policy of ‘Italy first’.277 Ironically, when this Italian populist government rejected the MV Aquarium that was to be “the center of a political storm about Europe’s migration policy”, it was another new populist government in Spain that took it in, allegedly to demonstrate to the world that migration is a global problem that should be treated as such and not subjected to a very narrow national interest as the US President Trump was doing.278 270 See

Agwu (2013, p. 111), op. cit. pp. 111, 121–126. 272 See “France ‘causing poverty’ in Africa”, New African, February 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 273 See “Italy Accuses France of Creating Poverty in Africa”, available at https://www.africa.com/ italy-accuses-france-of-creating-poverty-in-africa/ (last visited on Wednesday, March 6, 2019). 274 Loc. Cit. 275 Loc. Cit. 276 See “Ship caught in Europe’s migration spat docks in Spain”, Vanguard (Lagos), June 18, 2018, p. 44. 277 Reported on CNN and monitored in Lagos, Nigerian circa Wednesday, June 27, 2018, between 7 and 8 am local time. 278 See “Ship caught in Europe’s migration spat docks in Spain”, Vanguard (Lagos), June 18, 2018, p. 44, op. cit.; see also “Italy, France patch up migrant row”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, June 15, 271 Ibid,

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It was also at this time that the highly refugee/migrant-friendly and accommodating “German Chancellor Angela Merkel (who, in the 2015 peak of the migrant crisis, had adopted an open-door migration policy) was given two weeks [ultimatum, orchestrated by her interior Minister] to agree [to] a new migration policy with European leaders or face a renewed rebellion from her own government that is threatening to bring her 13-year rule to an end”.279 Even as the EU nations wrangled over migration, prompting Chancellor Merkel to reach the Brussels EU-wide deal, the Interior Minister and head of Merkel’s government’s Bavarian allies (Horst Seehofer) joined the ever recalcitrant Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic that had traditionally rejected their own EU quota of refugees in rejecting the deal, with Seehofer giving Merkel an ultimatum,280 an option to choose between limiting migration and risking loosing the coalition government.281 In the face of Italy—where most migrants first land whenever they make it across the Mediterranean—demanding that the rest of the EU bloc take concrete steps to share the burden, and also in the face of the populist and anti-immigration leaders in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic rejecting their EU quotas when German’s Angela Merkel was disposed to opening her country’s borders as her conservative coalition partners led by Seehofer threatened to shut the borders, one of the fine points of the Brussels deal was that, “member states agreed to send rescued migrants on EU territory to “control centers” across the bloc—at locations still to be decided, and only in countries that volunteered to have them”.282 It was from the “control centers” that “rapid and secure processing” would sift economic migrants from refugees with a potential right to asylum, for whom the “principle of solidarity would apply”— even though relocation measures would not be compulsory.283 The acceptance of the Brussels deal and its rejection by others has made the EU immigration crisis to persist.284 When the EU countries rejected the setting up of the control centers within the EU member states, the attention was later shifted to the North African coastal states. There was the “regional disembarkation platform” that the EU leaders proposed, 2018, p. 45s. This development was also covered on CNN, monitored in Lagos, Nigerian circa Monday, June 18, 2018, between 8 and 10 am local time. 279 See Germany: Merkel given ultimatum over migration policy”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 19, 2018, p. 45. Parentheses mine. 280 See Bremmer (2018, p. 19). 281 See Isabel Van Brugen in “Angela Merkel’s future in crisis as coalition allies reject migration deal”, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/982247/angela-merkel-migrant-pol icy-eu-migration-deal-crisis (last visited on July 2, 2018); see also “EU to sue Poland, Hungary and Czechs for refusing refugee quotas”, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe42270239 (last visited on July 2, 2018). 282 See John Henley in “EU Migration deal: what was agreed and will it work?, available at https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/29/eu-summit-migration-deal-key-points (last visited on July 2, 2018). 283 Loc. Cit. 284 See “Panic attack: Confusion over immigration and crime is riling European politics”, The Economist, June 30th–July 5th 2018, pp. 22–23.

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which allowed migrants found in European waters to have their asylum requests processed on African soil (in the “de facto detention centers”) to be set up by Brussels on African territory.285 The European Commission had fleshed out plans for the “disembarkation and controlled centers” and argued that the regional disembarkation arrangements would be seen as working in concert with the development of controlled centers in the EU and that both concepts would help ensure a truly shared regional responsibility in responding to complex migration challenges.286 The European commissioner responsible for migration, Dimitris Avrampoulos, had also argued with respect to these platforms that “now more than ever we need common, European solutions on migration”, ready to support member states and third countries in better cooperating on disembarkation of those rescued at sea.287 But the African Union—a coalition of 55 countries headed by Egypt—persuaded its coastal states members from cooperating with that EU’s migration plans, arguing that it would break international law.288 Consequently, a number of northern states, including Morocco, rejected that EU proposal even when the African Union was concerned that some of its other members could buckle under pressure from offers of development funds.289 The argument of the African union here was that the establishment of disembarkation platforms on the African continent for the processing of the asylum claims of Africans seeking international protection in Europe would contravene international law, EU law and the legal instruments of the AU with regard to refugees and displaced persons.290 In fact, setting up such ‘disembarkation platforms’ would be tantamount to de facto ‘detention centers’ where the fundamental rights of African migrants would be violated and the principle of solidarity among AU member states greatly undermined. It was also argued that “the collection of biometric data of citizens of AU members by international organizations violates the sovereignty of African countries over their citizens”.291 The AU coalition that rejected the platforms also argued that “the AU views the decision by the EU to support the ‘regional disembarkation platforms’ in Africa and ongoing bilateral consultation with AU member states (without the involvement of the AU and its relevant institutions) as undermining the significant progress achieved in the partnership of frameworks and dialogues between our two unions”.292 The coalition argued that Brussels had yet to reveal the full details of its “regional disembarkation platforms”; even after the EU had already established a similar arrangement 285 See

Joe Barnes in “EU migration scandal: African Union to tear up EU plans to process migrants in Africa: AFRICAN nations are planning to shoot down the European Union’s latest proposals for curbing migration, it has emerged from a leaked report”, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1091976/EU-migration-news-African-Unionregional-disembarkation-platform-report-latest (last visited on February 25, 2019). 286 Loc. Cit. 287 Loc. Cit. 288 Loc. Cit. 289 Loc. Cit. 290 Loc. Cit. 291 Loc. Cit. 292 Loc. Cit.

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with Libya, where there were around 800,000 migrants, of which 20,000 are held in government detention centers.293 Even the Italian right-wing deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini, had called for platforms to be established in Chad, Mali and Sudan.294 Another approach to this migration issue was thrown up when Germany’s Africa Commissioner, Gunter Nooke, proposed that the EU or the World Bank should build and run African cities to create jobs and help stem the migration flows to Europe.295 These cities were meant to operate like “free zones”, with foreign entities bringing in investment and expertise, while imposing their own laws, running their own system and policing the zones.296 This was a sort of ‘Marshall Plan’-type Africa recovery scheme.297 But when initially this idea was broached for the first time in 2008, it only attracted the interest of the Madagascar President Marc Ravalomanana, attracting a backlash from the ordinary people of that country and culminating eventually to the fall of President Ravalomanan government.298 The idea of outsourcing governance to external institutions was an obvious admission of African governments’ cluelessness, masquerading as governments when actually they are all playing rent-seeking and middlemen roles.299 In addition to other measures, the Brussels deal aforementioned—apparently providing a “lifeline for Merkel”—urged all EU governments to “take all necessary internal legislative and administrative measures” to stop refugees and migrants crossing Europe’s internal borders”.300 Meanwhile, the fact of some of the Western nations’ apprehension about the flow of migrants was irrespective of the fact that they benefit the most from it. When he took office as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, although Boris Johnson announced the relaxation of his predecessor’s (Theresa May) immigration controls, he was to introduce “fast-track visas for the world’s top scientists, engineers and mathematicians”, which he said were “designed to attract elite researchers and specialists in science, engineering and technology”.301 Boris Johnson maintained that “to ensure we continue to lead the way in advancement of knowledge, we have to not only support the talent that we already have here, but also ensure that our immigration system attracts the very best minds from around the world”.302 Two weeks before Britain exited the European Union on 293 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 295 See Wambu (2019, p. 74). 296 Loc. Cit. 297 Loc. Cit. 298 Loc. Cit. 299 Loc. Cit. 300 See John Henley in “EU Migration deal: what was agreed and will it work?, available at https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/29/eu-summit-migration-deal-key-points (last visited on July 2, 2018). 301 See “Johnson plans to abolish visa caps for scientists, engineers”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 9, 2019, p. 45. 302 The British Home Secretary, Priti Patel, also said that their country’s “new fast track visa route will be a key part of this—encouraging the world’s top scientists and researchers to our shores” as “those gifted minds will bolster the UK’s standing as a hub for science and innovation as we 294 Loc.

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January 31, 2020, the Prime Minister pursued this migration thought as it concerns Africans further303 during his country’s bilateral or ‘unilateral multilateralism’ in the UK–Africa International Investment Summit.304 During this Summit, he “told African leaders … that Britain would be more open to migrants from their continent after Brexit”; and that “Brexit would mean an end to preferential treatment for EU migrants”.305 Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s aforementioned utterances on Africans’ migration may not be unconnected with the fact that the Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari had reportedly written earlier that day (Monday, January 13, 2020) in The Time newspaper that “while many in the African Diaspora enjoy considerable benefits from life in the West, they do not always feel at the heart of the community”, in addition to also raising increased free trade issue and the visa issue.306 It was of utmost interest that the British Prime Minister was telling African leaders that Britain would be more open to migrants from Africa, and that the British migration system was becoming “fairer and more equal between all of our global friends and partners, treating people the same way, wherever they come from” when ironically, Britain was exiting the European Union.307 It was also surprising that after the UK had rejected the type of diversity that the EU’s Schengen visa was supposed to bring by not being part of it, and by even before Brexit restricting intra-EU immigration through the non-reception of immigrants from the poor Eastern European countries that had been admitted into the organization. Meanwhile, on Friday, February 14, 2020, after its first Cabinet reshuffle in the wake of the December 12, 2019 election and the January 31, 2020 Brexit, Boris Johnson promised to overhaul the UK’s immigration system and “enact an Australian-style points-based system that is blind to country of origin” in order to

look to introduce a points-based immigration system centered on what people will contribute to our economy”; see “Johnson plans to abolish visa caps for scientists, engineers”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 9, 2019, loc. Cit. 303 See “UK PM says Britain will be more open to Africans after Brexit”, in AFP, Punchng online, January 20, 2020, available at https://punchng.com/uk-pm-says-britain-will-be-more-open-to-afr icans-after-brexit/ (last visited on January 21, 2020). 304 The term ‘Unilateral Multilateralism’ was articulated by Charles Ukeje, Anouar Boukhars, and Dawit Toga (2018) in “State of Peace and Security in Africa (SPSA) 2019”—the TANA Forum report, Addis Ababa, Institute for Peace and Security Studies (IPSS). 305 See Alice Ritchie in “UK puts visas into pitch for post-Brexit trade with Africa”, AFP, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/uk-pm-raises-visas-pitch-post-brexit-trade-111650333.html (last visited on Monday, January 20, 2020). 306 Loc. Cit.; President Buhari’s article in The Times was also reproduced locally in Nigeria in Muhammadu Buhari, “A new case for a Commonwealth based on trade”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, January 20, 2020, p. 37. 307 See “UK PM says Britain will be more open to Africans after Brexit”, in AFP, Punchng online, January 20, 2020, available at https://punchng.com/uk-pm-says-britain-will-be-more-open-to-afr icans-after-brexit/ (last visited on January 21, 2020), op. cit.

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make the UK more racially diverse.308 When the Prime Minister unveiled this new points-based immigration system, the objective was to end the UK’s dependence on “cheap low-skilled labor” and deliver its pledge to halt freedom of movement from the EU after Brexit.309 Estimated to be effective from January 1, 2021 (when the transition period for Brexit would have ended), workers or immigrants into the UK “must prove they can speak English (10 points), have a verified job offer (20 points), meet a point threshold based on their specific skills or post doctoral qualifications (20 points) and a prospective salary of 25,600 lb or above (20 points)”.310 Curiously, the EU’s Schengen visa that the UK had rejected admitted people from all countries around the world. Making this u-turn to embrace the ‘points-based’ immigration system in search of racial diversity after Brexit must have only been a ploy to inveigle helpless and dependent countries from places like Africa. Anyway, the fact is that Africa can easily be willfully shortchanged by the UK, far much more than the European Union. The reinforcement of the British bilateral or ‘unilateral multilateralism’ in the UK– Africa Investment Summit and the British Prime Minister’s making of this migration promise cannot be delinked from the so-called “New Scramble for Africa”.311 The ‘Unilateral Multilateralism’ is certainly the “New Scramble for Africa” that is also deemed to be inclusive of the infamous multilateral ‘China Safari’ or projects in resource extraction and infrastructural development that leads to peonage as well as the German Marshall Plan for Africa that includes the development of controlled production chains and the diversification of Africa’s economies under foreign control and disproportionate benefits.312 It is ironical that it was in this ‘Unilateral Multilateralism’ or “New Scramble” that Nigeria’s President Buhari was noting that there is “a renewed sense that there are ties that bind us through the Commonwealth, and [that] a concerted effort to grow those links through trade could act as a spur to encourage togetherness and the certainty of belonging”.313

308 See

Adam Rasmi in “Brexit might actually make the UK more racially diverse”, financeyahoo.com, available at https://www.yahoo.com/tech/m/9bb337ff-6b2c-3de7-9959-ecc0d4 41b317/brexit-might-actually-make.html (last visited on Saturday, February 15, 2020). 309 See Olivia Konotey-ahulu in “UK Government Announces new ‘points-based’ immigration system, mandating foreign workers to prove they can speak English”, Time.com, available at https:// time.com/5786459/uk-point-based-immigration-system/ (last visited Friday, February 21, 2020); see also “UK to deny low-skilled workers visa”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, February 20, 2020, p. 42. 310 See Olivia Konotey-ahulu in “UK Government Announces new ‘points-based’ immigration system, mandating foreign workers to prove they can speak English”, Time.com, available at https:// time.com/5786459/uk-point-based-immigration-system/ (last visited Friday, February 21, 2020), op. Cit. 311 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/ January 2020, p. 55. 312 Loc. Cit. 313 See Alice Ritchie in “UK puts visas into pitch for post-Brexit trade with Africa”, AFP, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/uk-pm-raises-visas-pitch-post-brexit-trade-111650333.html (last visited on Monday, January 20, 2020), op. Cit. Parenthesis mine.

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It is an irony because some critics of the international environment of populism and protectionism recognize the global trade tension that is generated by the growing nationalism (instead of multilateralism) in which Nigeria was equally being afflicted.314 But despite its being the “New Scramble”, its controlled nature as well as the peonage it leads Africa, if—from Boris Johnson’s perspective on the functions of ‘Unilateral Multilateralism’—it can aid migration and visas for Africa, so be it because of the benefits of legal migration. In fact, even the South African Minister of Homeland Affairs (Mangosuthu Buthelezi) had argued that “through immigration legislation”, he had “sought to protect South Africa, closing the door to undocumented migration while opening it to the skills our country so desperately needs”; arguing further that “there is, for instance, a shortage of doctors in South Africa, and with our failing health care system, we need to welcome professional doctors from Nigeria and other countries”.315 It is, thus, obvious that although “although migration patterns are provoking a nationalist backlash in Europe and incidents of xenophobia across South Africa”,316 but in the loss of the “brightest and best” in migration,317 it is even the underdeveloped nations that lose their most healthy and able-bodied men to emigration abroad. President Trump labbed African countries “shithole countries” because he, alongside other anti-immigrant Senators, Congressmen, etc., prejudicially wanted “meritbased” immigrants from Norway (that is, the Norwegians) and Asia that “could help the economy”.318 Although Africa is discriminated against in migration into the developed countries, the IMF had forecasted “that sub-Sahara Africa’s contribution to the global labour force will exceed that of the rest of the world combined in 2030”.319 Of specific interest here was the case of Mamoudou Gassama, the 22 years old Malian immigrant who—consequently dubbed “Spider-Man”—scaled five floors of the apartment building in a street in Paris and saved the life of a child that was dangling from there.320

314 See

Egwuatu (2019). Mangosuthu Buthelezi in “We are brothers in Africa”, an excerpt from his speech as South African Homeland Minister and leader of Zulus to a mob in Johannesburg on Sunday, September 8, 2019, Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday, September 11, 2019, back page. 316 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/January 2020, p. 55, op. cit. 317 See “Johnson plans to abolish visa caps for scientists, engineers”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 9, 2019, loc. Cit. 318 See Woodward (2018, p. 320), op. cit. 319 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/January 2020, p. 54, op. cit. 320 See Ross McGuiness in “Father of dangling boy saved from balcony by Mali ‘Spider-Man’ was ‘out playing Pokemon Go’” available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/father-dangling-boy-savedbalcony-mali-spider-man-playing-pokemon-go-070137969.html (last visited on Tuesday, May 29, 2018). 315 See

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The French president Emmanuel Macron, in recognition of this heroic act, rewarded Mr Gassama with a French citizenship and a job as a firefighter.321 The West African nation of Mali needed manpower like Grassama in its workforce for enhanced productivity, but it lost it to France in a pull of migration. What is true of Mr Gassama is also true of African migrants in the professions. They are cheaply lost to the developed countries of the West because of the misery or push factors at home. This is particularly true when it is considered that, “according to a study by the Pew Research Center”, that “sub Sahara African immigrants to America are better educated than the average American and are likely to have better jobs”322 —a report that is a strongly a “direct contrast to President Trump’s opinion that immigration is a drain on the American economy”323 —a report that also contradicts his populisminspired prejudice that there are “sithole” countries from which immigration into the United States should be restricted, “sithole” countries that African states belong. But this favourable fact of sub Sahara African immigrants to America being better educated than the average American and more likely to have better jobs did not stop President Trump from stigmatizing the people. After introducing a travel ban in 2017 that closed US borders to citizens from seven countries, many of them with Muslim majorities, President Trump announced in January 2020 that the US had curbed immigration visas to six more countries—including Nigeria (Africa’s most populous country), Eritrea, Sudan, Tanzania, Kyrgzstan, and Myanmar—for their failure to meet the US security and information-sharing standards.324 Ezra Klein, an interlocutor on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria’s Global Public Square (GPS), explained that this immigration policy by President Trump was a function of the identity or racial politics in the United States, the fear of the “browning” of America that held the possibility of the minority or the so-called coloured people in that country becoming the majority.325 In Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari’s response to this controversial immigration policy that prohibited the issuance of immigrant visas (as Nigerians could still go to the US for official, medical, business, tourism and student travel purposes) to Nigerians was to set up a committee to examine and provide the government with an update on the restriction with a view to enhancing the procedure for information sharing between Nigeria and the United States.326 The admission of aliens into any country is the exclusive preserve of the sovereign, which made the Trump administration absolutely right in determining who gets the country’s immigrant visas 321 Loc.

Cit; see also Oluwakemi in “Photos: ‘African Spiderman’ begins firefighting training in France”, Punch (Lagos), May 30, 2018; available at http://punchng.com/photos-african-spidermanbegins-firefighting-training-in-france/amp/ (last visited on May 30, 2018). 322 See “Kaleidoscope” in New African, June 2018, p. 8. 323 Loc. Cit. 324 See “US travel ban: Trump restricts immigration from Nigeria and five other countries”, bbc.com, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51335011 (last visited on February 1, 2020). 325 Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Sunday, February 2, 2020 between 9 and 10 pm local time. 326 See Okocha and Ogunmade (2020, pp. 1, 8).

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and which countries were or were not meeting America’s security and informationsharing rules. Thus, the decision of the Nigerian government to set up a committee to address this US security concern should not only be to the interest of the United States but also to the interest of Nigeria. The American emphasis here on data is important for its security as it is equally important for Nigeria’s security because the securitization of Nigeria’s borders and, indeed, a data-prone political system for the country will redound not only to external (or American) security but also to Nigeria’s internal security. In a globalized world where almost everything happens instantaneously, securitization is of the essence of every human or national endavour. The whole issue devolves on Nigeria’s lack of capacity. The capacity to be developed was not just going to be concerned with the American security and information-sharing requirement on immigration; it would also include the capacity to diminish crime and the “push factor”—the latter relating to those issues that compel Nigerians to emigrate to the United States. It was actually this lack of capacity that made it impossible for Nigeria to comply with the US security and information-sharing rules. Nigeria is redolent of enormous banditry, kidnapping and Islamic terrorism challenges, the latter of which is very controversial because, despite Nigeria’s claim that the groups had been decimated, they still reportedly exist in the fringes of the country.327 From that fringe, they continue to ubiquitously commit heinous murders, beheading groups and individuals, and holding groups like the Chibok and Dapchi schools girls hostage. At the end when the insurgents pretend to have repented, they are controversially released into the civilian population328 after very controversial de-radicalization programmes.329 The so-called deradicalization programme was denounced by many Nigerians. One critic averred as follows: That all is fair in war is convenient only to cowards who lack the courage to abide [by] the principles of war. In what can only be interpreted as fresh salt over festering Nigerian wounds, and the latest installment of epic foolery, the Nigerian Army, on Saturday, July 25, against all hues and cries, released 601 supposedly repentant and de-radicalized ex-Boko Haram combatants into the Nigerian society upon their graduation from the DRR Camp of Operation State Corridor Mallam Sidi Gombe State. Amidst pomp and pageantry and a panoply of pictures, Nigeria’s enemies, dressed in repentant and remorseful garbs, were lent into Nigeria’s tents. How much more irony can irony get in a country where the comical and farcical daily compete for public attention with the polemical, the economical and the alchemical.330

327 See

Daniel (2020, p. 3).

328 Since the President Muhammadu Buhari administration created in September 2015, the Operation

State Corridor (OPSC), it had been releasing the Boko Haram and ISWAP terrorists into the society with about 606 batch of repentant terrorists reportedly billed for de-radicalization, and rehabilitation by June 28, 2020; see Omonobi (2020a, p. 21). 329 See Akinrefon (2020, p. 8). 330 See Obiezu (2020).

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The former Chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Senator Ali Ndume—who was the representative of Bornu South in the Senate331 —the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA),332 the entire society (especially the victims that insist that it is a misplaced priority to spend resources to de-radicalize the Boko Haram while abandoning them333 ), and the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) all deplored the de-radicalization programme.334 Meanwhile, President Buhari instituted the controversial De-radicalization, Rehabilitation and Reintegration (DRR) programme in September 2015 and had released at least three batches numbering over 1000 and reunited them with their communities.335 The de-radicalization programme is controversial because it is hard to determine how “a person who trained as a suicide bomber”, who had slaughtered fellow human beings and had sworn to overthrow Nigeria’s constitutional order had repented from that radical ideology that is deeply rooted in religion.336 This controversial de-radicalization created the possibility for “the terrorists to package some of their diehards to accept the DRR programme in order to re-infect the already ignored or abandoned victims in the society; that is, to re-infect the society from within and strike at a convenient time”.337 This was just as the attack on the state Governor, Professor Babangida Zulum, was the result of the sabotage by Trojan Horses.338 In other words, it was this sabotage by Trojan Horses that prevented the Nigerian Army from recapturing Baga, which warranted the insurgent’s attack on Governor Zulum’s convoy, and the Governor’s threat that since the army had failed, he would mobilize the local hunters to secure Baga.339 It was apparently because of the shame to the Nigerian army that this attack on the Borno Governor brought, including the Governor’s threat to deploy hunters that made the Nigerian Army to begin to probe the circumstances that culminated in the insurgents’ getting wind of the Governor’s movement.340 Nigeria’s treatment of the Boko Haram terrorists (eagerly pampering them, rehabilitating and releasing people that had killed over 30,000 and displaced about 2.5 million people) is in contradistinction to the severe punishment (including execution)

331 See

Wuyo (2020, p. 7), see also Umoru (2020). Omonobi et al. (2020b, p. 8). 333 Loc. Cit.; see also Erunke et al. (2020, pp. 10–11). 334 See Okoli (2020, p. 20). 335 See Our de-radicalization faux pas”, Vanguard Comment, Vanguard (Lagos), March 6, 2020, p. 18. 336 Loc. cit. 337 Loc. Cit.; see also Erunke et al. (2020, pp. 1, 10), op. cit. 338 See Omonobi et al. (2020b, p. 8), op. Cit. 339 See Omonobi et al. (2020c, pp. 1, 5). 340 Ibid, p. 5. 332 See

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that is meted to them in Niger and Chad.341 While Nigeria embarks on controversial deradicalization and gives the Boko Haram a slap on the wrist treatment,342 the Chadian President reportedly led his country’s soldiers to capture the terrorists’ arms store in the Goje-Chadian area of the Sambisa forest.343 Although the presidency consistently denied including hard boiled and ideologically hardened terrorists into the releases from “Operation Safe Corridor” into the society (where a total of 601 terrorists that allegedly voluntarily laid down their arms because they were forced to bear arms), it also denied re-absorbing the terrorists into the Nigerian Army.344 But the controversially “de-radicalized”, recycled or army-re-absorbed345 Boko Haram cadres346 were good candidates for American immigration while some of them, although an allegation that was debunked by the army,347 are recruited into the Nigerian armed forces348 to unconscionably constitute the Trojan Horses that continue to betray the country’s armed forces and its internal security.349 The foregoing explains why the de-radicalization programme in Nigeria is very controversial

341 Our

de-radicalization faux pas, Vanguard Comment, Vanguard (Lagos), March 6, 2020, p. 18, op. cit; see also the cartoon: “Chad executes 10 Boko Haram members a day after trial—News”, The Punch (Lagos), Tuesday, September 1, 2015, p. 26. 342 This was exemplified in a Punch newspaper cartoon entitled “Chad executes 10 Boko Haram members a day after trial … News”, The Punch (Lagos), Tuesday, September 1, 2015, p. 26. 343 See “The Photos: Chadian President leads soldiers to capture Boko Haram’s ‘arms store’ in Sambisa”, The Cable, available at https://www.thecable.ng/photos-chadian-president-leads-sol diers-to-capture-boko-harams-arms-store-in-sambisa (last visited on Monday, April 6, 2020). 344 See Agbakwuru (2020, p. 10). 345 Part of the reasons for the persistent of the Boko Haram insurgency, the frequent infiltration and massacre (like the Auno massacre in February 2020 that was severely criticized by northern Nigerian leaders) of civilians by the sect include the controversial de-radicalization programmes. There was a time the Nigerian army “released 136 repentant Boko Haram terrorists under its Operation Safe Corridor (OSC) skills acquisition training for integration into the society”. Then, “over 1400 exinsurgents were handed over to the Borno State government after the 52-week training in Gombe state”. In fact, when the OSC’s coordinator, Major-General Bamidele Shafa, addressed some of the beneficiaries of this controversial de-radicalization, he reportedly told them that “besides the army, the international community was ready to accept them for de-radicalization, training and integration into Borno, Adamawa and Yobe communities”. In other words, the Boko Haram “repentants” have a place in the army and the international community; see Azimazi Momoh Jimoh, John Akudo, Saxone Akhaine and Njadvara Musa in “Northern leaders urge overhaul of security infrastructure to contain insurgency: Military integrates 136 B’Haram ex-terrorists; Senate talks tough on killings”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, February 14, 2020, p. 4. 346 See Okoli (2020, p. 20), op. Cit.; see also Akinrefon (2020, p. 8), op. cit. 347 See “Our de-radicalization faux pas”, Vanguard Comment, Vanguard (Lagos), March 6, 2020, p. 18, op. cit. 348 As adverted to above, the OSC’s coordinator, Major-General Bamidele Shafa, reportedly said that “besides the army, the international community was ready to accept them for de-radicalization, training and integration …”; see Azimazi Momoh Jimoh, John Akudo, Saxone Akhaine and Njadvara Musa in “Northern leaders urge overhaul of security infrastructure to contain insurgency: Military integrates 136 B’Haram ex-terrorists; Senate talks tough on killings”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, February 14, 2020, p. 4, op. cit. 349 See Agwu (2016, pp. 924–938), op. cit.

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too.350 One critical demand of the US in the information-sharing problem was that Nigeria should share data and information on suspected terrorists and known terrorists.351 In the US imposition of immigrant visas on Nigeria, it had alleged that there was a lack of credible background investigation system that security groups like the Interpol would rely on to vet and certify the originality of prospective immigrants to the United States.352 In fact, even the International Labour Organization (ILO) confirmed that Nigeria had no data on migration, stressing the importance of statistics to migration because countries need the statistics for effective implementation of the relevant labour migration policies.353 Washington was also worried over the discrepancies in Nigeria’s data system, including a third party’s involvement in the management of the country’s passport system, especially the information and data on lost and stolen passports.354 The concern here was that the data that Nigeria was providing should not go through a third party (which Nigeria had been using in the management of its passports) because the security and data information in such passports are thereby made available to such private third parties that are prone to abusing them.355 By issuing electronic passports and keeping the US informed of the details so that it could decipher the genuine and the non-genuine, providing direct information on lost and stolen passports, and putting in place some data bases and ICT architecture that will capture and make the data available in real time to the Interpol, Nigeria would have eased the security and information-sharing details the US needed to reactivate the immigrant visa propramme for Nigerians.356 But some critics saw these security measures the US was inspiring as “an euphemism for spying”—“that rather than America spending huge sums spying on Nigerians, the Nigerian government should do the job and pass the results under the guise of information sharing”; unfortunately, America itself does not share information about its citizens with Nigeria.357 Despite the suspicion about America’s espionage here, Nigeria still responded with great concerns to Washington’s migrant ban; so much so that at the inaugural meeting of the US/Nigeria Forum—a bilateral platform where both countries progressively improve on their relations and address concerns for the benefit of citizens—the Permanent Secretary (Ambassador Mustapha Sulaiman) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that Nigeria had “accomplished almost 90% of the requirements by the US government” in order for it to re-evaluate and lift Nigeria as a candidate for the ban.358 For the sake of the gargantuan inequality between the two countries, this

350 See

Agwu (2018, pp. 121–124), op. Cit. Ojeme (2020, p. 9). 352 Loc. Cit. 353 See “Nigeria has no data on migrationILO”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, February 21, 2020, p. 13. 354 See Ojeme (2020, p. 9), op. cit. 355 Loc. Cit. 356 Loc. Cit. 357 See for instance, Lakemfa (2020, p. 32). 358 See Ojeme and Ekpang (2020, p. 11). 351 See

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was not an avenue for any form of nationalist exertions by Nigeria, not when Abuja also needed America’s support with logistics to fight the Boko Haram insurgents. But apart from this policy being a euphemism for espionage, it was also reckoned with as pure politics—the mark of Nigeria and the other affected countries’ underdevelopment, the “whitening” of America (with “the American establishment programme to pack whites into the country”), the prevention of the so-called “browning” of the country by stopping the inflow of Nigerians and people from “shithole” countries, and the bigoted policy of discrimination because although America established and continued to sustain contemporary terrorist groups (Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaeda in the Gulf, and ISIS in Syria and Iraq), and although fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 bombers were from Saudi Arabia, the US never issued visa ban on Saudi Arabia.359 Even more significative of America’s double-standards on the war on terrorism was the fact that at the heat of Nigeria’s engagement of more enhanced terrorists in the wake of the dissolution of Libya and Moammar Gadaffi’s government, “Americans not only refused to sell Nigeria arms to fight and conquer the Boko Haram terrorists, but worse still, [it] forbade other countries to sell us arms”.360 The irony of it all was that in the wake of this migrant visa ban, Nigeria never used its “big brother” African policy to coordinate other African countries for a joint response in order to robustly meet President Trump’s narcissism; rather Nigeria curiously “went into panic mood, pledging it will meet the demands of America”; unlike “small Eritrea with a population of 5,767,105 [that] denounced the ban”, declaring that it found the move unacceptable, even though it would not expel the US ambassador.361 But all these challenges notwithstanding, the demonization of migration, especially migrants moving from the developing world to the industrialized nations, tends to ignore its global function in the resolution of the contradiction in what Christine Lagarde termed “demographic shifts”362 —the situation of “an aging population in the West and Japan while across many developing nations, as much as 70% of the population is under the age of 25”.363 It was for this reason that it was argued that “a global policy that targets an optimal migration level could help businesses tap the world’s entire labour market for talent and workers …”.364 Meanwhile, a United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Report estimated that “no fewer than 17 million Africans left the continent in 2017 in search of greener pastures”.365

359 See

Lakemfa (2020, p. 32), op. cit. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 361 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 362 See Agwu (2016, p. 541), op. cit. 363 Loc. Cit. 364 See Moyo (2018, p. 16). 365 See “17 m people left Africa in 2017—UN report”, available at https://www.premiumtimesng. com/news/headlines/270613-17m-people-left-africa-in-2017-un-report.html (last visited on Friday, June 1, 2018). 360 Loc.

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For instance, in 2018 alone, 8,018 Nigerians met the stringent criteria and migration to the USA”.366 Regarding President Trump’s demonization of Nigerian migrants to the United States, he paradoxically admitted that “Nigerians and Mexicans have taken all the jobs meant for honest and hard working Americans”.367 An explanation of this paradox has been made in the fact that “Nigerians endanger the ‘America First’ policy because they are the single most educated group in America”—as “twenty-nine percent Nigerians in USA have degrees compared to 11% of the overall American population; 17% holds Masters degrees and 4% doctorate degrees compared to 8% White Americans with Masters degrees and 1% with doctorate”.368 The implication of the foregoing is that “with so many Nigerians holding one or more degrees in job placements where merit is the criterion, Nigerians will be snapping up the jobs” to the discomfiture of President Trump who, as a presidential aspirant, promised to clampdown on Nigerians.369 Meanwhile, the ‘Economic Development in Africa’ Report also indicated that 5.5 million people moved to Africa from other continents while some 19 million international (African) migrants moved within Africa”.370 In other words, migration within Africa of Africans is very low; but international migration within Africa by foreigners is ripe. This reality cannot be disconnected from the “new scramble for Africa” and it corollary, the bilateral or unilateral multilateralism that effectuates the exploitation of Africa in the so-called new scramble.

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Lakemfa, O. (2020, February 7). Visa ban: Come and see American wonder. Lagos: Vanguard. Madunagu, E. (2017, Friday, December 8) Murder of a leftist-feminist. The Guardian (Lagos). Makar, J. (2017, February). America’s good cop. New African. McLean, I. (1996). The concise Oxford dictionary of politics. Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press. Melber, H. (2017, January). Lumumba, hammarskjold and the cold war in the Congo, New African. Meseret, E. (2020, June 19).AP interview: Ethiopia to fill disputed dam, deal or no deal. The Washington Post. Retrieved Saturday, June 20, 2020, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/ world/the.americas/ap-interview-ethiopia-to-fill-disputed-dam-deal-or-no-deal/2020/06/19/bb8 eabf0-b25c. Moyo, D. (2018, June 4). Protectionism’s false promise. Time (New York). Nnnanna, O. (2017, Thursday, February 16). Trump’s early gambit on Nigeria. Lagos: Vanguard. Nugent, C. (2018, August 27). China accused of detaining millions in crackdown on ethnic minority. Time (New York). Obama, B. (2020). A promised land. New York: Viking, an imprint of Pengiun Books. Obiezu, K. (2020, August 5). Nigerian Army: Rubbing salt on nation’s sore. The Nation. Retrieved August 5, 2020, from https://thenationonlineng.net/nigerian-army-rubbing-salt-on-nations-sore/. Ojeme, V. (2020, Wednesday, February 5). FG begins move to reverse US visa ban. Lagos: Vanguard. Ojeme, V., & Ekpang, A. (2020, Thursday, September 17). US review ban on migrant visa as Nigeria meets 90% Requirement Visa. Lagos: Vanguard. Okocha, C., & Ogunmade, O. (2020, Sunday, February 2). Immigration Visa Ban: Buhari sets up C’ttee to address US security concerns. ThisDay (Lagos). Okoli, A. (2020, Thursday, July 30). IPOD condemns release, absorption of Boko Haram into Nigerian Army, says it [is] an insult, national disgrace. Lagos: Vanguard. Omonobi, K. (2020a, March 6). FG to release another batch of 606 repentant Boko Haram/ISWAP terrorists in June. Lagos: Vanguard. Omonobi, K., Marama, N., & Nanlong, T. (2020b, Monday, August 3). War on insurgency prolonged by sabotage, Borno insists … It’s misplaced priority to spend resources to de-radicalize Boko Haram, ECWA tells FG. Lagos: Vanguard. Omonobi, K., Marama, N., Asemota, A. (2020c, Friday, July 31). Borno gov to Army: I’ll use hunters if you can’t protect us. Lagos: Vanguard. Powell, B. (2017, August 25–September 1). From war with North Korea to deadly ISIS attacks, Trump Generals are protecting America from its enemies—and perhaps the President. Newsweek. Roache,M. (2019, October 21–28). Trump retreats ahead of Turkish operation against U.S. allies in Syria. Time (New York). Seteolu, D. (2004, January/February). Globalization: Challenges for the state in Africa. Nigerian Forum, 25(1–2). Stiglitz, J. E. (2002, 2003). Globalization and its discontents. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company. Trinkunas, H. (2018). Brazil’s new President: strongman at home, weak man abroad. Retrieved November 2, 2018, from https://www.brookings.edu/. Umoru, H. (2020, July 21). I did not call for the sack of Service Chiefs, says Ndume, at vanguardngr.com. Retrieved August 4, 2020, from https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/07/i-didnot-call-for-the-sack-of-service-chiefs-says-ndume/amp/. Wambu, O. (2019, February). Masquerading Africa. New African. Weber, C. (2001, 2005, 2010, 2014). International relations theory: A critical introduction (4th ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Williams, S. (2017, January). Congolese uranium and the Cold War. New African. Woodward, B. (2018). Fear: Trump in the white house. New York: Simon & Schuster. Wuyo, I. (2020, Thursday, July 30). Ndume flays FG over amnesty for Boko Haram fighters; says repentant insurgents returned to base, after killing parents; Govt. Pampering killers of my husband—victim. Lagos: Vanguard.

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Yakhot, O., & Spirkin, A. (1971). The basic principles of dialectical and historical materialism. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Zakaria, F. (2018, September 20). I wanted to understand Europe’s populism. So I talked to Bono. The Washington Post. Retrieved Sunday, September 23, 2018, from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-wanted-to-understand-europes-populism-soi-talked-to-bono/2018/09/20/55ee0d82-bcfd-11e8-b7d2-0773aa1e33da-story.html.

Chapter 2

Globalization, Populism and Nationalism in the Making of Brexit

2.1 UK and Undermining the European Union Ideal When the European Union (EU) was formed, first “as a small-bore operation that was based on a common trade in coal among three relatively small countries— Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg, the so-called BeNeLux nations that later expanded to six members and acquired a new momentum when France and Germany joined the coal project that ultimately turned into the EU,1 it represented (as an organization) a quintessential multilateralism—a socio-economic and political organization for the United Kingdom, and an exemplary multilateralism for the United States and the entire Western world—the latter from the point of view of the EU being the bastion for the propagation of the liberal world view.2 The ideological significance of the organization was such that some critic even argued that Washington “was allegedly using the UK as a Trojan Horse to penetrate the EU”.3 But this conspiratorial allegation notwithstanding, for the United Kingdom, the EU was specifically its largest market that took in almost half of its exports; and for the entire EU organizational framework, this multilateral project was a laudable “community of nations cooperating to create larger markets, greater efficiency and

1 See

University of Luxembourg (Uni.Lu) in “Historical events in the European integration process (1945–2014), CVCE.eu, available at https://www.cvce.eu/en/collections/unit-content/-/unit/02b b76df-d066-4c08-a58a-d4686a3e68ff/02d476c7-815d-4d85-8f88-9a2f0e559bb4 (last visited on August 25, 2020); see also Olatunji Dare at Home Abroad in “The ECOWAS failed mission to Mali”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, August 25, 2020, back page. 2 See Fareed Zakaria in “The EU is a great idea that has gone awry”, Washington Post, available at http://www.dailycamera.com/columnists/ci_32393373/fareed-zakaria-eu-is-great-idea-tha t-has (last visited on January 20, 2019). 3 See Owei Lakemfa in “Reluctant divorcee UK claims to be happy”, Vanguard (Lagos), January 31, 2020, p. 31. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0_2

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political stability”.4 For the rest of the western world, the EU and the United States were in synergy, “the two main engines behind a world [the EU world] based on open markets, democratic politics, liberty and law, [as well as] human rights and global welfare”.5 The foregoing were the ideals that the EU represented (with being the Trojan Horse in the hand of the US—an ideological idea—being a conspiratorial one) until it “became obsessed with two massive issues that have undermined its central achievement”—the overtly ambitious issue of the rapid integration of many new countries that were far less economically and socially developed than its original members; and the issue of the challenges posed by the controversial common euro currency.6 Concerning the EU on this issue of the rapid integration of new countries, it was obvious that: Since 1993, it has expanded from 12 countries to 28. Originally focused on opening up markets, streamlining regulations and creating new growth opportunities, the EU soon became a "transfer union," a vast scheme to redistribute funds from prosperous countries to emerging markets. Even in today’s strong economic environment, spending by the EU accounts for more than 3 percent of Hungary’s economy and almost 4 percent of Lithuania’s. This gap between a rich and poor Europe with open borders inevitably produced a migration crisis. For example, as Matthias Matthijs pointed out in Foreign Affairs, from 2004 to 2014, about 2 million Poles migrated to the UK and Germany and about 2 million Romanians moved to Italy and Spain. These movements put massive strains on the safety nets of destination countries and provoked rising nationalism and nativism. The influx into Europe of more than 1 million refugees in 2015, mostly from the Middle East, must be placed in the context of these already sky-high migrant numbers. And as can be seen almost everywhere, from the United States to Austria, fears of immigration are the rocket fuel for right-wing nationalists, who then discredit the political establishment that they deem responsible for unchecked flows.7

Even in the heat of Brexit when the Balkan nations of Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and North Macedonia were aiming to join the EU, France vetoed the expansion; but the EU enlargement Commissioner, Oliver Varhelyi, projected the expansion in “geo-strategic” terms, arguing that the EU cannot stem its waning influence without stabilizing the Balkan.8 It was for this same “geo-strategic” purpose of stabilizing Europe that the UK war-time Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, declared on a September 19, 1946 speech at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, that “we must build a kind of United States of Europe” and that “in this way only will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living”.9 4 See

Fareed Zakaria in “The EU is a great idea that has gone awry”, Washington Post, available at http://www.dailycamera.com/columnists/ci_32393373/fareed-zakaria-eu-is-great-idea-tha t-has (last visited on January 20, 2019). 5 Loc. cit. Parentheses mine. 6 Loc. Cit. 7 Loc. Cit. 8 See “EU to overhaul process for admitting new members”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, February 6, 2020, p. 44. 9 See Owei Lakemfa in “Reluctant divorcee UK claims to be happy”, Vanguard (Lagos), January 31, 2020, p. 31, op. cit.

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But then, this consistent inclination to admit new members—including the UK— was vetoed by France, in which President Charles de Gaulle in 1967, reportedly argued in respect of the UK, that the UK was not a good and fit person for the marriage and that it would not be faithful as it was in the romantic relationship with the United States, which was alleged to be using the UK as a Trojan Horse to penetrate the EU.10 With Brexit, the UK actually proved unfaithful in that marriage with the EU. Nobody knows what the fate of the Balkan nations would be with time if they are eventually admitted to the EU. And on the second issue of the euro, it was also alleged that it was: Launched more with politics than economics in mind; [and that] the euro has embodied a deep structural flaw: It forces a unified monetary system on 19 countries that continue to have vastly different fiscal systems. So, when a recession hits, countries do not have the ability to lower the value of their currency, nor do they get large additional resources from Brussels (as American states do from Washington when they go into recession). The results, as could be seen for years after 2008, were economic stagnation and political revolt.11

In addition to the anxieties that were provoked by global inequality and exclusion, the derailing of the EU (especially in its perception as a project that was no longer serving its purpose; and which had rather become “a transfer union, a vast scheme to redistribute funds from the prosperous countries to emerging markets”, particularly to those countries that had either emerged or were previously in the orbit of the defunct Soviet Union12 ) provided the background for the eruption of discontent and the foundering of the EU as a community, the growth of populism and nationalism in the United Kingdom (and many other original member countries); all of which heightened the agitation for Brexit and the resultant referendum to that effect that the leave campaign group narrowly won.

2.2 The Brexit Debacle The rapid integration of far less economically and socially developed countries as well as the introduction of the euro may have contributed to Brexit; but these factors are not as honed as the fact that, from the outset, the UK had always been a reluctant member of the organization, having been ever reputedly afraid that the EU “would affect its relations with its Commonwealth countries, and that in any case, it desired ‘one-world economic system’ with the Pound as a central currency”13 ; and having been hubristically (“as an ancient and proud democracy”) averse to incorporated into 10 Loc.

Cit. Fareed Zakaria in “The EU is a great idea that has gone awry”, Washington Post, available at http://www.dailycamera.com/columnists/ci_32393373/fareed-zakaria-eu-is-great-idea-tha t-has (last visited on January 20, 2019), op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 12 Loc. Cit. 13 See Owei Lakemfa in “Reluctant divorcee UK claims to be happy”, Vanguard (Lagos), January 31, 2020, p. 31, op. cit. 11 See

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a “supranational government”.14 Unfortunately, the British fears about the EU has remained illusory because the dollar has since supplanted the Pound in the pecking order of global central currencies while the supra-nationalism of the EU has remained unrealizable because unlike the United States of America that is a single political and sovereign unit, the EU is a coalition of sovereignties working together in a multilateral organization. The national interest is the primary quest of every nation-state, but when this quest co-joins with populism and chauvinistic nationalism (nativism instead of the regular nationalism) in antagonism to globalization because of immigration and other internationally divisive issues like refugees, terrorism and economic nationalism or protectionism, amongst others, the consequence becomes an extreme right-wing behaviour like Brexit. So, what forced the British Prime Minister David Cameron to embark on the 2016 referendum on the UK exiting the European Union was actually a combination of the Brexit forces in his conservative Tory Party as well as the leader of the Brexit Party, “Nigel Farage’s brand of populism and anti-EU rhetoric”.15 But as has been curiously made evident in this book, the road to Brexit was littered with many debacles; but the debacles notwithstanding, the eventual culmination of them all was the happening of Brexit on January 31, 2020, with the UK and the EU launched into “a transition period of eleven months that was primed to end on December 31, 2020—a transition period that was to enable them work out the divorce details”, which would include “trade and non-trade issues like education, data, security, intelligence, aviation, culture, research and fisheries”.16 Later, it turned out that the entire process of the post-Brexit negotiation was dimensioned or fraughted with difficulties. One of the difficulties was that the UK would be subjected to EU rules, even though, because of Brexit, London would no longer be part of the making of the rules; but in an apparent defiance, a leaked memo from the Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, reportedly insinuated that the UK would adopt a stance of confident independence and not cohere with the former EU allies.17 Another curious difficulty about Brexit was that the Brexiteers had banked so much on the UK’s relationship with the US while contemplating Brexit; it was such that before the referendum in 2016, Boris Johnson—then the Mayor of London—predicted that outside the EU, there would be a thriving UK that would be “even better and more valuable allies of the United States”; while Liam Fox (as trade Secretary) even enthused that

14 See

Johnson (2014, p. 308). Michael Holden, Guy Faulconbridge and David Holmes in “Brexit Party’s Farage ridicules Harry and Meghan with jibe at UK royals—Guardian”, Reuters, available at https://www.yahoo. com/news/brexit-partys-farage-ridicules-harry-074015805.html (last visited on August 12, 2019). 16 See Owei Lakemfa in “Reluctant divorcee UK claims to be happy”, Vanguard (Lagos), January 31, 2020, p. 31, op. cit. 17 See “UK will not align with EU rules, says Raab”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, February 3, 2020, p. 39. 15 See

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Britain’s relationship with America had been “special” and that Brexit would provide a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to raise it to a new level”.18 Unfortunately, shortly before Brexit, the UK found itself at loggerheads with the United States on tax, trade and technology.19 In particular reference to technology, a security-related issue arose in intelligence matters when the UK granted Huawei access to its 5G network, triggering a disappointment by the President Trump administration because allowing the Chinese telecommunications giant access to some of its 5G mobile network, especially as it concerns modems on military bases around the world would pose potential security risks.20 Huawei is seriously reprobated for snitching on the opposition in Africa for the governments of the day.21 Because China is remarkable in the international community in making it easier for authoritarian regimes, especially by lending them money and selling them arms in subSahara Africa; and because Huawei in particular had helped Uganda and Zambia to spy on political opponents,22 this Chinese technological (telecoms) behemoth was considered a big security threat by Washington. The decision of Prime Minister Boris Johnson on January 28, 2020 not to ban hardware made by the market-leading Chinese firm, Huawei, as the UK built out its infrastructure for 5G wireless technology was a blow to President Trump’s administration that had waged a months-long campaign to persuade allies to shun Huawei— having therein lost its closest ally, the UK.23 Despite the American Secretary of State’s (Mike Pompeo) warning that Britain should not buy the 5G telecoms kit from Huawei of China because this would let China to “control the internet of the future”, and given the consequent inherent security risks and loggerheads with Washington on the matter, the Trump’s administration decided that it would retaliate with punitive tariffs on British car exports.24 In addition to the United States’punitive tariffs, and because the UK’s decision to allow Huawei to build “non-core” parts of its 5G would allow Huawei to spy for the government of China and constitute a national security threat (which Huawei 18 See “A weaker post-Brexit Britain looks to America”, economist.com, available at https://www. economist.com/briefing/2020/01/30/a-weaker-post-brexit-britain-looks-to-america (last visited on Bebruary 2, 2020). 19 Loc. Cit. 20 See Amanda Macias in “Trump administration ‘disappointed’ by UK’s decision to grant Huawei access to 5G networks”, CNBC, available at https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/28/trump-administr ation-disappointed-with-uk-decision-on-huawei-5g.html (last visited on Saturday, 01 February 2020). 21 See Samuel Woodhams in “Huawei says its surveillance tech will keep African cities safe but activists worry it’ll be misused”, Quartz Africa, available at https://qz.com/africa/1822312/huawiessurveillance-tech-in-africa-worries-activists/ (last visited on March 21, 2020). 22 See “Democracy in Africa: Generation game; Across the continent, young protesters are standing up to aging autocrats”, The Economist, March 7th–13th 2020, p. 32. 23 See “Britain sides with China in technology cold war”, Time (New York), February 10, 2020, p. 7. 24 See “A weaker post-Brexit Britain looks to America”, economist.com, available at https://www. economist.com/briefing/2020/01/30/a-weaker-post-brexit-britain-looks-to-america (last visited on Bebruary 2, 2020), op. cit.

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continued to deny), Boris Johnson himself, after Brexit, on Tuesday, March 10, 2020 (although he won the vote with a narrow margin of 24 votes) fended off a party revolt when a group of Conservative party rebels tried to pass a bill that would rip Huawei out of Britain’s telecoms by the end of 2020.25 Because of this narrow victory, and although it refused to commit to any timetable to ban the Chinese company”, the Boris Johnson’s government tried to placate the rebel Conservative party members “by saying that it would work toward increasing the supply of 5G telecoms gear so operators would not need to use Huawei” that was considered a high-risk vendor because of its suspected capacity for espionage.26 Fortunately, and to the delight of President Trump, granted that China did not reportedly come clean on the COVID-19 pandemic, in addition to its crackdown on Hong Kong with its national security legislation, the UK’s mobile providers were banned from buying new Huawei 5G equipment after December 31, 2020; and were equally required to also remove all the Chinese (that is Huawei) firm’s 5G from their networks by 2027.27 The UK’s banning of the Chinese Huawei from its network was equally to remove the sanctions that Washington had imposed on it because of the national security threat that Chinese 5G kit reportedly posed, even though Huawei denied it.28 It was the same way the UK flirted with the United States before Brexit on January 31, 2020 that it also flirted with its former colonies in Africa and even the EU itself with a view to maintaining warm trade relationships.29 But like it started developing security and intelligence issues with the US over Huawei, it is also likely to develop issues with the African countries over the continuous sensitization of African leaders on the dysfunctions of bilateral or unilateral multilateralism, which the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, had latched on as Brexit approached.30 As will be seen later in this book, critics have remained very assertive about the exploitative nature of bilateral or unilateral multilateralism, with one noting in respect of the UK-Africa Summit that “as for us Africans, I think we should be smart enough to 25 See Isobel Asher Hamilton in “The UK government said it would like to exclude Huawei from its 5G networks, but admitted it’s too inconvenient”, Reuters, available at https://www.yahoo.com/ news/uk-government-said-exclude-huawei-122905424.html (last visited on Thursday, March 12, 2020). 26 Loc. Cit. 27 See Henry Ojelu in “UK bans China’s Huawei from 5G network”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, July 15, 2020, p. 30. 28 Loc. Cit. 29 See Owei Lakemfa in “Reluctant divorcee UK claims to be happy”, Vanguard (Lagos), January 31, 2020, p. 31, op. cit. 30 See Aisha Salaudeen in “Britain seeks closer economic ties with Africa following Brexit”, cnn.com, available at https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/31/business/brexit-uk-africa-intl/index.html (last visited on February 1, 2020).

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know that in the wake of its divorce, and search for new markets, new partners and places to exploit as it did in the pre-colonial times, the UK has our continent fully in its sight”.31 Africa’s greatest undoing in this matter is its underdevelopment and total dependence on foreigners. Yet, this notwithstanding, the UK’s continuous challenges in its membership of the EU had been as old as the mooting of the idea itself. This evidently demonstrates that until Brexit, the UK had been a reluctant member of the EU. It must be recalled that when the EU initially started in 1950 as the European Coal and Steel Community—a rudimentary European Union—the UK never entered an application to join because of the fear of the supranational government.32 Eventually, when after years of negotiations the Treaty of Rome to unite Europe was signed in 1957, the UK opted out of it, comforted by its Commonwealth countries, its desire of a one-world economic system, and its aspiration for its currency—the Pound.33 Hence, only six countries (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg) became the consequent original European Economic Community (EEC) members, an organization that was later renamed the European Union.34 But within four years after the UK rejected the EEC, it changed its mind and decided to join, but now, it was rejected in 1967 by France, in which the French President Charles de Gualle vetoed that move and argued that the UK was not good and fit for the EU membership.35 It was not until Georges Pompidou succeeded Charles de Gaulle that France’s objection to UK’s membership of the EU was withdrawn and it joined in 1973 as a “reluctant” member, having refused to join the EU’s Schengen Agreement on June 14, 1985 (that abolished border controls between member states) and the single currency that was adopted on January 1, 1999, leading to the floating of the euro.36 The UK rejected the Schengen Visa that promoted the migration of non-EU citizens into the UK, but as it concerned the free movement or migration of EU citizens that the UK accepted, it still rejected or discriminated against those from Eastern Europe,37 the less developed part of Europe that the EU had admitted into the organization. It was in this context that some critics felt that the EU was just tolerating the UK by “bending over backwards to accommodate it”; yet, the UK “remained dissatisfied, even complaining about its financial contributions to the marriage”38 —as canvassed by the leave campaign.

31 See Owei Lakemfa in “Reluctant divorcee UK claims to be happy”, Vanguard (Lagos), January 31, 2020, p. 31, op. cit. 32 See Boris Johnson (2014); The Churchill Factor …, pp. 305, 308, op. cit. 33 See Owei Lakemfa in “Reluctant divorcee UK claims to be happy”, Vanguard (Lagos), January 31, 2020, p. 31, op. cit. 34 Loc. Cit. 35 Loc. Cit. 36 Loc. Cit. 37 Loc. Cit. 38 Loc. Cit.

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Apart from the British peculiar problems with the EU, many members of the organization had begun to jilt globalization and focus on nationalism, populism and protectionism. Contrary to the expectation that those that were made vulnerable in globalization would be save, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that was framed to force through the economic integration via creating some convergence criteria that all European countries must follow (and which was “designed as a must sign for all countries) was roundly rejected by Denmark (in a Danish referendum) in June of that year (1992) even though it passed in the British Parliament because the Brits did not require a referendum to ratify it.39 Another ambitious agenda for political integration that was framed in the European Constitution treaty of 2005 was also roundly rejected by French and Dutch voters in May/June 2005 respectively, leading to the Lisbon treaty of 2007 that tempered the European Constitution.40 Europe, like the rest of the world, had become aware of the inevitability of internationalism in globalization; and many European nations and people had become morbidly fearful of this syndrome of internationalism and the inherent prospect of losing state sovereignty as a result of globalization.41 There was also the hoax of Turkey joining the EU that the Brexit campaigners propagated, hyping the scare in “facing potentially 70 million Turks having the right of free movement if Turkey became an EU member”—a prospect that the then British Prime Minister David Cameron stoutly refuted in his anti-Brexit campaigns, reportedly insisting that it “was unlikely that Turkey would ever enter the EU”.42 There was also the economic problem of a significant proportion of Euroskeptics feeling “themselves to be on the frontlines of competition for low-paid jobs and assistance from the state”.43 In fact, before the failed coup in Turkey44 and the attendant President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s purge to rid Turkey of Gulenism,45 the declaration of a state of emergency and crackdown on both the military and other state institutions (including the academia and civil society), triggering the talk about

39 See Fareed Zakaria in “The EU is a great idea that has gone awry”, Washington Post, available at http://www.dailycamera.com/columnists/ci_32393373/fareed-zakaria-eu-is-great-idea-tha t-has (last visited on January 20, 2019), op. cit. 40 Loc. Cit. 41 Loc. Cit. 42 See Onyekachi Wambu in “The Old Silk Road and a new world order”, New African, August/September, 2016, p. 98. 43 See Nana Adu Ampofo in “Brexit and the Black Atlantic”, New African, July 2016, p. 6. 44 See Roger Cohen in “Turkey’s coup that wasn’t”, Daily Sun (Lagos), Friday, July 22, 2016, p. 34. 45 See “Turkey’s Gulen purges: A conspiracy so immense”, The Economist, September 10th–16th 2016, pp. 25–26.

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the prospect of denying Turkey the prospective EU membership,46 the possibility of Turkey joining the EU was not only considered a hoax but also a fib.47 As it were, “the successful campaign for Britain to leave the European Union warned about the hordes of immigrants that would result from Turkey’s imminent accession to the union”.48 But it was presumably because of this fear of Turkey joining, amongst other reasons, that this category of people (the vulnerable and dispossessed in the UK) was apparently persuaded on the impact of such a possibility on them; including also their worry about the “unfairness of immigration”49 ; hence, contributing to the pro-Brexit vote carrying the day in the UK referendum. Aside from the xenophobia amongst the Brexiters, the terrorists in the Middle East also loathe the presence of foreigners on their soil. The unacceptability of terrorist tactics does not discount the fact that those that are averse to the “pollution” of globalization have some legitimate points—for instance, at the levels of cultural globalization and the globalization of terrorist threats, both of which imperceptibly seek to diffuse and dilute the culture of “weaker” societies through migration and refugee flows as well as insecurity. For North America and Europe (in the wake of the Syrian and Iraq internal crises that gave birth to the ISIS) the migration and refugee flows that resulted from those crises were accentuated by globalization. This intensified the apprehension about the possible infiltration of these developed and privileged countries/regions of the world by terrorists that do not only take it out on their hosts in the guise of “sacred” or millenarian terror, but also inspire the lone wolves, some of which were the socio-politically and economically disconnected in their various host societies. Kenya’s threat to close the Dadaab refugee camp did not only question in general terms, the seriousness of the international community toward the responsibility in refugee protection, it also specifically challenges Kenya’s commitment to the principle of non-refoulement as bedrock of the protection of refugees.50 The plight or challenge of the Somali refugee in Kenya is the more reason why it is indubitable that terrorism can best be resolutely tackled if the international community (in spite of itself, its numerous contradictions in an increasingly globalizing world) 46 In the wake of the post coup crackdown—presaged by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s declaration in the early morning after (July 16, 2016) that “this uprising is a gift from God to us because this will be a reason to cleanse our army” (see Jared Malsin in “Turkey’s long night of the soul”, Time, (New York), August 1, 2016, p. 6)—and, in addition to a dispute over Turkey’s anti-terrorism legislation, the EU (in reaction to the President Erdogan’s crackdown or purges that hugely violate human rights and other EU values) began to walk away from its promise to reward Ankara with visa-free access to Turks in order that it (Turkey) would help choke or stem the flow of the illegal migrants to Europe; see “Give us visa-free travel or lose migrant deal, Turkey tells EU”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Tuesday, August 16, 2016, p. 22, op. cit. 47 See “Art of the lie: Politicians have always lied. Does it matter if they leave the truth behind entirely?, The Economist, September 10th–16th 2016, p. 11. 48 Loc. Cit. 49 See Nana Adu Ampofo in “Brexit and the Black Atlantic”, New African, July 2016, p. 6, op. cit. 50 See Fred Aja Agwu (2011), The Law of Armed Conflict and African Wars …, pp. 329–331, op. cit.

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can band together and treat its member-nations fairly, especially with a significant improvement in the international political economic relations between peoples and nations. The Brexit debate, which raged across the country and was packed with vitriol, was described as a “vituperative” and “unnecessarily insulting” one.51 In fact, it was obvious that Thomas Mair, the slayer of Jo Cox, acted out of deep-seated aversion to immigrants because he struck at the height of the economy and immigrationdominated Brexit campaigns—the debate in the referendum to determine whether or not Britain would remain or exit the EU. The Labour Party campaigned for remain and its Parliamentarian, Jo Cox held a very liberal or pro-remain position on the matter, in addition to being receptive to the unceasing flow of asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants in general into Britain as well as in Britain remaining in the EU. This was why some critics of the murder of Cox insisted that “Jo Cox … was murdered by an irate [Euro-skeptic] for her pro-EU stance” and “will be remembered as the symbol of how a straightforward, for or against, political debate turned into hate campaign and a national referendum became an act of terror”.52 In fact, in their peddling of xenophobia and Euro-skepticism, the pro-Brexit demagogues had a field day during the campaigns. Because of the prevailing atmosphere of Euro-skepticism, and, of course, the obvious caustic sentiment against globalization, they hijacked the campaign and made it “a carnival of bad-tempered distortion and exaggeration”, thus, evidently culminating in the “brutal murder” of Jo Cox.53 When charged to court the following day and asked his name, the assassin, Thomas Mair responded that his name was “death to traitors and freedom for Britain”.54 The United Kingdom eventually voted to leave the European Union. It was essentially because the cosmopolitanism inherent in globalization had not been made to work for the entire humanity that there came the serious over-reaction against it as found in acts of terrorism and now the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the Brexit signaling the United Kingdom’s retreat from cosmopolitanism and a further diminution of “Great Britain” in contemporary times. Berxit became an irony for a people that were eminently part of the pioneers of liberalism and globalization, but who are now developing cold feet on account of some of the inexonerable forces of globalization (especially migration, outsourcing and free trade). In Brexit, just as in the election of President Trump, the British voted to restrain or roll back some of these forces of globalization, which is a serious indication that something is wrong and should be done about globalization. 51 This was how the fiction writer and former spy for the M16 spy service, Frederick Forsyth, himself a long time advocate for Brexit, described the campaign, even as he lamented that political correctness had become “a new religion” in Britain; see The Guardian UK as reproduced in Daily Trust (Abuja), Saturday, September 17, 2016, p. 24. 52 See Reuben Abati in “The Brexit Nightmare”, The Guardian (Lagos), Sunday, June 26, 2016, p. 11. Parenthesis mine. 53 See “Europe must rediscover the virtues of civil political debate”, The Economist, June 25th 2016, p. 22. 54 See Phil Noble in Big Shots, “England: Brexit Murder”, Newsweek, July 1, 2016 (07. 01. 2016), p. 6, op. cit.

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The scare of Brexit hit the Brits hard when the successor to David Cameron, Prime Minister Theresa May, announced that she would trigger Article 50 (that would see to the negotiations for the actual exit) in April 2017, a timetable that, on October 4, 2016, set the Pound plummeting to its lowest level against the dollar in 31 years.55 Consequently, some activists headed to a UK High Court, challenging Prime Minister May’s authority in hiding (with her government) under the so-called “royal prerogative”, to trigger the British exit from the EU without a parliamentary vote.56 But on Tuesday, January 24, 2017, the UK Supreme Court rejected the government’s argument that “under the Royal Prerogative (powers handed to ministers by the Crown)”, it could trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty without consulting the Parliament as well as the government’s argument “that the MPs had voted overwhelmingly to put the issue in the hands of the British people when they backed the calling of [the] June referendum in which UK voters backed Brexit by 51.9% to 48.1%; even though it also ruled that “the Scottish Parliament and Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies did not need a say”.57 Consequently, the Supreme Court ruled that “Parliament must vote on whether the government can start the Brexit process”, which meant that Prime Minister Theresa May would not trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to begin talks with the EU until the MPs and Peers gave their backing.58 The Prime Minister had conceded a parliamentary debate but not a vote; yet, these activist opponents that went to court raised the issue of upholding the democratic process, arguing that the Brexit process cannot begin without a vote in the parliament, in the House of Commons59 ; which was the same argument they maintained at the Supreme Court hearing.60 Being not only a highly educated but also a highly intellectual Western society where things are deeply subjected to dialectical thinking, the Brits could not have ignored this “royal prerogative” that was clearly a transgression of democratic ethos; after all, in the June 23, 2016 referendum, the “voters narrowly chose to leave the EU by a 52–48 per cent margin”.61 This narrow margin was probably the outcome of the fact that Scotland overwhelmingly voted for the UK to remain in the EU. In the British Parliament, Brexit risked being vetoed by the Scottish. When Theresa May hinted that that Article 50 would not be invoked without a “UK-wide approach”, the Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, took it for granted that there would be 55 See

“Pound plunges over Brexit fears”, Time (New York), October 17, 2016, p. 8. “Brexit vote faces challenge in UK high court”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, October 14, 2016, p. 55. 57 See “UK govt. loses Brexit vote appeal, must consult parliament: Europe reacts to ruling”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, January 25, 2017, p. 45. 58 Loc. Cit. 59 See “Brexit vote faces challenge in UK high court”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, October 14, 2016, p. 55, op. cit. 60 See “UK govt. loses Brexit vote appeal, must consult parliament: Europe reacts to ruling”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, January 25, 2017, p. 45, op. cit. 61 See “Brexit vote faces challenge in UK high court”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, October 14, 2016, p. 55, op. cit. 56 See

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both a debate and a vote in Parliament to that effect and, therefore, enthused about the opportunity to block the exit, saying, “I think we’re in a very strong position and that is a position I’m going to use as well as I can”.62 In fact, shortly after the referendum in which Scotland overwhelmingly voted for the UK to remain rather than exit the EU, Ms Nicola Sturgeon said that Scotland, being a nation and not a region of the UK, would “immediately” go into talks “with EU member states with a view to maintaining the EU membership”.63 Even when Boris Johnson assumed duty as the British Prime Minister and the Brexit crisis deepened, the leadership of the Labour Party (Mr. Jeremy Corbyn—an accomplished Eurosceptic) that campaigned for remain was still under pressure for not making the case for remain or the EU forcefully enough; while Nicola Sturgeon said that the United Kingdom that Scotland voted to remain in the 2014 independence referendum “does not exist anymore” after the referendum to leave the EU.64 Thus, she reiterated that “what’s going to happen with the UK is that there are going to be deeply damaging consequences” of which she would try and protect Scotland from65 —her supposed tactic being a second Scotland vote to leave the UK. The decision by Theresa May’s government (suffused as it were with many individuals with Brexit sympathy, individuals like Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson) to contemplate and actually decide bypassing a parliamentary vote after a debate was an antithesis of democracy that could not have been met with meek acquiescence in the British society. Why would it not be all about the game of democracy; after all, was it not The Economist, the very megaphone of capitalism/liberalism/neo-liberalism66 (founded in the early 1840s “to support the repeal of the Corn Laws”67 ) that—in making a point (in its defence of globalization) about how some free trade agreements trump democracy—wrote that “many see the rules that bind signatories to trade pacts as an affront to democracy”?.68 This is particularly so in those countries where treaties are not subjected to legislative oversight and approval before executive ratification. But even the former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, came out to express optimism that the United Kingdom would remain in the EU as the departure by 62 See “Nicola Sturgeon: Scotland can block Brexit”, The Nation (Lagos), Monday, July 18, 2016, p. 39. 63 Loc. Cit. 64 See “United Kingdom: Post-Brexit opposition crisis deepens”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 1, 2019, p. 41. 65 Loc. Cit. 66 As affirmed by The Economist, by whatever name called, be it capitalism, liberalism or neoliberalism, this is the belief in “open economies and open societies, where the free exchange of goods, capital, people and ideas is encouraged and where universal freedoms are protected from state abuse by the rule of law”; see “The year of living dangerously: Liberals have lost most of the argument in 2016. They should not feel defeated so much as reinvigorated”, The Economist, December 24th 2016, p. 11, op. cit. 67 See “Why they ‘re wrong: Globalization critics say it benefits only the elite. In fact, a less open world would hurt the poor most of all”, The Economist, October 1st 2016, p. 9, op. cit. 68 Loc. cit.

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dint of the Brexit vote was not etched in stone.69 According to Blair, Brexit “can be stopped if the British people decide that, having seen what it means, [that] the pain-gain cost–benefit analysis doesn’t stack up”.70 But Tony Blair’s optimism was predicated on the possibility of the British Parliament and the British people being allowed to have the ultimate say or to pass judgment on the matter; contrary to Prime Minister Theresa May’s insistence that “Brexit means Brexit”—thereby, rejecting the call for a second referendum and appealing a court ruling that Parliament should have a vote before the triggering of Article 50 and the beginning of the formal exit negotiations.71

2.3 The Danger of Brexit Beyond the razzmatazz about Brexit, a significant question that can be posed is whether it is in the interest of Britain, Europe, the United States and the entire Western world for Britain to leave the European Union. It is very important to make the point here that Britain had been very reluctant about an integrated Europe in the form envisaged in the European Union. This was why, just after two years of joining the EU, it contemplated a divorce that was in 1975, put to a referendum that resulted in 67.2 percent saying it should remain—as opposed to the 2016s referendum in which 51.9 percent voted for the divorce.72 The British lackluster attitude to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty was clear because the Treaty only passed in the British Parliament because (as stated above) the Brits did not need a referendum to ratify it. Thus, the British reluctance was consistent with Winston Churchill attitude to the unification of Europe. Although Churchill was considered as one of the visionary founders of the united Europe, this point “contains a very large dollop of truth” because even though it is “true that he believed Britain should play a leading role in this process of unification”; but this is by no “means the whole story”.73 Winston Churchill actually “saw Britain as somehow dwelling apart from the European congeries”, thus, he once said to General de Gaulle of France “that if Britain had to choose between Europe and the open sea, she would always choose the open sea”.74 It is obvious that right back in 1930 when Churchill “first had his brainwave about imitating America and creating a single European market, he entered this crucial reservation about his own country” (Britain), stating that: 69 See “Tony Blair says Brexit can be stopped”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, November 25, 2016, p. 50. 70 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 71 Loc. Cit. 72 See Owei Lakemfa in “Reluctant divorcee UK claims to be happy”, Vanguard (Lagos), January 31, 2020, p. 31, op. cit. 73 See Boris Johnson (2014); The Churchill Factor …, p. 304, op. cit. 74 Ibid, p. 305.

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2 Globalization, Populism and Nationalism in the Making of Brexit But we have our own dream and our own task. We are with Europe, but not for it. We are linked, but not comprised. We are interested and associated but absorbed. And should European statesmen address us in the words that were used of old: ‘wouldest thou be spoken for to the King, or the Captain of the Host?’, we should reply with the Shunammite woman, ‘I dwell among my own people’.75

Thus, Churchill “never saw Britain as part of that federal union”, which was clear “in his actions” because “it was only a few months after that 1950 debate on the Schuman Plan that he again became Prime Minister”, and “if he had really wanted Britain to join the Coal and Steel Community, he could surely have entered an application then”.76 The point is that for Churchill in an integrated Europe, “his role was to be a sponsor, a witness, rather than a contracting party” as “Britain was certainly meant to be there in the body of the church, but as an usher or even as the priest rather than one of the partners in the actual marriage”.77 And what is often forgotten in all the talk of the European Union’s rules and regulations is that its central project for decades was the creation of a single market, harmonizing taxes and eliminating tariffs and barriers,78 not the creation of a super-state. Although the vision of a united Europe that is governed by the liberal principles of free trade was additionally articulated, re-enforced and urged most aggressively by Britain’s free-market Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher (so much so that the plan succeeded in large measure), but Britain had also consistently advocated a Europe of nation-states, not a European super-state, despite the fact that irrespective of some recent rhetoric to the contrary, Europe as a super-state is what basically now exists.79 Even when Brexit brought down Theresa May as Prime Minister and she was succeeded by Boris Johnson, the man (Johnson) was a truly accomplished imbiber of the Churchillian text of a united Europe.80 Boris Johnson had reportedly seen “the EU as undemocratic and a childish fantasy”, stating equally that “the truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years had been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions—in a Freudian way—to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it”.81 Boris Johnson was one of the Brexiteers that unrepentantly led the leave EU campaign. As Prime Minister, he had remained an unrepentant Brexiteer. Concerning the failure of Brexit under Theresa May, as he reportedly remarked in his inaugural as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson stated that “we will do a new deal, a better deal that will maximize the opportunities of Brexit, while allowing us to develop a new 75 Ibid,

p. 304. p. 305. 77 Loc. Cit. 78 See Fareed Zakaria in “Boris Johnson will accelerate the decline of Europe”, The Washington Post, July 25, 2019, available at https://beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we.need.europe-to-pre serve-world-order-britain-is-pushing-it-in-the-wrong-direction/2019/07/25/f431a122-af17-11e9bc5c-e7f38-story.html? (last visited on Saturday, July27, 2019). 79 Loc. Cit. 80 See Boris Johnson (2014); The Churchill Factor …, p. 304, op. cit. 81 See Owei Lakemfa in “No deal Boris Johnson”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 26, 2019, p. 31. 76 Ibid,

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and exciting partnership with the rest of Europe based on free trade and mutual support”—all of which he promised to crack before the 99 days window left by Brussels (the October 31, 2019 allowed by the EU for Brexit to happen).82 Still on Brexit, Boris Johnson equally boasted that “the people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts because we are going to restore trust in our democracy, and we are going to fulfill the repeated promises of Parliament to the people and come out of the EU on October 31 [2019], no ifs or buts”.83 Unfortunately, it is clear that for “Brexit to happen, it would accelerate the decline of Europe as a global actor”; and this is particularly because “Britain has always been an organizing force in Europe; more so when it must be appreciated that although “Britain took a while to enter the European Economic Community”, but when once it joined in 1973, it became perhaps its most influential member.84 Even earlier than 1973 when U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall announced a plan to help Europe rebuild after World War II, it was the British government that took the lead in responding and forging a coalition of countries that ultimately accepted the Marshall Plan and worked with the United States to make it a success.85 It was also London that took the lead in organizing the coalition that became NATO, including the controversial decision to welcome Germany into the alliance in 1955.86 The consequence of the foregoing is that “with Brexit, the United States would lose a major supporter on a range of important trade and regulatory issues”; and this is particularly where the UK’s more free-market approach mirrors that of the US more closely than most EU member states.87 This closeness is especially mirrored in the “US sanctions regimes against Iran, Russia, and other countries” as well as “on data privacy and anti-trust matters, counterterrorism, and on national security issues”.88 Unfortunately, with Brexit, “Britain is poised to withdraw from Europe at a time when Europe is withdrawing from the world”, contrary to the past European “leaders such as Thatcher, François Mitterrand, Jacques Delors and Helmut Kohl” that “believed that Europe had to play a pivotal role in global affairs”.89 These past European leaders and “their successors built the single market, navigated the collapse of the Soviet empire, welcomed in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe, and projected Western values onto the new post-Cold War world”.90 But today, contemporary “European leaders are consumed with Europe’s economic 82 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 84 See Fareed Zakaria in “Boris Johnson will accelerate the decline of Europe”, The Washington Post, July 25, 2019, available at https://beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we.need.europe-to-pre serve-world-order-britain-is-pushing-it-in-the-wrong-direction/2019/07/25/f431a122-af17-11e9bc5c-e7f38-story.html? (last visited on Saturday, July27, 2019), op. cit. 85 Loc. Cit. 86 Loc. Cit. 87 Loc. Cit. 88 Loc. Cit. 89 Loc. Cit. 90 Loc. Cit. 83 Loc.

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strains, populist politics and anti-European backlashes; exemplified by the fact that “Germany’s Angela Merkel is in caretaker mode; France’s Emmanuel Macron wants a stronger Europe but is bedeviled by domestic troubles; and Britain (long the voice for energy and activism on the world stage) is busy preparing for its exit.91 Curiously, it was Princeton’s Jan-Werner Muller that has contended that the European’s effort to create a more centralized and unified Europe has largely collapsed and now being replaced by “Breurope”—a conception of the EU that is much closer to the one articulated by London.92 In other words, Müller has pointed out the irony that Britain wants to exit Europe at the moment that its vision for Europe has won the day.93 In the same vein, the former U.S. ambassador to the EU (Stuart E. Eizenstat) has equally said that Britain is always the United States’ closest ally on substantive issues within Europe.94 There is also this notion in the liberal West that the main challenge to global stability and order is obvious in the assertiveness of powers such as Russia and China.95 In such an unstable world, Europe—which has an economy second only to that of the United States—could play a crucial role in helping to preserve the liberal rules, norms and values that have been built up since 1945; even though it would need to harness its power and act with purpose.96 Unfortunately with Brexit, it is moving in the opposite direction as there is the shriveling of a group of nations that have defined and dominated the international stage since the seventeenth century; hence, “Brexit will only accelerate this sad slide”.97

2.4 The Politics of a No-Deal Brexit It was quite a tragedy that during the Brexit campaigns, the political, economic, and practical challenges of managing the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland after the UK left the EU was never discussed; but this border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was to become the biggest obstacle in securing a Brexit deal from the EU.98 After three years that the June 2016 Brexit referendum took place, the United Kingdom remained so divided and paralysed by the decision to leave the European Union that on March 27, 2019, after 91 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 93 Loc. Cit. 94 Loc. Cit. 95 Loc. Cit. 96 Loc. Cit. 97 Loc. Cit. 98 See Amanda Sloat in “Watch: Explaining Brexit and the backstop”, Brookings, available at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/10/03/watch-explaining-brexit-andthe-backstop/?utm-campaign=Brookings%20Brief&utm-source=hs-email&utm-medium=email& utm-content=77690226 (last visited on October 5, 2019). 92 Loc.

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two defeats from lawmakers that refused to ratify the exit deal she negotiated with the EU, the Prime Minister, Theresa May, made one of her “last attempt to end that paralysis by promising to resign if the Parliament would just push her deal over the line”.99 As the original March 29, 2019 Brexit deadline approached without a deal, an online petition calling for Brexit cancellation drew more than 5.8 million signatures as Brexit supporters gathered around Nigel Farage’s (a figurehead of the movement to leave the European Union) criticism of Theresa May’s “Brexit Betrayal”.100 The snag in Brexit under Theresa May was that although she staked her reputation in delivering it, she became unable to count on the support of even people who wanted to leave the EU, let alone those who did not want to leave the EU because of her inability to get an agreeable deal from the EU. It was obvious that Theresa May had been assailed by British protesters against her inability to get an agreeable Brexit deal on the one side and the EU on the other side, which prompted the snag that was the basis for her to declare on March 27, 2019 to her Tory Party that she knew there was “a desire for a new approach and new leadership”; against which she vowed she would not stand in the way of—meaning that she would resign.101 Thus, shortly before the Brexit date of March 29, 2019, and after two historic defeats and without any consensus on the delivering of Theresa May’s deal on Brexit, the British Parliament on March 14, 2019, directed her to ask the EU for more time, the result of which was that at a summit in Brussels, the leaders of the 27 other EU members agreed to postpone the new deadline for Brexit from March 29 to May 22— meaning that if the lawmakers were to (in its third effort) ratify May’s agreement with the EU, the Brexit would be postponed to May 22, 2019 and Theresa May would stand down; but if they did not (for the third time) ratify the Theresa May deal, the UK would crash out of the EU on April 12, which would be two weeks after the original date of March 29.102 It was this crashing out of the EU that was a no-deal Brexit. The consequence of a no-deal Brexit (if it were to happen on April 12, 2019) was that at home, “trade agreements, citizens’ rights and customs agreements would be nullified overnight”.103 Then overseas, the consequence or repercussion of a noBrexit deal would mean that trade with every EU country would fall, with Germany and Ireland primed to be among the countries that would be worst hit by this trade decline.104 The United States was also billed to be capable of suffering as a result of a no-Brexit because a recession in Britain (the United States’ largest export market) would have knock-on effects for U.S. producers.105 In fact, it was reasoned that 99 See Billy Perrigo in “Concerned by Brexit, May promises to go”, Time (New York), April 8, 2019, p. 6. 100 Loc. Cit. 101 Loc. Cit. 102 Loc. Cit. 103 Loc. Cit. 104 Loc. Cit. 105 Loc. Cit.

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the potential damage of no-Brexit to the global clout UK, once seen as America’s diplomatic bridge to Europe was substantial.106 As a matter of fact, it was reasoned that: Brexit, and a no-deal Brexit in particular, promises to hurt the economy and leave the country diplomatically isolated in a world where its interests are under threat, as they are right now in the Strait of Hormuz. The risk is existential for the United Kingdom, as Brexit wrenches at the bonds with Scotland and Northern Ireland.107

The no-deal Brexit was considered by Boris Johnson—an aspirant to the Prime Minister position—“as courageous and Churchillian rather than the needless act of self-harm … [and] the warnings of damage to the economy, the union and Britain’s international standing” that the abhorrent to no-Brexit and the no-deal Brexit were propagating.108 It has, however, been argued that there was no mandate for a no-deal Brexit—an argument that was neither in the “Leave Prospectus” nor advocated by “any party in the last election”, an option that was “opposed by majorities of both Parliament and the public”.109 But a European top court had ruled that the only mechanism to avoid a no-deal Brexit was for the British government to unilaterally revoke Article 50, the legal device by which Britain would exit the EU; but this was an outcome that would mean not having Brexit at all, an outcome that would delight the millions who signed the anti-Brexit petition.110 The possibility of revoking Article 50 was ruled out by the British government in the argument that it would “break the promises made by government to the British people, disrespect the clear instruction from a democratic vote and, in turn, reduce confidence in our democracy”.111 But in preparation for a no-deal Brexit, and as the Members of Parliament (MPs) forced the government to publish the Yellowhammer document that warned of food crisis and fuel shortages in the event of a no-deal scenario,112 the British authorities began preparing for possible food and medicine shortages as the Bank of England warned that a no-deal Brexit could do more harm to the UK economy than the 2008 financial crisis.113 The possibility of a no-deal Brexit became worryingly and increasingly apparent with the resignation and departure of Theresa May from 10 Downing Street, and the ascendance of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister—a man characterized as

106 Loc.

Cit.

107 See “Here we go: Buckle up, Britain. Boris Johnson promises thrills but it is heading for a serious

spill”, The Economist, July 27th—August 2nd 2019, p. 7. Cit. 109 Loc. Cit. 110 See Billy Perrigo in “Concerned by Brexit, May promises to go”, Time (New York), April 8, 2019, p. 6, op. cit. 111 Loc. Cit. 112 See “Boris Johnson denies lying to Queen over parliament suspension”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 13, 2019, p. 36. 113 See Billy Perrigo in “Concerned by Brexit, May promises to go”, Time (New York), April 8, 2019, p. 6, op. cit. 108 Loc.

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Chameleonic and enamoured of hard line Tory politics because of his “savage reshuffle” and appointment of “right-wingers to his cabinet”, people who were uncompromising Brexiteers.114 In his conviction about the necessity of a no-deal Brexit, Boris Johnson was fixated in the belief that the United States President Donald Trump would provide Britain with a “lifeboat”, a fixation that had earlier “stopped him from criticising the president, even when Mr. Trump belittled the British ambassador to Washington”, a behaviour that was considered a dangerous “pandering … at a time when Britain should be standing up to American policy on Iran”.115 Boris Johnson was also inclined to pander to the will of hard line Brexiteers that argued that the British “Parliament should be suspended so that no-deal can be forced through—in the name of democracy”, a ‘grotesqueness’ that spoke for itself; and which Johnson did not disavow.116 It was clear that Johnson possessed an “otherworldly Brexit plan” and was posed to make the same mistakes that undid Theresa May, who made “unrealistic promises about the deal Britain would get, pledges she spent two miserable years rolling back from”.117 It can be stated as a matter of fact that, like Theresa May: Mr. Johnson has made the same mistake on a large scale. He swears he will bin the “backstop” designed to avoid a hard border in Ireland, which the EU insists is non-negotiable. He says Britain need not pay the exit bill it agreed on. He has vowed to leave on October 31st, “do or die”. And he says that if the EU does not roll over, it would be “vanishingly inexpensive” for Britain to leave with no deal.118

Because of her “unrealistic promises” about her Brexit deal with the EU (vis-a-vis “the warts-and-all reality of Brexit” after the Brexit vote and the “fantasy version” that the British people were sold on in 2016 before the vote), Theresa May “found the contact with reality hard enough” to exit from within the two years she had to retreat from her overblown commitments; but Boris Johnson’s own unrealistic pandering promised to “be even more brutal” because “the red lines in which Mr. Johnson has entangled himself” could hardly be disentangled from within the three months (by October 31st 2019) he had to do so.119 In all, even Boris Johnson’s fellow Tories party members—the “wavering Tories”—were “in no doubt that if Mr. Johnson is allowed to suspend democracy [that is, the Parliament] to force through a no-deal Brexit that whacks the economy and risks the union, it will not only be a betrayal of the country, it might well spell the end of the Conservative Party”.120 In other words, the idea was for Boris Johnson to ditch the fantastical promises of a no-deal Brexit and get serious about doing a deal with the EU to achieve Brexit; for this was the only way he would end up 114 See “Here we go: Buckle up, Britain. Boris Johnson promises thrills but it is heading for a serious

spill”, The Economist, July 27th—August 2nd 2019, p. 7, op. cit. Cit. 116 Loc. Cit. 117 Loc. Cit. 118 Loc. Cit. 119 Loc. Cit. 120 Loc. Cit. 115 Loc.

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not being compared to Churchill his hero (who had a reservation about a united Europe in the mould of the United States of America121 ), but to Neville Chamberlain.122 Neville Chamberlain was the pacifist British Prime Minster that Churchill succeeded because he (Chamberlain) lost a confident vote in the House of Commons due to his (Chamberlain’s) policy of appeasement and the signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, not believing that war with Germany was inevitable and that Britain needed to aggressively rearm and confront Germany.123 Winston Churchill rearmed Britain and led it into victory over Germany.124 Unfortunately, in an era that President Donald Trump was perceived as “the king of the mediocrities, more reminiscent of the traditional court jester pretending to be the monarch for laughs than the real thing itself”, Boris Johnson was perceived to have “swiftly transitioned from a Wilson Churchill-in-waiting to a blundering sulk”.125 This was seen as another extent to which populism and its attendant “leadership deficient”126 had: ... “let loose the dogs of chaos and hatred. Extremist groups, many with violence as their modus operandi, are multiplying by the day. Western police sources say that White Supremacist groups and other racial and political extremist organizations have overtaken radical Islamic groups and are considered even more dangerous. Neo-Nazi parties are openly marching, not only in Europe but also in the US. The world seems to sliding from one extreme end to the other, like water on a rocking boat. ... Any degree of rationality or appealing to the facts in the UK’s Brexit differences has long disappeared. It is now bitter trench warfare, sometimes pitting members of the same family against each order.127

But despite the constitutional crisis in Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament and the declaration of that action as unlawful by the British Supreme Court, the so-called December 12, 2019 “Brexit election” where Johnson’s Conservative Party gave the Labour Party a drubbing of the latter’s life by the Conservatives’ winning “their biggest majority in 32 years” uplifted him with what he considered a “get Brexit done” mandate.128 The drubbing of the Labour Party in the “Brexit election” was total. For instance, in Sedgefield—“a former mining community with a mixture of market towns and well-off suburbs on the edge of Teesside, [which] had been won by Labour since 1935”, a seat that was once held by Tony Blair—alongside other

121 See

Johnson (2014); The Churchill Factor …, p. 304, op. cit.

122 See “Here we go: Buckle up, Britain. Boris Johnson promises thrills but it is heading for a serious

spill”, The Economist, July 27th–August 2nd 2019, p. 7, op. cit. 123 See “Neville Chamberlain” in WikipeDiA, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville-

Chamberlain (last visited on Friday, September 13, 2019). Cit. 125 See Anver Versi in “What makes a genuine leaders?”, New African, October 2019, p. 15. 126 Loc. Cit. 127 Loc. Cit. 128 See “Boiled with her own pudding”, The Economist, December 21st 2019, p. 9; see also “The New Conservative Party; what’s the story, northern Tories: who are the Conservatives’ new supporters, and what do they want from Boris Johnson?”, The Economist, December 21st 2019, p. 43. 124 Loc.

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“wall of seats across the north and the Midlands that had not voted Conservative in decades, “the Conservatives won 54 seats from Labour”.129 But Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party’s defeat of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in the “Brexit election” notwithstanding, the Brexit chaos, in addition to the rise of “fascistic right wingers in several Eastern European countries”,130 coupled with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s invasion of Syrian’s northern border with Turkey in pursuit of the Kurds (which the Turkish government calls terrorists), Turkey’s creation of the so-called “safe zone” (to clear Kurdish militants) as well as its determination to deny the Kurds the right of statehood,131 were all basic nubs or essential parts of the dysfunction of populism that had caused unhappiness, confusion and fright to the world in ways that reminiscence the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Europe, which had in the twentieth century convulsed the world with the Second World War and untold casualties.132

2.5 Special Place in Hell for Brexiteers Meanwhile, one of the pro-Brexit arguments has remained that “the borderless Shengen zone has, according to the Interpol, been exploited by terrorists, human traffickers and criminal gangs”; resulting across Europe, to “despondency”.133 Unfortunately, they were so minded by immigration and money (trade) that they lost sight of the tricky issue of the 500 km border between the British province of Northern Island and the Republic of Ireland, which was softened and rendered practically invisible by the Good Friday Agreement that ended the conflict over the Irish question, creating a border that the Republic of Ireland would not want to be hardened even with Britain exiting the EU and abolishing the customs union with the EU.134 As a member of the EU, the Irish Republic resisted the abrogation of this soft and invisible border for political reasons; even though it is a situation that would pose an economic risk to the rest of the EU because the UK could easily smuggle untaxed goods through it to the EU as well as the soft border enhancing an added security risks embodied in the terrorist scare.135 The resistance culminated in the UK conceding this aspect of a “soft withdrawal” (the soft and the invisibility of the 500 km border 129 See

The New Conservative Party; what’s the story, northern Tories: who are the Conservatives’ new supporters, and what do they want from Boris Johnson?”, The Economist, December 21st 2019, p. 43, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 130 See Anver Versi in “What makes a genuine leaders?”, New African, October 2019, p. 15, op. cit. 131 See “Heavy fighting as Turkey pushes into north Syria”, The Guardian (Lagos), October 11, 2019, p. 37. 132 See Anver Versi in “What makes a genuine leaders?”, New African, October 2019, p. 15, op. cit. 133 See Iain Duncan Smith in “It’s time for Britain to take back control”, Newsweek, June 24, 2016 (06/24/2016, p. 28. 134 See “Brexit and the Irish question: Borderline solution”, The Economist, December 2nd–8th 2017, p. 12, op. cit. 135 Loc. Cit.

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aforementioned).136 This soft border is also called the “Irish Backstop” (keeping the soft border or backstop), which the Pro-Brexiteers resisted because they believed that it would seriously damage the United Kingdom.137 The “Irish Backstop” was considered, therefore, as “an insurance policy to avert a hard border in Ireland by keeping the United Kingdom in a custom union with the European Union”.138 The denouement to this very thorny issue arose when it came to “putting into treaty terms the agreement to avoid a hard border in Ireland”.139 The British had thought that inking it could be evaded and that “this commitment [to a soft border] can be made consistent both with leaving the EU single market and customs union and with diverging from EU regulations”.140 As will be seen below, although the “Irish Backstop” was eventually inked in a treaty form, it was later resisted by the Boris Johnson government. But before then, the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, after a marathon meeting with her cabinet at her country retreat in Chequers, came up with what was to be tagged the Chequers Brexit plan.141 The Chequers Brexit plan consists of 12 points that involved the UK remaining closely tied to Brussels—that is, the EU; including leaving the EU on March 29, 2019; the creation of a new UK-EU free trade area for goods with a “common rulebook” that could limit the UK’s ability to strike trade deals with other countries like the United States, leaving the common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries policy; no more sending vast sums of money each year to the EU; restoring the supremacy of British courts by ending the jurisdiction of the ECJ in the UK; no hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland or between Northern Ireland and the UK; an independent foreign and defence policy working closely with the EU and other allies, etc.142 Prime Minister Theresa May reinforced this proposal at Salzburg (Austria)— that is, a Brexit within a new economic framework or cooperation with the EU as the “only serious credible” way to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland”.143 But this Chequers plan and its reiteration in Salzburg were kicked against by some people like Boris Johnson in her Conservative Tory Party and even the opposition

136 Loc.

Cit.

137 See “Brexit and Parliament: Theresa’s temporary triumph”, The Economist, February 2nd 2019,

p. 27. 138 Loc.

cit. “Britain and the European Union: Now for the difficult bit”, The Economist, January 13th 2018, p. 27. 140 Loc. Cit. 141 See “Chequers Brexit plan explained—what is Theresa May’s proposal and will Parliament vote against it?”, available at https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6718969/chequers-brexit-plan-the resa-may-proposal-labour-vote-against/ (last visited on October 2, 2018). 142 Loc. Cit. 143 See “Tusk: May’s Brexit plan won’t work”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Friday, September 21, 2018, p. 41; see also See “Theresa May stands firm despite EU rejection of her Brexit plan; EU leaders have said current Chequers proposal undermined single market, available at https://www.thenational.ae/world/europe/theresa-may-stands-firm-despite-eu-rejection-ofher-brexit-plan-1.772651 (last visited on Monday, September 24, 2018). 139 See

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Labour Party.144 It was also rejected by the head of the European Council, Donald Tusk, who insisted that the proposal “will not work” because it risked undermining the EU’s single market.145 At the annual Conservative Party conference that held in Birmingham early October 2018 in the face of the stalling Brexit talks, Theresa May called on the fractious party to unite on a Brexit strategy in order to successfully negotiate a separation with the European Union.146 But the prospect of a “soft withdrawal”, especially with Theresa May’s plan for a continued partnership or cooperation with the EU, was feared by Brexiteers for being capable of denying the UK the key ingredients that would foil their determination to clamp down on immigration.147 Hence, the insinuation by the Brexiters that a second Brexit referendum be held to confirm the determination of the UK to leave the EU, so that the pro-EU interests should not water down or even halt Britain’s departure from the EU.148 It was the Brexiters’ quest for hard Brexit—to be characterized by “a bullish negotiation strategy in talks with the European Union and, if necessary, a total break with the bloc”149 —as opposed to soft Brexit—“in which the U.K. would remain closely aligned with European Union legislation”150 that triggered the gale of resignations (by Brexit Secretary, David Davis; and Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson) from the Prime Minister Theresa May’s government151 when she came up with a Brexit strategy with the EU that was considered soft—in which the Prime Minister was alleged to be “leading the UK into a “semi-Brexit” with the “status of a colony” in the EU.152 When Boris Johnson resigned as Foreign Secretary, claiming that the Theresa May government had a “song to sing” but that “the trouble is that I have practised the words over the weekend and find that they stick in the throat”, what he meant was that in the soft Brexit deal the Prime Minister was negotiating with the EU, “we appear to be heading for a semi-Brexit, with large parts of the economy still locked in the EU system, but with no UK control over that system”.153 144 See

“Chequers Brexit plan explained—what is Theresa May’s proposal and will Parliament vote against it?”, available at https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6718969/chequers-brexit-plan-the resa-may-proposal-labour-vote-against/ (last visited on October 2, 2018), op. cit. 145 See “Tusk: May’s Brexit plan won’t work”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Friday, September 21, 2018, p. Ibid, p. 41; and “Theresa May stands firm despite EU rejection of her Brexit plan: EU leaders have said current Chequers proposal undermined single market, available at https://www.thenational.ae/world/europe/theresa-may-stands-firm-despite-eu-rejection-ofher-brexit-plan-1.772651 (last visited on Monday, September 24, 2018), op. cit. 146 See “Theresa May urges party unity during ‘tough phase’ of Brexit talks”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, October 4, 2018, p. 38. 147 See “Brexit and the Irish question: Borderline solution”, The Economist, December 2nd—8th 2017, p. 12, op. cit. 148 See “Brexiteers back second EU referendum”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 12, 2018, p. 44. 149 See “U.K. foreign secretary Johnson quits amid Brexit crisis”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, July 10, 2018, p. 39. 150 Loc. Cit. 151 Loc. Cit. 152 See “Resignations plunge UK govt. into crisis”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, July 10, 2018, p. 44. 153 Loc. Cit.

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The soft Brexit here was the “Irish Backstop”. It was a major part of the EU Brexit deal that Prime Minister Theresa May took to the British Parliament in January 2019; but after two major changes—first, the amendment by Sir Graham Brady that backed the deal provided “the much-disliked Irish “backstop” … is replaced by what it coyly called “alternative arrangement”; and the second, “a plan hatched by Tories from both the Remain and the leave wings of the party, daubed the Malthouse compromise … for a different backstop and for a longer transition period even if no withdrawal agreement is ratified”.154 This, according to The Economist, is: … the seemingly intractable problem of the nature of the border between Britain and Ireland when Britain leaves the European Union. Neither side wants the return of a “hard” border of physical infrastructure, with its associated security and customs checks. But retaining an open border would impose legal constraints on Britain’s freedom to change its laws in ways that diverge from the EU’s. To many on the British side, this would be tantamount to keeping Britain in the EU.155

But for the British in particular, it was on the basis of this stalemate—the inability of the British MPs to reach a consensus on the “Ireland Backstop” and some other matters on Brexit156 —that Donald Tusk, the European Council President, derided the Brexiteers without a plan, saying that “there will be ‘a special place in hell’ for politicians who promoted Brexit without any plan for how to deliver it”.157 But much as Europe was very reluctant to renegotiate because of the risk of reopening issues like fisheries, the budget or Gibraltar—things that some European leaders thought they had already given so much to the UK158 —they were still nonetheless not interested in a no deal Brexit because they felt that such an outcome would seriously damage not just Britain but the entire EU.159 The controversy between the proponents of soft and hard Brexit was so heated that the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, reportedly had to call “for a fresh referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, warning that leaving the bloc could lead to job losses and worsened economic prospects”.160 Khan slammed both the British government and Boris Johnson (his predecessor as London Mayor) over their handling of the negotiations with the EU, alleging that “at every stage [in the 154 See “Brexit and Parliament: Theresa’s temporary triumph”, The Economist, February 2nd 2019,

p. 27, op. cit. “Border-control and technology: The invisible boundary”, The Economist, February 16th 2019, p. 62. 156 See “May issues last-minute Brexit plea to MPs ahead of Brussels visit”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, February 18, 2019), p. 43; see also “May tasks Tory MPs on Unity, Brexit deal”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, February 18, 2019), p. 20. 157 See “Special place in hell: Donald Tusk derides Brexiters without a plan-video”, The Guardian, available at https://www.theguardian.com/politic/video/2019/feb/06/special-place-in-hell-donaldtusk-derides-brexiters-without-a-plan-video (last visited on Wednesday, February 13, 2019). 158 See Brexit and Parliament: Theresa’s temporary triumph”, The Economist, February 2nd 2019, p. 27, op. cit. 159 Ibid, p. 28. 160 See “London Mayor demands second referendum on Brexit”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 17, 2018, p. 46. 155 See

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negotiation], Prime Minister Theresa May’s government has looked unprepared and out of its depth, resulting in a litany of wrong turns”, while accusing Boris Johnson of prioritizing his political ambition over the terms of Brexit from the EU.161 Meanwhile, the UK had until March 2019 to secure a deal with the EU over the terms of Brexit, failing which—that is, in a no-deal Brexit—the UK would revert to the World Trade Organization rules on trade and be forced to pay tariffs on goods imported from the EU.162 This was the basis of Khan’s fear that leaving the EU would result in job losses and worsened economic prospects. The preference of hard Brexit by those exiting Prime Minister Theresa May’s government was not unexpected because when Britons narrowly voted to leave the EU, the then Prime Minister David Cameron decided to resign, leaving the way open for the so-called “prominent leavers” to take the reins of government.163 But if the British retreat from globalization on account of migration, including the fear of the Shengen border and the globalization of terrorism, is it the less institutionally incapacitated developing or underdeveloped countries that would cope with some of these challenging forces of globalization? How can a renowned colonial power that at a historical point in time in human history traversed and dominated a substantial part of the world in pursuit of its colonial enterprise (and still embraces the Commonwealth of nations today), out of fear of the Shengen arrangement now be an advocate of hard borders? What actually do the Brits mean by this paradox of being part of the world expounding the liberal ideology (which has as some of its implications, the practice laissez-faire economy, migration, including penetration and counter-penetration) and at the same time abjuring being counter-penetrated as seen in Brexit, the resistance against flexible immigration policy inherent in globalization and continued existence of the larger European family, the EU? Why is an otherwise “progressive” nation (alongside much of the political current in the United States) degenerating into antitrade, anti-globalization and the embrace of populism and protectionism? As a matter of fact, in the Brexit vote and decision to leave the European Union, the Brexiteers in the United Kingdom were not just dragging the EU behind (a union that should ordinarily be in the frontline in showing examples on how to globalize and repair the fault lines therein), they were also clearly creating the condition for a retreat from global unity, a retreat that can only help nurture more terror. It is a truism that such super-national or transnational problems like refugee flows and migration (which Joseph Stiglitz said was the proximate cause of the pro-Brexit vote164 ), economic deprivation, poverty and inequality, amongst others, do not only stoke the furnace of international terrorism, they are also conducive to the spread of lone wolf and other terrorist groups around the world. But these are problems that can only be confronted by effective multilateral actions that the vehicle of globalization 161 Loc.

Cit. Parenthesis mine. Cit. 163 See “U.K. foreign secretary Johnson quits amid Brexit crisis”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, July 10, 2018, p. 39, op. cit. 164 See Joseph Stiglitz in “Questions”, Time (New York), August 29, 2016, p. 48. 162 Loc.

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can provide. It is on this premise that it has been acknowledged that “a no-deal Brexit would be a leap into the unknown”165 despite the fact that the Tory Party (especially when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister and with his Brexit Secretary, Stephen Barclay) threatened or yearned for no-deal Brexit,166 even at the risk of destroying the union with Scotland and Northern Ireland.167 But the resistance to Brexit in the EU was determined. Although the clamour for Brexit coincided with the moment of a surge of nationalist populism in Europe— with the Brexiteers in Britain; Marine Le Pen in France; the Alternative for Germany that had transformed their country’s political landscape; Italy and Poland that were governed by anti-establishment Eurosceptics; Viktor Orban’s political dominance in Hungary that was undermining liberal democracy and enriching the strongman’s friends and cronies; and Steve Bannon (President Trump’s one time strategy chief) that had lent his tactics to many European nationalists and had even toured the European continent with the hope of turning the five-yearly European Parliament election into a repeat of Donald Trump’s triumph in the American 2016 Presidential election.168 After the European Parliament elections, although at first sight the result looked good for the Bannonite tendency (the followers of Steve Bannon), a closer look revealed a more mixed pattern—indicating that the populist advance in Europe had slowed down.169 The responsibility for this slowdown of populism lay not only with the controversial Bannonism, but also with the fragmentation of the European party landscape, exemplified with the ceding of more seats to the liberals and the green in the EU parliamentary elections.170 In the four-decade history of the elections to the EU Parliament, the turnout rose from 43% in 2014 to 51% in the 2019 election; explained by such factors as the election of President Trump that was not a friend of the EU, and the Brexit vote that reminded the voters of the EU vulnerability.171 These factors, in addition to other cross border challenges like migration and economic disruption, emphasized the multilateral roles of the EU and made the support of the union to rise in such a way that even the Eurosceptics (both in Brexit and in other European countries) began talking less about leaving and more about the challenges within the European Union.172 It was because of this development that the European election that had been billed in some quarters as a nationalist blow to the ideal of a Europe-wide politics, turned out to be a represent the invigoration 165 See

“The global crisis in conservatism: The new right is not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it”, The Economist, July 6th–12th 2019, p. 9, op. cit. 166 See”UK calls on EU to renegotiate or face no deal Brexit”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, August 5, 2019, p. 9. 167 See “The global crisis in conservatism: The new right is not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it”, The Economist, July 6th–12th 2019, p. 9, op. cit. 168 See “The European Parliament election (1): All the colours of the rainbow; fragmentation comes to the European Parliament; it might improve it”, The Economist, June 1st–7th 2019, p. 19. 169 Loc. Cit. 170 Loc. Cit. 171 Ibid, p. 20. 172 Loc. Cit.

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of that ideal.173 It was also because of the foregoing that when Boris Johnson took office as Prime Minister, Brussels (the EU) consistently resisted his Brexit Secretary (Stephen Barclay) and insisted that the Brexit withdrawal agreement (one of two main elements of Theresa May’s Brexit deal, which includes the Irish backstop that prevents a hard border if the UK and the EU fail to agree on a long-term trade deal) that was resoundingly rejected by the British Parliament cannot be renegotiated.174 The implication of the Irish backstop is that since the EU rejected the UK staying in the EU custom union and the single market as a solution in the Brexit problem, people in Northern Ireland could have EU rules foisted on them indefinitely with the preservation of the open border.175 It was in Brexit that populism presented its quintessential negative effect of confronting democratic practice (people’s choice) and national institutions (the British Parliament). As Kyle and Mounk put it, “populist rule—whether from the right or left—has a highly negative effect on political systems and leads to a significant risk of democratic erosion.176 In other words— and as has been partially seen in the United States with President Trump—given the democratic backsliding and extremely sentimental nature of populists, it has become inherently characteristic of populists to last longer in office; to often leave office in dramatic circumstances; to usually damage democracy; to frequently erode checks and balances on the executive; and to attack individual rights.177 It was in the above context that the former conservative British Prime Minister, David Cameron, expressed his mea-culpa about executing the Brexit referendum that allowed populists like Boris Johnson to seize the initiative and launched the United Kingdom into a leave vote that catapulted the Brexit political crisis.178 Although Cameron himself supported the UK staying in the European Union, resigned the morning after the leave camp won, “staying out of electoral politics and out of the public eye since then”.179 Another conservative, Theresa May, that succeeded him wrestled with all the issues that the leave EU entailed, but should could not get a Parliamentary approval for her Brexit deal with the EU, culminating in her resignation and the assumption of office by yet another conservative, Boris Johnson, who swore Brexit without a deal.180 Populist Boris Johnson never harkened to those that advised that he should not suspend the British Parliament in order to force through a no-deal Brexit. The Prime 173 Loc.

Cit. ”UK calls on EU to renegotiate or face no deal Brexit”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, August 5, 2019, p. 9, op. Cit. 175 Loc. Cit. 176 See Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk in “The Populist Harm to Democracy: An Empirical Assessment”, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, available at https://institute.global/insight/renewingcentre/populist-harm-democracy (last visited on September 16, 2019), op. cit. 177 Loc. Cit. 178 See Gregory Katz in “Ex-PM David Cameron ‘sorry’ for creating Brexit divisions”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-pm-cameron-sorry-brexit-061907543.html (last visited on September 15, 2019. 179 Loc. Cit. 180 Loc. Cit. 174 See

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Minster suspended the British Parliament for five weeks as the clock ticked towards the October 31st Brexit deadline in order to foreclose the legislature’s involvement in ensuring that a deal was obtained from the EU and unfortunately lost control of his no-deal Brexit.181 Just as Boris Johnson and other populists like Michael Gove spearheaded the leave campaign—falsely citing that Britain could save 350 million pounds per week that it was sending to the EU and now spend it in its National Health Service—his commitment to a no-deal Brexit despite the Parliament’s instruction that he should seek a Brexit extension, turned his Conservative Party into a “psychodrama” and British politics into an unending crisis.182 It was in the above context that Boris Johnson and the Parliament were at odds since he took power in July with the determination to take Britain out of the EU on Oct. 31 with or without a divorce deal.183 But constitutionalism dealt a major blow to Boris Johnson’s populism and its bent towards authoritarianism when Britain’s highest court ruled on Tuesday, September 24, 2019 that his decision to suspend the Parliament for five weeks in the crucial countdown to the country’s Brexit deadline was illegal.184 The unanimous, strongly worded Supreme Court judgment declared his order to suspend Parliament “void and of no effect”; and that Johnson acted to limit debate by lawmakers on Britain’s impending departure from the European Union in violation of Parliament’s constitutional role.185 But Boris Johnson was “emancipated” after the December 12, 2019 “Brexit election”. It was in this election that Brexit reasserted its “victory with a vengeance” by “retaining power with a comfortable majority, the highest number of seats since 1987 under Margaret Thatcher”.186 Despite the studious efforts by Jeremy Corbyn to make Brexit a peripheral issue and steer the election away from Brexit into a pro-people gains and other development agenda, Boris Johnson insistently make the election a Brexit one.187 The Conservative Party (or Tories) had cleansed its leadership of the “Remainers and throttled towards the exit road irrespective of road signs, speed limit,

181 See

Amanda Sloat in “Brexit endgame: Boris Johnson loses control”, Brookings, available at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2019/09/05/brexit-endgame-boris-johnsonloses-control/?utm-campaign=Foreign%20Policy&utm-source=hs-email&utm-medium=email& utm-content=76536962 (last visited on Friday, September 13, 2019). 182 See Gregory Katz in “Ex-PM David Cameron ‘sorry’ for creating Brexit divisions”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/former-pm-cameron-sorry-brexit-061907543.html (last visited on September 15, 2019, op. cit. 183 See Gregory Katz, Mike Corder and Jill Lawless in “Top UK court: Johnson’s suspension of Parliament was illegal”, Associated Press, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/uk-supremecourt-rule-johnsons-072240437.html (last visited on September 24, 2019). 184 Loc. Cit. 185 Loc. Cit. 186 See Anthony Akinola in “Brexit reasserts victory with a vengeance”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, December 16, 2019, p. 17. 187 See Owei Lakemfa in “Corbyn makes history, but it is yet written”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, December 20, 2019, p. 31.

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bumps, sharp bends and uncharted territory”.188 For this reason, the conclusion of the critic is that: Brexit was a mess created by the Tory Party which for three years searched for an exit, but has in this election, gained massively from its incompetence and myopia. Britons may discover that the easier part is ‘getting Brexit done with’. It is likely that the votes in Parliament today, Friday, December 20 [2019] will see to that [which it actually did]. However, the real challenge is what follows? The reality is that Brexit is an uncharted course with an uncertain future having not just economic but political implications, especially in Northern Ireland and Scotland … Johnson is like a gambler ready to stake all on what seems to him a sure bet in pools stake.189

In the Parliamentary vote of Friday, December 20, 2019, Boris Johnson’s promise that Britain would leave the European Union on January 31, 2020 was accomplished190 when the Parliament voted 358 in favour of the exit and 234 against it.191 On January 31, 2020, the UK left the EU. But the exit was not as celebrated as it was when the UK joined because, as a critic observed, it was “a far-cry from the huge celebrations, including candle-light processions that marked the marriage when the country signed the dotted lines in Brussels, vowing to hold and cherish the EU until death do them part”.192 According to a critic, “this time [with Scotland agitating against Brexit and angling for self-determination], the UK is a less confident, divided and broken country with an uncertain future”.193 Apart from Scotland, there is also the problem of Northern Ireland. On February 8, 2020, Sinn Fein “won more first-choice votes in the general election than any of Ireland’s other parties, which was a stunning upset”.194 It was a stunning upset because Sein Fein is the second-largest party in Northern Ireland with a troubling past, being from the 1970s, “the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a paramilitary organization which tried to push the British state out of Northern Ireland through terrorism”.195 Sinn Fein is one of the political parties in Ireland that is, “in principle, committed to seeing the six counties which remained in the United Kingdom in 1922 rejoin the 188 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 190 See Martin Farrer in “Johnson dashes hopes of a softer exit … Congress locked in battle over Trump trials … and beware the great Christmas getaway”, The Guardian on line, available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/20/friday-briefing-labour-dismayas-mps-vote-on-brexit-bill (last visited on Thursday, 26 December 2019). 191 See Mark Landler and Stephen Castle in “U.K. Parliament advances Brexit Bill in lopsided vote, all but assuring January exit”, The New York Times, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/ 12/20/world/europe/brexit-parliament.html (last visited on Thursday, December 26, 2019). 192 See Owei Lakemfa in “Reluctant divorcee UK claims to be happy”, Vanguard (Lagos), January 31, 2020, p. 31, op. cit. 193 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 194 See “Brexit and Sinn Fein’s success boost talk of Irish unification”, economist.com, available at https://www.economist.com/briefing/2020/02/13/brexit-and-sinn-feins-success-boost-talkof-irish-unification?utm-campaign=the-economist-today&utm (last visited on Friday, February 14, 2020). 195 Loc. Cit. 189 Loc.

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26 counties which gained their independence, and thus, create a united Ireland”.196 Now a force in the Irish Dail, it sees the unification of Ireland as a real and pressing ambition197 —a situation that was given impetus by the fact that in the UK’s December 12, 2019 general election (and for the first time in history), the traditional Irish nationalist parties won more seats than the traditional unionist parties.198 Until now, “a campaign for unification was thought to risk opening old wounds, with bloody consequences”, but “Brexit is one reason all this has changed”.199 Although Northern Ireland voted against Brexit, the biggest unionist party and England voted for Brexit; but the Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland were also angered by the British Home Secretary that “suggested using the threat of food shortages to soften up the south [Ireland] in the negotiations [for Brexit], heedless of the famine in the 1840s when all of Ireland was under British rule”; particularly when Brexit created an economic border in the Irish sea, between Northern Ireland and Britain, even as it keeps a united Ireland for goods.200 These complex realities vindicate the critical view point that with Scotland and Northern Ireland, Brexit holds an uncertain future for the United Kingdom because it is now less confident, divided and broken. Although Britain quit the EU on January 31, 2019 with a Brexit transition period that was to end by December 31, 2020, it remained in lockstep with the EU, particularly as COVID-19 had slowed the negotiations; with the basic red line or impasse being that the EU rejected Britain’s special treatment (which contributed to the increasingly bitter row) in its bid for a long-term agreement and a future access to the European Union financial markets; even though the EU wanted the ability to cut off British bankers and investors from its financial services industry at a short notice.201 On the order hand, the UK itself insisted on full national sovereignty with fishing regulations that would oust the EU from its territory202 ; that is, the fact that the UK “would not succumb to EU demands to access British fishing waters.203 196 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 198 See “2019 United Kingdom general election in Northern Ireland”, Wikipedia, available at https:// en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019-United-Kingdom-general-election-in-Northern-Ireland (last visited on Friday, February 14, 2020). 199 See “Could it really happen? Why the unification of Ireland is becoming likelier”, The Economist, February 15th–21st 2020, p. 9. 200 Loc. Cit. Parentheses mine. 201 See Joe Barnes in “EU rejects UK’s financial demands as Brexit talks hit new red line row”, Express, June 3, 2020, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1290640/Brexit-newsUK-EU-trade-talks-financial-services-Michel-Barnier-Boris-Johnson-latest (last visited on June 4, 2020). 202 See Katya Adler in “Brexit: Who will blink first in UK-EU stand-off”, BBC News, June 5, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52944700 (last visited on June 7, 2020). 203 See Lisa O’Carroll in “Britain will not seek to extend Brexit transition period by autumn: Penny Mordaunt tells MPs she hopes to have post-Brexit deal agreed by autumn”, The Guardian.com, available at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/june/09/britain-will-not-give-in-to-eu-fishingdemands-says-villiers (last visited on June 10, 2020). 197 Loc.

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In both the EU limiting the UK’s access to its financial services industry and the UK not succumbing to the EU fishing in its territorial waters, the two blocs were clearly adopting maximalist points of view in the Brexit negotiations, which made the whole process harder,204 a process that was thrown into a profound impasse or a go-slow pace205 that promoted the possibility of a no-Brexit deal or even a Brexit fantasy.206 This possibility of a no-Brexit or a no-deal (that is a hard) Brexit was worsened when Prime Minister Boris Johnson started to renege on the Brexit deal by introducing his controversial Internal Market bill that was envisaged to break international law (the inked agreement) with the annulment of the Irish Backstop— a Backdrop that Boris Johnson said would keep the “UK trapped within the EU’s institutions” in so far as it would keep Northern Ireland closely aligned with many EU rules, including on goods.207 In other words, Boris Johnson was sparked into the Internal Market bill when “eurocrats warned [that] firms could be blocked from sending British cheese, lamb and beef into Northern Ireland after the end of the post-Brexit transition period”, a ban that “was unavoidable unless the government published its plans for food and plant safety by the end of October 2020.208 It was this threat by the European Commission officials that Britain would not be in the list of countries that would export food and agricultural products to the EU bloc (which Northern Island would become after the transition period on December 31, 2020) that caused the blockade problem and bitter wrangling over the Brexit withdrawal deal,209 which caused Boris Johnson’s imputation that the Internal Market bill was an insurance policy if the UK and the EU headed for a cliff-edge of a no-deal by December 31, 2020 when the Irish Backdrop would have been breached.210 Although the Irish Backstop was agreed to by both the UK and the EU in the withdrawal agreement in order to ensure fair competition after Brexit, and to comply with a 1998 peace pact that ended the three decades of unrest in the province of 204 See Gerrard Kaonga in “Oh dear, Brussels! Barnier furious with EU as Brexit chief grows ‘frus-

trated’ with bloc”, Express, July 14, 2020, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/129 4939/Brexit-latest-news-EU-trade-talks-Michel-Barnier-no-deal-update-David-Frost (last visited on June 14, 2020). 205 See Katya Adler in “Brexit: Who will blink first in UK-EU stand-off”, BBC News, June 5, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52944700 (last visited on June 7, 2020). 206 See Rafael Behr in “The harder reality gets for Johnson, the tighter he clings to Brexit fantasy”, The Guardian.com, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/02/borisjohnson-brexit (last visited on June 2, 2020). 207 See Jen Kirby in “The UK threatenes to renege on the Brexit deal it signed with the EU just a year ago”, Vox, September 9, 2020, available at https://www.vox.com/2020/9/9/21427210/brexituk-eu-nothern-ireland-protocol-internal-market (last visited on September 13, 2020). 208 See Joe Barnes in “EU draws up plans to end food blockade threat ‘within days’ after sparking Borish fury”, Express, September 15, 2020, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/ 1335632/Brexit-news-UK-EU-Northern-Ireland-food-blockade-Boris-Johnson-Michel-Barnierupdate (last visited on September 16, 2020). Parenthesis mine. 209 Loc. Cit. 210 See “UK PM says he has hope avoiding ‘No-Deal’ with EU”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, September 17, 2020, p. 38.

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Northern Ireland; but a short while to the December 31, 2020 terminal date of the transitional period, the government of the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, suggested that the EU was plotting to destabilize the integrity of the United Kingdom with a food “blockade” between Britain and Northern Ireland”; and that in unwinding the nearly 50 years of the EU economic integration, the Internal Market legislation would “regulate the UK’s internal market” after the post-Brexit transition expired at the end of 2020.211 Thus, the Internal Market bill sought to ensure regulations between the UK provinces of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Island were joined-up once the UK left the EU in order to have the power to set their own rules on areas like food safety and air quality.212 Even before the EU Brussels diplomats rowed back the threat of a food exports blockade to Northern Ireland in order not to blow up future negotiations,213 the Internal Market bill was suggestive of, according to some critic, that Boris Johnson had always seen Brexit as a swindle that cared more about Eurosceptic fantasy than the Good Friday agreement for which Ireland (Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland) would be paying the price.214 In other words, Boris Johnson pretended that the UK was bamboozled into a substandard Brexit deal, in which case he signed it by mistake.215 So, since the Brexit was deemed to be a swindle, the Internal Market bill pointed to the possibility of a no-deal Brexit, an eventuality that the pro-Brexiteers like Boris Johnson aspired from the outset in the leave campaign, a no-deal Brexit possibility in which the Internal Market bill would ensure that the four nations of the UK would prevent any disruption in trade between themselves—which was why the Boris Johnson’s government described the bill as a “vital legal safety net”.216 But this UK government’s Internal Market bill was vehemently rejected by the Republic of Ireland because of its suggestion of a new (or hard) border with Northern Ireland217 —more so because by virtue of withdrawal deal, the Republic of Ireland

211 See

“Ireland rejects Boris Johnson’s claim of Brexit blockade”, Vanguard (Lagos), September 14, 2020, p. 43. 212 See “Brexit vote: What just happened and what comes next?”, BBC News, September 15, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54147365 (last visited on September 15, 2020). 213 See Joe Barnes in “EU backs down: Barnier caves to Boris in N Ireland Brexit row after nuclear option threat”, Express, Friday, September 18, 2020, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/ politics/1336919/brexit-news-eu-trade-deal-michel-barnier-northern-ireland-protocol-internationa l-law (last visited on September 18, 2020). 214 See Rafael Behr in “Boris Johnson’s Brexit has always been a swindle. Now Ireland will pay the price”, The Guardian, September 15, 2020, available at https://www.theguardian.com/co„entisf ree/2020/sep/15/boris-johnson-brexit-swindle-ireland-eurosceptic-good-friday-agreement (last on September 16, 2020). 215 Loc. Cit. 216 See “Brexit vote: What just happened and what comes next?”, BBC News, September 15, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54147365 (last visited on September 15, 2020), op. cit. 217 See “Ireland rejects Boris Johnson’s claim of Brexit blockade”, Vanguard (Lagos), September 14, 2020, p. 43, op. cit.

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has gone to the EU while Northern Island is in the UK.218 The bill was also criticized by some senior figures in the governing Conservative Party (in the second legislative chamber, the House of Lords219 ) because it overruled some parts of the Brexit deal that came into effect in January 2020—a withdrawal agreement that is “a fully fledged international treaty” and as such a legal agreement.220 Apart from the Internal Market bill splitting “opinion within Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party”, in which a number of members voted against moving it to the next stage,221 two former British Prime Ministers, Sir John Major (former Conservative leader) and Tony Blair (former Labour leader), also criticized the bill for violating international law, including the peace process, trade negotiations and the United Kingdom’s integrity in the international community.222 In what a senior Minister termed an “unprecedented situation”, the two former British Prime Ministers of opposing political parties rejected a raw political partisanship in their unity against what they described a “shameful” attempt to override parts of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, arguing further that the government’s actions were “irresponsible, wrong in principle and dangerous in practice”.223 In fact, they vehemently insisted that respecting the treaty obligations was just as important as domestic law, thus, urging the MPs to reject the ruling Party’s excessive nationalist legislation in the Internal Market bill.224 As a matter of fact, some critic of the Internal Market bill asserted that it was either Boris Johnson did not understand the withdrawal deal that his government signed, or he knew that he was beaten by Brussels, but he “mis-sold the defeat as victory in a general election” that made him Prime Minister.225 When Boris Johnson tried to play a partisan game by amending the Internal Market bill in order to give the Tory (Conservative) MPs a vote before he could use the powers in it to break international law (thus, heading off a potential rebellion 218 See “Brexit vote: What just happened and what comes next?”, BBC News, September 15, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54147365 (last visited on September 15, 2020), op. cit. 219 Whereas in the first voting on the bill on Monday, September 14, 2020, the Parliament debated it and voted it to the next stage in the House of Lords by 340 to 263, giving the Johnson’s government an entire 77 votes majority, the legislation was expected to have problems in the House of Lords; Loc. Cit. 220 Loc. Cit. 221 Loc. Cit. 222 See Staff and agencies in “Blair and Major hit out at Boris Johnson’s plans to override Brexit deal” The Guardian, September 13, 2020, available at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/13/ blair-and-major-hit-out-at-boris-johnsons-plans-to-override-brexit-deal (last visited on September 13, 2020). 223 See”Brexit: Blair and Major urge MPs to reject Internal Market Bill”, BBC News, September 13, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-54135231 (last visited on September 13, 2020). 224 Loc. Cit. 225 See Rafael Behr in “Boris Johnson’s Brexit has always been a swindle. Now Ireland will pay the price”, The Guardian, September 15, 2020, available at https://www.theguardian.com/co„entisf ree/2020/sep/15/boris-johnson-brexit-swindle-ireland-eurosceptic-good-friday-agreement (last on September 16, 2020), op. cit.

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over the issue in the House of Lords), the Labour Party still insisted that the UK was on course to break its words before the world.226 The point was that Britain’s Boris Johnson’s intention to breach international law over the Brexit Internal Market bill would certainly violate the country’s international legal obligations in that regard and, indeed, undercut parts of the divorce deal; which would not only be absurd, but would “embolden autocratic regimes that violate international law with devastating consequences all over the world”.227 In November 2020, Boris Johnson suffered a heavy defeat in the parliament’s upper chamber (the House of Lords), which voted to strip those clauses in the Internal Market bill that would allow him to breach Britain’s EU exit treaty.228 Although Boris Johnson vowed to retable the contentious clauses when the bill returned to the House of Commons where it had previously passed by 340 votes to 256, the defeat of the offending clauses by the House of Lords provided the UK an opportunity to rebuild its reputation on the matter.229 But, finally, on December 24, 2020, after very serious negotiations between the UK and the EU, a Brexit deal was reached; which Boris Johnson described as his “jumbo Brexit deal”,230 a deal that both the UK and the EU claimed were a victory.231 As the Brexit deal concerns the Northern Ireland, the UK and the EU “agreed that the border Ireland and Northern Ireland should be practically invisible—no cameras, no border posts”, which was the situation when both Ireland and the UK were part of the EU and people and goods moved unhindered.232 So, with Brexit, there is no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because “checks will 226 See

“Brexit: PM in compromise with Tory critics over Internal Market Bill”, BBC News, September 17, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-54170397 (last visited on Thursday, September 17, 2020). 227 See Costas Pitas and Sarah Young in “Amal Clooney quits UK envoy role over ‘lamentable’ international law breach”, Reuters, Friday, September 18, 2020, available at https://news.yahoo. com/amal-clooney-quits-uk-envoy-145139271.html (last visited on September 19, 2020). 228 See “UK PM Johnson defeated in Parliament on treaty-breaking Brexit laws”, Vanguard (Lagos), November 11, 2020, p. 28; see also “Johnson suffers defeat in UK Parliament over Brexit law breach”, The Nation online, available at https://thenationonline.net/johnson-suffers-defeat-in-ukparliament-over-brexit-law-breach/ (last visited on November 11, 2020). 229 See “UK PM Johnson defeated in Parliament on treaty-breaking Brexit laws”, Vanguard (Lagos), November 11, 2020, loc. Cit. 230 See Lisa O’Carroll and Jon Henley in “Johnson promised tariff-free trade—so why is Brexit reality so different?”, The Guardian, Friday, January 6, 2021, available at https://www.theguardian. com/politics/2021/jan/08/business-finds-snags-in-johnsons-jumbo-tafiff-free-brexit (last visited on January 9, 2021). 231 See Edward Evans et al. in “In Bullet Points: The Key Terms of the Brexit Deal Analyzed”, Bloomberg, December 24, 2020, available at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-1224/in-bullet-points-the-key-terms-of-the-brexit-deal (last visited on December 27, 2020); see also Ben Glaze in “Brexit deal: Five main points MPs will have just days to digest before crunch vote”, Mirror, December 25, 2020, available at https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/brexit-deal-mainpoints-agreement-23221458 (last visited on December 27, 2020). 232 See Tom Edgington in “Brexit: What will happen in Northern Ireland?, BBC News, December 9, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-53724381 (last visited on January 6, 2021).

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not take place at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland” as “Northern Ireland will continue to follow many of the EU’s rules, meaning that Lorries can continue to drive across the border without having to be inspected”.233 On the contrary, there is “a new ‘regulatory’ border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales)” because, “unlike Northern Ireland, Great Britain won’t have to follow EU rules in future” as there will be checks on goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.234 And Spain equally reached a deal with the UK that avoided a hard border on Gibraltar because “the rock whose sovereignty is disputed by Spain and Britain will remain subject to rules in use in Europe’s Schengen area”—an arrangement that, according to the UK Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab, ensures “border fluidity, which is clearly in the best interests of the people living on both sides”.235 This means that “Gibraltar will effectively become part of Europe’s passport-free travel area—the Schengen zone”— an arrangement that would later be elevated into a treaty.236 This arrangement on Gibraltar appears to reflect the fact that “people in Gibraltar voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU in the Brexit referendum”.237 The practical handing over of Gibraltar to the EU, alongside the soft border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland does not vindicate Boris Johnson’s description of Brexit as his “jumbo Brexit deal”238 —an assertion that Brexit was a victory for the UK. It was for purposes of avoiding a soft border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland; that is, avoiding the creation of a hard border in this area (so that the four nations of the UK would prevent any disruption in trade between themselves) that Boris Johnson created the failed Internal Market bill that he described above as a “vital legal safety net”. But this soft border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Island was not only eventually created, it strongly resonated in the COVID-19 ‘vaccine nationalism’. The COVID-19 ‘vaccine nationalism’ was a spat in which the rich developed nations were trying to own or hoard the COVID-19 drugs; like the British-Swedish drugmaker, AstraZeneca, that informed the EU bloc it would not be able to supply the number of vaccines the EU had hoped for by the end of March 2021, a fact that made EU leaders furious that the company appeared to be fulfilling its deliveries for

233 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 235 See “Spain reaches deal with UK on Gibraltar, avoiding hard border”, Aljazeera, December 31, 2020, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/31/spain-reaches-deal-with-uk-on-gib raltar-avoiding-hard-border (last visited on January 1, 2021). 236 See Gavin Lee in “Brexit: End to Gibraltar land border prompts joy and trepidation”, BBC News, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55674148 (last visited on January 16, 2021). 237 Loc. Cit. 238 See Lisa O’Carroll and Jon Henley in “Johnson promised tariff-free trade—so why is Brexit reality so different?”, The Guardian, Friday, January 6, 2021, available at https://www.theguardian. com/politics/2021/jan/08/business-finds-snags-in-johnsons-jumbo-tafiff-free-brexit (last visited on January 9, 2021), op. cit. 234 Loc.

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the UK markets and not theirs.239 The soft border issue essentially resonated in the COVID-19 ‘vaccine nationalism’ debate in the sense that “the EU also said it would invoke a clause in the Brexit deal to impose controls on exports to Northern Ireland to ensure doses wouldn’t funnel through the region into the rest of the UK”, even though it later backed down from the threat.240 Because Northern Ireland remained a part of the EU, goods or products arriving the UK were to undergo the EU’s import checks procedures.241 However, there were grace periods within which the procedures and checks were not to be fully applied, the first grace period of which was to expire at the end of March 2021; but when the UK stated that it would unilaterally extend this grace period to October 2021, the EU said that such an extension would constitute a breach of international law—the Northern Ireland Protocol.242 The Northern Ireland Protocol is part of the Brexit Deal that prevents the hardening of the land border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland by keeping Northern Ireland in the EU single market for goods.243 The UK government had also unilaterally announced moves to ease the trade in plants from Britain to Northern Ireland, meaning that the Protocol’s rule that “soil from other parts of the UK cannot legally enter” Northern Ireland—a situation that caused difficulties for garden centres—was now being temporarily relaxed by the UK government.244 With the UK’s unilateral relaxation of this rule, bulbs or vegetables that had been grown in soil can be sent from Great Britain to Northern Ireland—a move for which the EU threatened legal action against the UK for changing the implementation of the Northern Ireland Brexit deal without its agreement.245 The Irish Sea border (soft border) in the Brexit deal is, therefore, an ostensible setback to Boris Johnson’s populism or far-right tendency because of the many anti-sentiments or movements against it. In fact, in Brexit, the last has not been heard about the soft border question because placing Northern Ireland simultaneously inside two customs

239 See an analysis on “A fight between the EU and the UK reveals the ugly truth about vaccine nation-

alism” by Angela Dewan on CNN, January 30, 2021, available at https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/ 30/europe/uk-eu-astrazeneca-vaccine-nationalism-gbr-intl/index.html (last visited on January 31, 2021). 240 Loc. Cit. 241 See John Campbell in “Brexit: EU says UK grace period extension breaches international law”, BBC News, March 6, 2021, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-56262527 (last visited on March 6, 2021. 242 Loc. Cit. 243 Loc. Cit. 244 See John Campbell in “Brexit: Further trade rules relaxed between GB and NI”, BBC News, March 6, 2021, available at https://www.bbc.com/uk-northern-ireland-56294309 (last visited on March 6, 2021). 245 Loc. Cit.

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and single market regimes was always going to be complicated even though there was no obvious alternative.246 With the placement of Northern Ireland in two customs and single market regimes, the soft border is really combustible—a match that could easily be struck; a situation which, against the background of the failed Internal Market bill, presents the scaring scenario that the Independent newspaper depicted in its editorial as involving the fact that “if we lose the Northern Ireland protocol, the rest of Brexit could quickly unravel”.247 Shortly after the effectiveness of Brexit, a Loyalist (or Unionist) group that included representatives of loyalist paramilitaries wrote the British Prime Minister and temporarily withdrew its backing of the Good Friday Agreement (the Belfast Agreement of 1998 that marked the effective end of the troubles in Northern Ireland) because of its concern about the Northern Ireland Protocol.248 The group declared that the Protocol damaged trade and threatened Northern Ireland’s place in the UK; it vowed too that it wanted the Protocol amended to ensure unfettered access for goods, services and citizens throughout the UK.249 In the soft border under reference, Boris Johnson’s populism has really been humbled and tempered. The ills of populism are further demonstrated below in this book by the tragedy that is Trumpism.

Reference Johnson, B. (2014). The Churchill Factor: How one Man made History. London, Great Britain, Hodder & Stoughton.

246 See

“If we lose the Northern Ireland, the rest of Brexit could quickly unravel”, Editorial Independent, Friday, February 5, 2021, available at https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorial/nor thern-ireland-protocol-brexit-irish-border-b1797789.html (last visited on February 6, 2021). 247 Loc. Cit. 248 See “Loyalist group withdraws support for Good Friday Agreement”, BBC News, March 6, 2021, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-56276653 (last visited on March 6, 2021). 249 Loc. Cit.

Chapter 3

Globalization, Populism and Nationalism in the Making of Trumpism

3.1 The Emergence of Trumpism In conceptual clarification, the Cambridge Dictionary defines trumpism as “the policies and political ideas of the US President Donald Trump”—“a comment made by the US President Donald Trump, or a word or expression often used by him”.1 In its contribution to the elucidation of Trumpism, The Economist described it as part of the new right that arose out of the nadir of globalization, a new right that has jettisoned the value of conservatism and put conservatism under threat in the West in such a manner that even troubles non-conservatives.2 Trumpism is captured in President Trump’s slogan of making America Great Again. It is a form of the populist descent into nationalism and nativism, a form of anti-globalization that is proximate to Brexit. The Brexit vote happened at a time that the pervasive feeling of anti-globalization in the West was creating a descent into nationalism and populism; the same way that globalization and imperialism were creating political Islam in the Middle East. There was something of a domino effect in the relationship between Brexit and Trumpism in the sense that Donald Trump won the presidency of the United States immediately after the Brexit vote. The point to be noted here is that in the countdown to Brexit and Trumpism, global discontent had been palpable. It was presumably the nadir of globalization. Unlike the golden age of globalization, in 1990–2010” when “commerce soared as the cost of shifting goods in ships and planes fell, when phone calls got cheaper, when tariffs were cut and finance liberalized; when businesses went gangbusters, as firms set up around the world and investors roamed and consumers

1 See “Trumpism”, Cambridge Dictionary, available at https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/ english/trumpism (last visited on Wednesday, March 18, 2020). 2 See “The global crisis in conservatism: The new right is not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it”, The Economist, July 6th–12th 2019, p. 9, op. cit.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0_3

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shopped in supermarkets with enough choice to impress Phileas Fogg3 —the protagonist in the 1873 fictional biography Jules Verne novel (Around the World in Eighty Days) that wagered that he could circumnavigate the world in 80 days or less.4 But then, the golden age of globalization gave way for the decline of globalization, which, according to The Economist, led to what a Dutch writer, Adjiedj Bakas, called “slowbalization”.5 It was slowbalization that gave “way to a new era of sluggishness, in which “cross-border investment, trade, bank loans and supply chains have been shrinking or stagnating relative to world GDP.6 Consequently, the cost of moving goods had stopped falling; multinational firms had found that global sprawl burned money and that local rivals often eat them alive; with activities shifting towards services, which are harder to sell across borders”.7 This was irrespective of the fact that an optimistic assessments of today’s global order—in playing the devil’s advocate—often insisted that in many measures, the global order had not been totally dysfunctional because globally, the rich countries (in the status quo), “from China to India to Ethiopia … have adopted more market-friendly policies, and Western countries have helped them with access to markets, humanitarian assistance and loan forgiveness”—all policies supported by the very elite that had allegedly broken the world.8 This devil advocacy insists that over the years, there had been gains even though not distributed equally; that “in the 1950s … Jim Crow reigned in the United States and women could barely work as anything more than seamstresses and secretaries”; that in the 1980s, … “two-thirds of the globe stagnated under state socialism, repression and isolation”; that those that ran the world in the so-called golden age—“kings, commissars, mandarins—could not have run it “better than our current hodgepodge of politicians, and business executives”; and that in short, today, “after 400 years of slavery, segregation and discrimination in the United States, blacks have been moving up”, that “after thousands of years of being treated as structurally subordinate, women are now gaining genuine equality”, that “once considered criminals or deviants, gays can finally live and love freely in many countries”, etc.9

3 See

“Slowbalisation: A new pattern of world commerce is becoming clearer—as are its costs”, The Economist, January 26th 2019, p. 9. 4 See Phileas Fogg, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki.Phileas-Fogg (last visited on Friday, February 15, 2019). 5 See “The global list: Globalization has faltered and now being reshaped”, The Economist, January 26th 2019, p. 17. 6 See “Slowbalisation: A new pattern of world commerce is becoming clearer—as are its costs”, The Economist, January 26th 2019, p. 9, op. cit. 7 Loc. Cit. 8 See Fareed Zakaria in “We have a bleak view of modern life. But the world is making real progress” The Washington Post, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-havea-bleak-view-of-modern-life-but-the-world-is-making-real-progress/2019/01/31/6ee30432-25a811e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7525691a49f8 (Last visited on Sunday, February, 3, 2019). 9 Loc. Cit.

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But given the inherent controversies in some of the points made above, this devil advocacy can only go so far; more so because despite the optimist view of modern life (against the background of what used to obtain when pessimists hark back with nostalgia to the “golden age” before it was broken by the current elite prompting the incidence of Brexit and Trumpism), there are still persistent widespread revulsion against global inequality and exclusion, so much so that in the 2019 World Economic Forum in Switzerland, there was still “a spirited round of elite-bashing”, “the trendy political posture on both the right and left”.10 It was this revulsion against inequality and the perceived exclusion created by globalization that prompted the rise of Trumpism as an epitome of the new right.11 When the Russian President Putin, in apparent response to the slowdown of globalization (the onset of slowbalization) declared that the liberal idea was “obsolete” because liberalism was all about immigration, multiculturalism and gender politics, The Economist newsmagazine, the megaphone of liberalism12 declared Putin’s pronunciation as a travesty and a pick on the wrong target.13 Consequently, The Economist, being a classical liberalist—against which Trumpism is implacably hostile to—tagged Trumpism the new right that has jettisoned the value of conservatism that used to define it, thus, putting conservatism under threat in the West; so much so that non-conservatives could even find the situation very troubling.14 For instance, the paper lamented that conservatism is under threat in the two-party United States and Britain where the right is in power; and in multiparty systems like Germany and Spain, the center-right is being eroded while being completely eviscerated in France and Italy; and in shorter democratic traditions like Hungary, the right has completely gone straight to populism without even trying conservatism.15 It is not only in Hungary that the right has completely gone straight to populism without trying conservatism, the same transition to populism has also happened to the United States ’President Trump and the conveyors of Brexit in the United Kingdom. To this effect, The Economist argued that conservatism is not so much a philosophy as it is a disposition, citing Philosopher Michael Oakeshott’s clarification that “to be conservative … is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant”.16 10 Loc.

Cit. “The global crisis in conservatism: The new right is not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it”, The Economist, July 6th–12th 2019, p. 9, op. cit. 12 See “The year of living dangerously: Liberals have lost most of the argument in 2016. They should not feel defeated so much as reinvigorated”, The Economist, December 24th 2016, p. 11, op. cit; see also “Why they ‘re wrong: Globalization critics say it benefits only the elite. In fact, a less open world would hurt the poor most of all”, The Economist, October 1st 2016, p. 9, op. cit. 13 See “The global crisis in conservatism: The new right is not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it”, The Economist, July 6th–12th 2019, p. 9, op. cit. 14 Loc. Cit. 15 Loc. Cit. 16 Loc. Cit. 11 See

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The argument here is also that classical liberalism and conservatism are children of the Enlightenment who only differ in liberals saying that “social order emerges spontaneously from individuals acting freely, but conservatives believe social order comes first, creating the conditions for freedom”.17 But conservatism in particular looks to the authority of the family, church, tradition and local associations to control change or slow it down, insisting that you sweep away institutions at your peril— even though such a demolition is now happening to conservatism from the right.18 Thus, the new right is not an evolution but a repudiation of conservatism, having become usurpers that are aggrieved, discontent, pessimistic and reactionary; and the new right looks at the world and sees what President Trump calls “carnage”19 —the idea that has made Trump determined to “Make America Great Again”. The new right is currently smashing one conservative tradition after another; so much so that even though conservatism is pragmatic, the new right is zealous, ideological and cavalier with the truth; in which for Trump, “facts” are nothing but “alternative facts” or just devices to puff up his image or slogans designed to stir up outrage and tribal loyalties.20 Concerning climate change, Australia suffers droughts and reef-bleaching seas, but the right won an election there under a party whose leader addressed the parliament holding a lump of coal like a holy relic.21 Although conservatism is cautious about change, the new right now airily contemplates revolutions—with the Alternative for Germany flirting with a referendum on the membership of the euro, with US President Trump threatening to leave the NATO at the risk of up-ending the balance of power, while the Tories in Britain were threatening a no-deal-Brexit at the risk of destroying the United Kingdom’s union with Scotland and Northern Ireland.22 The new right (exemplified, for instance, by Trumpism and Fox News in the United States) was trouncing the status quo for being “out-of-touch establishment” and running “things into the ground”; while the left wingers, “traditionally concerned about the poorest of the poor” and exemplified by individuals like the Harvard-trained Anand Giridharadas (author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World”), took time to “decry the millionaires and billionaires who … “broke the modern world”.23 All these embodied a general bleak view or perception of “a dysfunctional global order”, that produced stagnant incomes, raised insecurity and environmental degradation in such a manner that practically animated the “sense of 17 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 19 Loc. Cit. 20 Loc. Cit. 21 Loc. Cit. 22 Loc. Cit. 23 See Fareed Zakaria in “We have a bleak view of modern life. But the world is making real progress” The Washington Post, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-havea-bleak-view-of-modern-life-but-the-world-is-making-real-progress/2019/01/31/6ee30432-25a811e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7525691a49f8 (Last visited on Sunday, February, 3, 2019), op. cit. 18 Loc.

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“unfairness” that fueled Trump’s “America First” agenda and much of the anger on the right at the international system”.24 Despite the apologies of The Economist (as examined above25 ), all these were clearly a backlash against globalization and neo-liberalism, which had marginalized the poor and disconnected many people in the developed countries, creating a wave or widespread angst, gutsy chauvinism, and unprecedented “ethnic nationalism” against the more uplifting or high-minded “civic nationalism”.26 Critics argued that whereas “civic nationalism” is conciliatory, forward-looking and appeals to universal values like freedom and equality, “ethnic [or racial] nationalism” is zero-sum, aggressive and nostalgically drawing on race or history to set nations apart.27 The fact that the “British” voted to exit the European Union is serious evidence that there is a huge problem with globalization that must have to be fixed. The universality of the angst against the problems of globalization was attested to by the fact that like the anti-EU campaigners in Brexit, there were in the United States and other developed nation of the world, opposing forces to globalization, dramatically represented in the US by Trumpism. However, the United States and Europe are fundamentally divided on some aspects of globalization, especially because of the ideological discrepancies between the insular and sometimes deeply shareholdersaverse “Euro capitalism” and the “tightly regulated markets and shareholder-driven companies that characterize American brand of capitalism.28 In fact, until the emergence of Trumpism, and because the United States was more inclined to a more open and competitive capitalism, it could be safely assumed that the credo of globalization, liberalism and free trade was more highly favoured in that country across the wide spectrum of political or partisan orientations. But now, with the surreptitious surge of populism and nationalism that delivered President Trump in the White House, this can hardly be the case. Donald Trump himself as the Republican Party flag-bearer in the 2016 Presidential election ecstatically and consistently declared that “Americanism, not globalism, will be our [Americans] new credo” if elected President of the United States.29 And perhaps, it may well be because of the Trump nationalist and populist rhetoric that “the vast majority of his supporters—some 67%, in some polls, favoured the idea that the U.S. should not import some goods from developing countries.30 24 Loc.

Cit. “The global crisis in conservatism: The new right is not an evolution of conservatism, but a repudiation of it”, The Economist, July 6th–12th 2019, pp. 9–10, op. cit. 26 According to The Economist, civic nationalism is conciliatory, forward-looking and appeals to universal values like freedom and equality; but in contrast, ethnic nationalism “is zero-sum, aggressive and nostalgic”, drawing “on race or history to set [nations] apart; see “The new nationalism: With his call to put “America first”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit to a dangerous nationalism”, The Economist, November 19th–25th, 2016, p. 9, op. cit. 27 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 28 See Agwu (2016, pp. 431–433), op. cit. 29 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 30 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 25 See

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In his populism, Donald Trump was particularly seen as detonative of anger against globalization; an embodiment of racism, xenophobia, divisions, and authoritarianism, amongst other vices.31 The divisiveness and xenophobic nature of Trumpism was such that apart from President Trump’s disparaging of African countries as “shithole” countries, he also, at the onset of COVID-19, continued to refer to the pathogen as the “Chinese Virus”.32 With President Trump doubling down in his tweet that “some are being hit hard by the Chinese virus, [while] some are being hit practically not at all” (as his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, referred to the pathogen as the “Wuhan Virus”), China’s official Xinhua news agency responded that using “racist and xenophobic names to cast blame for the outbreak on other countries can only reveal politicians’ irresponsibility and incompetence which will intensify virus fears”.33 In fact, President Trump’s racism was fundamentally delineated when, after a white police officer kneeled on the neck of an African-American, George Floyd, causing his death, boasted to Americans with respect to the consequent diverse and multiracial street protests, that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”, in total disdain of public consciousness and the racial sensitivity.34 Because of President Trump’s racial outburst in respect of the coronavirus, a Seattle-based Asian-American pastor and author, Eugene Cho, even said too that “calling it the ‘Chinese virus’ only instigates blame, racism and hatred against Asians—here and abroad”; more so, when rather than Trumpism, the world “need leadership that speaks clearly against racism; leadership that brings the nation and world together, not further divides”.35 In the recriminations that were perpetrated in Trumpism about the coronavirus pathogen, Beijing even allowed some disinformation to spread in respect of the virus with its foreign ministry’s spokesman, Zhao Lijian, perpetuating the conspiracy theory that “it might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan”.36 Trumpism was such that despite the series of controversies that would easily have destroyed other candidacies—Donald Trump’s extreme policy proposals that drew “criticisms from both sides of the aisle”, his “record of racist and sexist [being a sexual predator] behavior, and lack of conventional political experience”37 —this category of xenophobic Americans still voted for him. Thus, in an obverse term, populism or anti-globalization forces are represented by Brexit in Europe, Trumpism in the United States—with Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaigns also 31 Fareed Zakaria, amongst others, outlined these vices as the reasons why he was against Donald Trump’s candidacy in the United States 2016 presidential election, Fareed Zakaria in GPS on CNN, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria), Sunday, November 6, 2016, between 9 and 10 pm local time. 32 See “Outrage as Trump calls coronavirus ‘Chinese virus’, U.S. death toll reaches 100”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, March 18, 2020, p. 2. 33 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 34 See “George Floyd, Trump and racism in USA”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, June 8, 2020, p. 18. 35 See “Outrage as Trump calls coronavirus ‘Chinese virus’, U.S. death toll reaches 100”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, March 18, 2020, p. 2, op. cit. 36 Loc. Cit. 37 See “Republican candidate’s win plunges U.S. into uncertain future”, The Guardian (Lagos), November 10, 2016, p. 2.

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denouncing some free trade agreements like the TPP—and some forces in Germany that think they lose out in openness38 —forces that continue to discredit free trade and migration in such a way that expose them to accusations by the proponents of globalization of being middle ages or medieval in their thinking. It was in this thrall of ethnic and/or racial nationalism that an ostensibly angry Donald Trump campaigned to “make America great again” by putting America first, determined to “no longer surrender this country [the United States] or its people to the false song of globalism”.39 Latching onto the fear of migration and the notion that globalization was a cultural threat, an economic threat and a security threat, Donald Trump campaigned viciously against American trade negotiations, promising, amongst others, to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); build a wall on the U.S. southern border with Mexico; ban Muslims from entering the United States, or alternatively, subject this category of immigrants to extreme vetting if they must; and also to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare policy, colloquially described as the “Obamacare”.40 Nigel Farage, who became “something of a folk hero among conservatives” because of his hatred of Europhiles, “his entertaining speeches castigating the European Union Parliament while serving in the European Union Parliament”; in addition to his (that is, Farage’s) intense populism and “plucky—and ultimately victorious— leadership of a wing of the Brexit campaign”—was also on the campaign hustings in support of Donald Trump.41 And hyping/heightening his anti-trade antics, his repudiation on President Obama’s trade negotiation and deals because of the perceived job loss that all the Obama trade deals allegedly caused Americans, Trump, predicted that he would shock the establishment, saying that his victory at the poll would be “Brexit plus” (a reference to Britain’s exit from the European Union), which he eventually accomplished with the result that the United States joined the “big league” of nations with populist, authoritarian and anti-globalization leadership.42 Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote, beating the widely favoured Democratic Party candidate, Hillary Clinton, who won the popular vote but could not be elected because the President of the United States must win the Electoral College vote. Even though Hillary Clinton also campaigned in repudiation of some of President Obama’s trade deals (like the Trans-Atlantic and the Transpacific partnerships), 38 See “Why they ‘re wrong: Globalization critics say it benefits only the elite. In fact, a less open world would hurt the poor most of all”, The Economist, October 1st 2016, p. 9, op. cit. 39 See “The new nationalism: With his call to put “America first”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit to a dangerous nationalism”, The Economist, November 19th–25th, 2016, p. 9, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 40 See Haley Sweetland Edwards in “The Obamacare conundrum”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, p. 28. 41 See Mark Antonio Wright in”Nigel Farage’s double standard”, available at http://www.nat ionalreview.com/corner/439375/nigel-farages-donald-trump-support-bad-manners (Last visited on Wednesday, November 9, 2016). 42 See “Trump wins in stunning election upset”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumpwins-presidency-in-stunning-victory-073128080.html (last visited on November 9, 2016).

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she showed more finesse and tendency to be receptive to globalization than Donald Trump who adopted a rather more bullying and extreme nationalist tactics. The former Swedish Foreign Minister, Carl Bildt, described the election of Trump as meaning “the end of the West as we know it”43 —open borders and free trade, amongst other liberal values. Instead of impelling confidence, the election of Donald Trump brought about a lugubrious feeling that coursed through, not just the length and breadth of America,44 but also the globe; except in, perhaps, Russia, where President Putin and his government was visibly elated.45 In Trump’s chauvinistic aversion to globalization—and in contrast to his fellow Republican and predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who in his 1980 presidential campaign, “sought [American] renewal after the failures of the Carter Presidency” and extolled American exceptionalism, describing it as a shinning “city on a hill” that should “not [be] turned inward, but outward—toward others”—Trump demanded “respect from a freeloading world that takes leaders in Washington for fools”.46 In his inaugural speech of Friday, January 20, 2017, the only place that the newly sworn-in President Trump can be credited with darkly making reference to American exceptionalism is where he declared that “we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example; we will shine for everyone to follow”.47 But this was only President Trump’s deceptive veneer for his ultra-nationalism and protectionist sentiments, especially in his narcissistic belief that “protection will lead to great prosperity and strength”. With a deeply cynical view (in his inaugural speech) that “what truly matters is not which party controls our government”,48 President Trump was underlining his conviction that his government was not all about ideology (liberalism, which he abjured with his repudiation of globalization) or political party (having won the presidential election while renouncing all known Republican Party principles, including that of free trade, even if not fair; for Trump himself had expressed preference for his so-called smart trade); but all about nationalism—America first. President Trump lamented the “American carnage”—the fact that “for decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry …; made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon; one by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores with not even a 43 Carl Bildt made this remark on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN programme, “Amanpour”, monitored

in Lagos (Nigeria) on Wednesday, November 16, 2016, between 8 and 9 pm local time. Karl Vick in “The U.S. continues to come apart in the wake of a divisive election”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, pp. 7–8. 45 See in particular, Ian Bremmer in “Trump will thaw chilly U.S.-Russia relationship”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, 12, op. cit. 46 See “The new nationalism: With his call to put “America first”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit to a dangerous nationalism”, The Economist, November 19th–25th, 2016, p. 9, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 47 See “full text of President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Speech”, available at http://abcnews. go.com/Politics/full-text-president-donald-trumps-inauguration-speech/story?id=44915821 (last visited on Wednesday, January 25, 2017), op. cit. 48 Loc. Cit. 44 See

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thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind”.49 It was also because of his populist rhetoric that immediately he was elected, and during his ‘thank you’ tour to supporters across the country, President-elect Trump visited Carrier, the company that had begun arrangements to relocate abroad and (by way of carrot) assured them of some corporate tax cuts as an incentive to remain in the United States, and (as stick or punishment) threatened higher retributive or punitive taxes (a 35% tax) for goods manufactured overseas to be exported to the United States.50 But in addition to Trump and his supporters—supporters (as this book also states) that were extensively composed of the true right-wing populists who were dominant in rural America and who desired the preservation of Middle Ages or medieval traditions because their non-college degree level of education and skills were not compliant with the changes and demands of globalization51 —the Democratic Party’s candidate Hillary Clinton was also critical of free trade, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), saying that free trade “hurt a lot of American workers”.52 The widespread assumption in the “#BringBackOurJob” movement in the United States was that “the white-black underclass was caused by the departure of manufacturing jobs” as a result of globalization and, invariably, outsourcing.53 In other words, the notion (even if misconceived) was that the global economy was the cultivator of job losses, poverty and inequality, a conviction shared not just by the “Trumpian theory” (coined after Donald Trump), but also “the political cognoscenti of both parties” (the two major political parties in the United States).54 In both Trump and Hillary, there was an American nationalist inclination that was clearly disruptive of globalization; unless, perhaps, the espousal of globalization is in American national interest—a nationalist ors sort of zero-sum approach to globalization. In his first three days in office, President Trump (as hinted earlier above) unleashed an avalanche of Executive Orders aimed at, amongst others, initiating America’s withdrawal from the TPP, halting immigration (with federal funding of “sanctuary cities” terminated), building a wall on the US-Mexico border), and restricting (for 120 days, but banning those from Syria indefinitely) the refugee flow into the United States, especially from the seven Muslim dominant nations of Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya,

49 Loc.

Cit. Michael C. Bender and Peter Nicholas “Donald Trump to Visit Carrier Plant Amid ‘Thank You’ Tour: President-elect, in first public events since the election, heads to Indianapolis, Cincinnati”, available at http://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-to-visit-indianapolis-cincinnati-infirst-public-events-since-election-day-1480551224 (last visited on Tuesday, December 6, 2016). 51 See also Agwu (2016, pp. 337–395), op. cit. 52 See the former President of Mexico, Vincente Fox, in “Questions”, Time (New York), September 12–19, 2016, p. 96. 53 See Joe Klein in “Don’t believe the new myths about America’s white working class”, Time (New York), September 12–19, 2016, p. 24. 54 Loc. cit. 50 See

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Yemen, Sudan, and Somalia; except, perhaps, they were thoroughly vetted.55 The temporary travel ban was swamped by controversy and judicial restraints, resulting in a second travel ban some weeks later in March, 2017. But a federal judge in Hawaii again issued a nation-wide halt to President Trump’s second temporary ban that targeted six predominantly Muslim countries (now excluding Iraq), a judgment that Trump (during a rally in Nashville, Tenn.) called an “unprecedented judicial overreach” while expressing his determination to fight the matter up to the US Supreme Court.56 Eventually, the Supreme Court, in what was “considered one of the court’s most shameful decisions”, on June 26, 2018, rejected the challenge to President Trump’s September 2017 third version of the ban from “entry to the U.S for citizens of some Muslim-majority nations”.57 Although considered a big win for the Trump administration because the travel ban policy had been mired in the courts for months; the Supreme Court decision was very divisive, with Chief Justice John Robert writing for the majority and stating that the Trump administration had shown sufficient national security justification for the ban, and that the demographics of the countries that it affected weren’t proof of “religious hostility”; while Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing a stinging dissenting opinion, accused the conservative Justices of “ignoring the facts” of how the ban had been advertised58 by Presidential Candidate Trump in the campaign hustings. Accusations and counter-accusations of President Trump being a white supremacist flew right, left and center, with the first travel ban ending up in court where a Seattle (Washington) federal judge James Robart, suspended the ban on the logic that it harms public safety, leading to the matter going on appeal.59 It was President Trump’s utterances during the Presidential campaigns that evidently hurt his second travel ban, his assertion that Islam hates the West, which suggested that the ban was a reaction to the so-called clash of civilization; that is, against all Muslims.60 So, as The Economist averred, although President Trump’s “government may turn afresh to the appeals court to get its ban reinstated”, the fact remains that “the sticking point again was that any “reasonable” person would interpret the ban as being based 55 See for instance, “Trump signs order pulling US out of global trade deal: cuts funding for international groups that provide abortion”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, January 24, 2017, p. 44; and “Trump to ban people from Syria, six other countries from entering America”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, January 26, 2017, p. 38. 56 See Alan Gomez in “Federal Judge blocks Trump’s second travel ban nation-wide”, available at http://www.nwcn.com/news/politics/federal-judge-blocks-trumps-second-travel-ban-nation wide-1/423065146 (last visited on Tuesday, March 21, 2017). 57 See Tessa Berenson in “What’s hidden inside the Supreme Court’s ruling on the travel ban?”, Time (New York), July 9, 2018, p. 8. 58 Loc. Cit. 59 See “US court rejects bid to immediately restore travel ban”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, February 6, 2017, p. 44; see also Massimo Calabresi in “Trump’s immigration order is legal—for now”, Time (New York), February 13, 2017, pp. 7–8. 60 See Alan Gomez in “Federal Judge blocks Trump’s second travel ban nation-wide”, available at http://www.nwcn.com/news/politics/federal-judge-blocks-trumps-second-travel-ban-nation wide-1/423065146 (last visited on Tuesday, March 21, 2017), op. cit.

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on religion”.61 The charges that President Trump is a white supremacist and antiMuslim are divisive and related to the equally divisive wide evangelical support that is inherent in his constituencies.62 President Trump’s identification with the evangelicals—a Christian fundamentalist group that professes to be “born-again”—had tended, like his sympathy for white supremacism,63 to create the politics of identity rather than that of issues in the United States. In other words, apart from the divisive issues of his impeachment, his bombing of Iran and the killing of the Iranian GeneraL Qassem Soleimani, immigration, the COVID-19, healthcare (the Affordable Care Act, ACA), the environment (Trump’s climate change denial), and the death of Ruth Badel Ginsburg (RBG), amongst others, President Trump had embedded American politics in the obscurity of white supremacism, religion, race and ethnicity. In fact, apart from President Trump’s excessive concern about the economy, he sabotaged issues as seen in his evident campaign against the wearing of masks (amongst other COVID19 Pandemic health concerns)—the ignoring of the practice of mask-wearing in his 2020 re-election campaigns.64 For his evangelical inclinations that generally cared less about issue-oriented politics (but cared more about evangelical religious convictions that apparently threatened American secularism), the American evangelical movement vehemently swore his re-election in the 2020 November Presidential elections.65 Thus, Trumpism used white supremacism and the evangelicals to seemingly turn the US November 2020 elections away from issue-oriented politics. The evangelicals’ interests here were particularly more for the appointment of conservative judges in the Supreme Court, Judges that would be against abortion (amongst other reasons); President Trump’s theatrical religious ways were such that in early June 2020, he had federal officers use tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse a peaceful protest in order to stage a photo-op

61 See

“The world this week”, The Economist, March 18th 2017, p. 6. Sean IIIng in “Is evangelical support for Trump a contradiction?”, Vox, July 12, 2020, available at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/7/9/21291493/donald-trump-eva ngelical-christians-kristin-kobes-du-mez (last visited on September 17, 2020). 63 On August 15, 2017, when President Trump responded to the violent protests in Charlottesville, Va, he assigned a moral equivalence between the white supremacists that were spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it by saying that “you also had people that were very fine people on both sides”, see Angie Drobnic Holan in “In context: Donald Trump’s ‘very fine people on both sides’ remarks (transcript)”, PolitiFact, April 26, 2019, available at https://www.politi fact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks/ (last visited on September 18, 2020). 64 See Stephen Collinson in “Trump’s anti-mask crusade is coming back to bite him”, CNN Politics, Thursday, July 2, 2020, available at https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/02/politics/donald-trump-cor onavirus-masks-politics-joe-biden-election-2020/index.html (last visited on September 18, 2020). 65 See Patsy Widakuswara in “Trump courts Evangelicals to secure re-election”, VoA, January 4, 2020, available at https://www.voanews.com/usa/us-politics/trump-courts-evangelicals-secure-reelection (last visited on Thursday, September 17, 2020). 62 See

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outside the St. John’s Church that sits across from the White House in his infamously surreal and awkwardly dramatic believe in the Bible.66 In fact, President Trump’s association with the evangelical Christian nationalism rekindled the fright about religious fanaticism in American politics because this variant of Christian nationalists draw support from the broader Christian right.67 As an extremist right group, the evangelical do not perceive Jesus Christ as a humble and peaceful Lamb of God. Consistent with the above extreme Christian philosophy, the evangelicals perceived President Trump as a strong, unconventional and chaotic figure that would restore the United States by making America great again (with amongst others, the abolition of homosexuality), just as the Kingdom of God shall be taken by force.68 Because President Trump courted the evangelicals for his re-election, he combined his drama with the Bible opposite St. John’s Church across the White House with his persistent railing against homosexuality, boasts about the restriction of abortions, the appointment of the Supreme Court’s Conservative Judges (made worse with the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the heels of the November 2020 Presidential elections and President Trump’s avowal that he would replace her immediately without waiting for the next President to do so69 ) and the safeguarding of the First Amendment rights that sustains the owning of guns in the United States—the conservative reasons of which he did well amongst Hispanic and Latino voters.70 Because white evangelicals in particular has a complicated relationship with Christian nationalism, the recrudescence of this romance with the evangelicals by President Trump resonated with what was felt at the election of George W. Bush in early 2000s (even though the election of Barack Obama broke that expectation) and the risk of America risking the abandonment of secularism.71 Yet, President Trump’s romance with the evangelicals was just an expedient one because it cannot

66 See Sean IIIng in “Is evangelical support for Trump a contradiction?”, Vox, July 12, 2020, available at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/7/9/21291493/donald-trump-eva ngelical-christians-kristin-kobes-du-mez (last visited on September 17, 2020), loc. cit. 67 See “Christian nationalism” in Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_ nationalism (last visited on September 17, 2020). 68 Remark in Aljazeera’s Bottomline, an Aljazeera television programme monitored in Lagos on Thursday, September 17, 2020, at 1.30am, local time. 69 See Martin Farrer, Lois Beckett, Joan E. Greve, and Martin Belam in “Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Obama calls on Republicans to delay filling vacancy—as it happened”, The Guardian, September 19, 2020, available at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2020/sep/18/donald-trump-joebiden-minnesota-us-election-coronavirus-covid-live-updates (last visited on September 19, 2020). 70 See Patsy Widakuswara in “Trump courts Evangelicals to secure re-election”, VoA, January 4, 2020, available at https://www.voanews.com/usa/us-politics/trump-courts-evangelicals-secure-reelection (last visited on Thursday, September 17, 2020), op. cit. 71 See Matthew Lee Anderson in “White Evangelicals have a complicated relationship with Christian nationalism”, Christian Today (CT), June 22, 2020, available at https://www.christianitytoday.com/ ct/2020/july-august/christian-nationalist-temptation-america-white-evangelicals.html (last visited on September 17, 2020).

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be reconciled with his personal lifestyle, especially with women.72 But concerning his divisiveness and travel bans, at the heart of President Trump’s immigration ban, both from the standpoint of Judge James Robart (including, of course, the Hawaii Federal Judge) and that of the petitioners, was the terrorist scare; and so, some critics outside the United States even joined the fray and took side with President Trump, arguing that “although every country in the world is an immigrant nation as nobody grew like trees from the ground; … every country has the right to protect itself from its sworn enemies”.73

3.2 A Trumpian Apology: Any Rhyme or Reason? Trumpism is not seen as a whim by some apologists. The argument inherent in this Trump apology relates to the clash of civilization narrative—the belief that radical Islamist are after the United States and the entire Westerners because the occupying presence of the latter in the Middle East was polluting, purporting that Islam forbade two religions in Arabia.74 Hence the Trump apologist’s query: “why this rush to countries of “infidels” to settle among them? Same people who are forbidden because of their religion in your own countries?75 So, wondering why “Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and Somali refugees would [not] be warmly welcomed by their Muslim brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and other Muslim countries which are prosperous and lie next door to them”, this apologist warned Trump against “reckless liberalization and importation of foreigners, many of whom have questionable commitment to America”.76 In the ardent conviction of this apologist, “Russia is in control of its system; and so are China, Japan and even India, while America and Europe have become international dumpsites”.77 Unfortunately, according to this apologist, “if the migration of Muslims to these Christian-founded countries were the issue alone, perhaps, the locals would not feel so threatened”; rather, “these newcomers maintain their allegiance to terror cells in their countries of origin”, meaning that “they can turn from “peaceful” to “radical” overnight and become foot soldiers for terrorist organizations 72 See

Remark in Aljazeera’s Bottomline, an Aljazeera television programme monitored in Lagos on Thursday, September 17, 2020, at 1.30am, local time, op. Cit; see also Rebecca Shabad in “New Trump allegation: Ex-model says he assaulted her at U.S. Open tennis in ‘97”, yahoonews, available at https://news.yahoo.com/ex-model-alleges-trump-sexually-123850 860.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer (last visited on September 17, 2020). 73 See, for instance, Ochereome Nnnanna in “Trump versus bastardized America”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, February 2, 2017, p. 31. 74 See Bernard Lewis (2003); The Crisis of Islam …, p. xxix, op. cit. 75 See, Ochereome Nnnanna in “Trump versus bastardized America”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, February 2, 2017, p. 31, op. cit. 76 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 77 Loc. Cit.

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in the Muslim world”.78 Thus, in the flow of refugees to the West, this apologist was convinced “that terrorist groups are deliberately sponsoring their foot soldiers to become Americans and Europeans to destroy their systems from inside”.79 The argument then is that if Trump fails to stem this refugee flow into the United States—the bastardization of America that caused “the silent majority orthodox Americans [to respond] to Donald Trump’s campaign messages aimed at making America great again”—, “America risks losing its superpower status within the next decade”, and that “it might even disintegrate”; the reason being that “the people they are trying to accommodate and placate” (being “their implacable, sworn enemies”), may be their nemesis, given this likely scenario and poser: “today, they [the people they are accommodating] are vulnerable, what will happen tomorrow when they are ready to move against America and Israel?”80 But irrespective of these contestations and altercations, the fact remains that President Trump’s immigration ban derived from his nationalist electoral promises. However, he was only being populist about it; likewise his opponents. All that is at issue here is more of politics than law, especially international law; for every sovereign nation reserves the right to admit or reject aliens without the duty to offer explanations. In the United States, as also obtains elsewhere, the executive arm of government has the preponderant right to conduct foreign policy, and this includes deciding on who enters or leaves the United States. Even without the hullabaloo about immigration ban against migrants or refugees from the seven dominantly Muslim countries aforementioned, President Trump would have still achieved the same result with silent or everyday executive and/or bureaucratic decisions. But when he took office, President Trump began trying to make political statements with an avalanche of Executive Orders, some as unnecessary as his memorandum of January 24, 2017, approving the controversial Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), the two pipelines that the Obama administration had halted because of their negative environmental impacts.81 This action of President Trump was in disregard of the environment, a confirmation of his belief that climate change was a hoax, and what a Nigerian critic termed “the new American age of intolerance, recalling matter of factly that: There have been debates and protests against the construction of the 172-mile Keystone and Dakota Access Pipelines which is expected to carry 570,000 barrels of crude oil. The Standing Rock Sioux people on whose lands the pipes would be laid complain that they would pass underneath the Missouri River which is the source of their drinking water, and that given the frequency of pipe leaks and bursts, the river can be polluted. They also complain of non-proper consultation; while environmentalists argue that fossil fuels should be left in the ground due to their adverse affect on climate change.82

78 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 80 Loc. Cit. Parentheses mine. 81 See “Energy: A tale of two pipelines”, Time (New York), February 13, 2017, p. 13. 82 See Owei Lakemfa in “The New American Age of Intolerance”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 3, 2017, p. 31. 79 Loc.

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In fact, when President Trump took office, the United States stood on the precipice of an imperial presidency; the possibility of which was reinforced by the Republican majority in Congress, and the President’s already predicted appointment of a deeply conservative Judge, Neil Gorsuch, to fill the then existing vacancy in the Supreme Court.83 It was the very imperial presidency that the Republicans were accusing President Obama of tending towards when the latter was embarking in the use of the same Executive Orders to get some things done. The sway of rabid disposition to nationalism, populism and anti-globalization that led to Donald Trump’s victory in the American presidential election, was poised to be given a free reign, becoming a credo, “a new normal” as the Chinese President XI Jinping described his abolition of the two-term limit, consolidation and concentration of unchecked power over the 1.4bn Chinese in himself.84 But as Barack Obama handed over presidential power to Trump and bade Americans farewell, he reiterated his conviction that “trade should be fair and not just free”; and that “the next wave of economic dislocation won’t come from overseas; it will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes many good, middle-class jobs obsolete”.85 Again, blaming globalization or immigration for the woes of the American underclass did not seem cognizant of some internal and personal contradictions of some individuals, what Joe Klein described as “habits of indolence—the inability to show up to work on time, the refusal to follow orders on the job, the preference to hang out at home often subsidized by the federal government”.86 The populism and nationalism surge in 2016 were so widespread that by 2017, globalization had seemingly been boxed into a strait-jacket; so much so that even though Davos—the euphemism for the meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the annual four-day coming together of the world’s most powerful political and business leaders, the “global clubhouse for establishment figures” that holds in Davos, Switzerland—coincided with the inauguration of President Donald Trump in the January 20, 2017, it witnessed the dominance of anti-establishment (globalization) figures like Trump of the United States, Putin of Russia, and Xi-Jinping of China.87 But something much more insidious than populism was taking place 83 See Corky Siemaszko in “As a Student, SCOTUS Nominee Gorsuch Supported Gays and Opposed Campus Military Recruiters”, available at http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/student-scotusnominee-gorsuch-supported-gays-opposed-campus-military-recruiters-n715421 (last visited on Thursday, February 02, 2017). 84 See “The world most powerful man: Xi Jinping now has more clout than Donald Trump; the world should be wary”, The Economist, October 14th–20th 2017, p. 11; see also Bill Powell in “XI’S Gotta Have it: China’s President seems to have total control—and may keep it for a very long time”, Newsweek, March 16, 2018, pp. 12–13. 85 See “Full Text of President Obama’s Farewell Speech” in Chicago on January 10, 2017, available at http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/BL-WB-67205?responsive=y (last visited on January 11, 2017), op. cit. 86 See Joe Klein in “Don’t believe the new myths about America’s white working class”, Time (New York), September 12–19, 2016, p. 24. 87 See Matt McAllester in “Davos lone stars”, Newsweek, January 20 (01/20/2017), 2017, pp. 20, 21, op. cit.

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around the world—as Madeleine Albright noted in her Fascism: A Warning, political pluralism was being strangulated.88 For instance, in the creeping nationalism and authoritarianism in the United States, although President Trump, as acknowledged by Madeleine Albright, may not be classified as a textbook fascist, he had an authoritarian streak that ranged from attacking the media to targeting immigrants, amongst others; and these were paving the way for the growth of fascism around the world: in Russia, Alexei Navalny, the only credible opposition candidate against Vladimir Putin was rejected by the Central Election Commission; while in China, the Communist Party amended the country’s Constitution, removed the term limits and thereby made Xi Jinping a life-long leader.89 This was the context in which what Madeleine Albright described as an international fraternity of “bullies”90 emerged, the conclave that dominated the January 20, 2017 Davos in Switzerland aforementioned. This dominance at the world stage by rabid nationalists and anti-establishment and anti-globalization figures had triggered in 2016/2017, a scenario where liberals were deemed to have lost its argument for “open economies and open societies, where the free exchange of goods, capital, people and ideas is encouraged and where universal freedoms are protected from state abuse by the rule of law”.91 In the words of The Economist: Not just over Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, but also the tragedy of Syria, abandoned to its suffering, and widespread support—in Hungary, Poland and beyond—for “illiberal democracy”. As globalization has become a slur, nationalism and even authoritarianism, have flourished. In Turkey, relief at the failure of a coup was overtaken by savage (and popular) reprisals. In the Philippines, voters chose a President who not only deployed death squads but bragged about pulling the trigger. All the while, Russia, which hacked Western democracy; and China, which, just last week, set out to taunt America by seizing one of its maritime drones, insists liberalism is merely a cover for Western expansion.92

For President Donald Trump in particular, especially given the United States’ transcendent influence in the world, his erratic and aberrant ways—illustrated at the incipient stage of his presidency by, for instance, his taking a direct telephone call from the President of Taiwan in negation of America’s one-China policy93 ; and his racial chauvinism and intolerance (in the guise of reacting to globalization). President Trump’s populism and nationalism were emergent threats that endangered international peace and security, including the principle of multilateralism and the 88 See Nicole Goodkind in “Pulpit Bullies: Madeleine Albright talks Trump, antifa and the return of global fascism”, Newsweek, April 20, 2018, p. 12. 89 See Kokil K. Shah in “Democracy under threat”, New African, April 2018, p. 4. 90 See Nicole Goodkind in “Pulpit Bullies: Madeleine Albright talks Trump, antifa and the return of global fascism”, Newsweek, April 20, 2018, p. 12, op. cit. 91 See “The year of living dangerously: Liberals have lost most of the argument in 2016. They should not feel defeated so much as reinvigorated”, The Economist, December 24th 2016, p. 11, op. cit. 92 Loc. Cit. 93 See Olivier Knox “White House chides Trump for Taiwan call, available at https://www.yahoo. com/news/white-house-chides-trump-for-taiwan-call-201900723.html (last visited on Tuesday, December 6, 2016).

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global cohesion that were required to fight terrorism. Thus, President Trump was truly a threat to globalization. However, the paradox about globalization remains that it is the same way that globalization had been a threat to itself by leaving many peoples and nations behind in poverty that it is also a viable unifying force that uses multilateral institutions to fight the concerns or contradictions of globalization.

3.3 Convergence and Global Sway of Populism and Nationalism In its ‘Open Future project’—The Economist newsmagazine’s series on liberalism’s greatest thinkers with which it marked its 175th anniversary—the magazine wrote that for roughly 30 years, liberals, which are in the market for new ideas, ran the world because “starting in the early 1980s, free markets, globalization and individual freedoms [had] flourished”.94 Historically and retrospectively, as The Economist recounted, liberalists like John Maynard Keynes “advocated government intervention during recessions to avoid the social ruin of an economic collapse”; thus, in addition, “the welfare state was not a socialist creation, as both right and left assume, but a liberal one”; a creation by liberalism so that individuals would be free to achieve their potentials.95 And it was because of the opportunities it provided for self-fulfillment that “liberalism—in this broad classical sense, rather than the narrow American left-of-center one—saw off communism as well as social conservatism”.96 But unfortunately, after leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the intellectual dominance of liberalism led to a disaster in 2008, a crash in which it fell apart.97 As the crisis of globalization and the financial crisis in particular “unleashed economic austerity and the rise of populism, liberals in charge of governments and the banks got the blame and has been paralyzed ever since.98 So, although “liberalism is a broad church”, as The Economist wrote, “the liberals in charge before the financial crisis”, convinced that they had all the answers, did nothing or stopped thinking.99 Lamenting the dearth of the great liberalists of yore, The Economist wrote that: Were the great minds still humming, three things would trouble them. The first is the steady erosion of truth by “fake news”, Twitter storms and viral postings. Liberalism thrives on conflict. But for arguments to be constructive, it must be founded on good faith and reason. Today, both sides talk past each other. The idea has become common, on both right and left,

94 See “Philosophy brief: The brains trust”, The Economist, August 4th–10th 2018, p. 10. Parenthesis

mine. 95 Loc. Cit. 96 Loc. Cit. 97 Loc. Cit. 98 Loc. Cit. 99 Loc. Cit.

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that when people put forward an argument, you cannot separate what they say from who they are.100

The foregoing had led to the “erosion of individual freedom” and “liberals’ faltering faith in progress” as “many people no longer expect to live better than their parents”.101 In this melee and lack of a coherent response from liberalists, as The Economist recounted that as democracies drifted towards xenophobic nationalism, universal values were in retreat; “and for the first time since the heyday of the Soviet Union, liberalism faces the challenge of a powerful alternative in the form of Chinese state-capitalism”.102 The rise of populist nationalism in otherwise liberal West was a clear indication that liberals had shrunk from their task; unlike the liberal thinkers of yesteryears (who had confronted and prevailed over revolutions, wars and the evils of totalitarianism) that would have rolled up their sleeves and gotten down to making the world a better place.103 Although it cannot be said that the reputation of liberalism was completely gutted in 2016 in particular; yet, that year did witness in unprecedented terms, a great deal of chaos in the ideology of liberalism, and in globalization as its major corollary— a tumult that was clearly exemplified by Brexit, the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the paroxysm of terror (particularly by the ISIS), and violence in Syria, Turkey, and the Philippines.104 The rise of nationalism, populism and antiglobalization sentiments compounded the already existing wave of extremism around the world: there were the lone wolf terrorists that were up and about, inspired by either extreme right-wing nationalism or religious zealotry; there were individuals like the far-right extremist in Leeds (England) who in June, 2016 (while shouting “Britain first”), murdered the British politician, Jo Cox, an anti-Brexit advocate for diversity105 ; and there were people like Mevlut Mert Altintas, an off-duty police officer who, in late December 2016, in Ankara (Turkey), shot and killed the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, at an art gallery while shouting “don’t forget Aleppo”, the northern Syrian city whose eastern part, occupied by rebels, was seized by the Syrian government. The United States’ President Trump was an archetypal populist with a profound protectionist agenda; but his protectionist policies unfolded within the context of “jealous nationalism” in other countries106 —meaning that Trump was not alone in his ultra-nationalism and aversion to globalization. The man who reputedly helped Trump win the White House—Steve Bannon—became an avowed campaigner for the spread of populism around the Western world, especially in Europe where he 100 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 102 Loc. Cit. 103 Loc. Cit. 104 See “Big Shots, the year 2016 in photos: It’s a mad, mad, bad, bad world”, Newsweek, January 13 (01/13/2017), p. 4. 105 Ibid, p. 5. 106 See “The new nationalism: With his call to put “America first”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit to a dangerous nationalism”, The Economist, November 19th–25th, 2016, p. 9, op. cit. 101 Loc.

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was reportedly determined to “pull off a similar antiestablishment revolution in the EU and get eurosceptics from all corners of the union voted into the European Parliament107 —from where they would take back control by way of exiting the European Union. In fact, it was the French Philosopher, Bernard-Henry Levy, who said that it was Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin that were fueling populist forces both within and outside the European continent, using such critics as Italy’s Matteo Salvini and France’s Marine Le Pen.108 When he spoke to Euronews in Athens about the future of the European project, Bernard-Henri said: We have populist movements all over Europe supported from outside by external forces, for example, Mr. Putin … So, the two enemies of European values are linked. On one side you have people like Marine Le Pen or Salvini or others, on the other side, you have people like Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump who are fuelling the internal force.109

In Bernard-Henri’ monologue in the European project under reference, entitled “looking for Europe, considers the future of the bloc amid a rising threat of nationalism”, he stated that “you have now some political forces who use democracy to ruin democracy, who use elections in order to torpedo the system which makes election possible and who are going to use the European Parliament in order to corrupt from inside, to weaken and maybe to destroy—but this will be more difficult—the European project itself. So please vote … but for real European candidates who have Europe in the heart”.110 One of the prominent eurosceptics that Bannon had signed into the cause of exiting the EU was Italian Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini.111 Indeed, Matteo Salvini— described by the Time magazine as “the most feared man in Europe”112 —had reportedly “taken pages from Donald Trump’s populist playbook”, having vowed to an Italian audience that “he would seize back control of their lives from the European Union’s faceless bureaucrats” and chanted “Italians first!” to the admiration and loud cheers of the people.113 Even the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, and the Dutch nationalist—Geert Wilders—are admirers of Steve Bannon’s populist project in Europe.114 In reference to Steve Bannon’s mobilization of eurosceptics 107 See

“As Sweden swings right, Bannon’s anti-EU crusade looks north”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 12, 2018, p. 44. 108 See Giannis Giaginis in “Populists are attacking Europe from inside and out, claims philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy”, euronews, available at https://www.euronews.com/2019/04/02/populists-areattacking-europe-from-inside-and-out-claims-bernard-henri-levy (last visited on April 2, 2019). 109 Loc. Cit. 110 Loc. Cit. 111 See “As Sweden swings right, Bannon’s anti-EU crusade looks north”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 12, 2018, p. 44, op. cit. 112 See Vivienne Walt, “The Most Feared Man in Europe: Matteo Salvini, Italy’s hard-line Interior Minister wants to remake the EU for Nationalists”, Time (New York), September 24, 2018, p. 21. 113 Loc. Cit. 114 See “As Sweden swings right, Bannon’s anti-EU crusade looks north”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 12, 2018, p. 44, op. cit.

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in the taking back control from the EU, Wilders had reportedly told Reuters that “sometimes you need a catalyst”.115 Nevertheless, this anti-globalization syndrome had existed elsewhere around the world, some of which even preceded the election of President Trump in the United States. In other words, when Donald Trump emerged on the scene of chauvinism, nationalism and populism, there was already chauvinism and an aversion to globalization in countries around the world. This prevalence of nationalism and populism was almost a common denominator that existed at a scale never seen since the end of the Second World War, especially in those “great and rising powers” like Russia, China, Turkey, India, and many European countries—countries where many of the leaders and the common folk were “simultaneously in thrall to various sorts of chauvinism”.116 In other words, the nationalist and populists were individuals found in almost all the strata of the society, but whose common trait was die-hard chauvinism. For instance, the right-winger, Thomas Mair, who killed the British Parliamentarian, Jo Cox, was a chauvinist who shouted ‘long live the United Kingdom and death to traitors’ as he carried out his dastardly act. Even the avant-garde of the Brexit movement, individuals like Nigel Farage of the British UKIP, boasted about regarding the day after the successful Brexit vote as the United Kingdom’s Independence Day. In fact, the Russian President Vladimir Putin had “shunned cosmopolitan liberal values for a distinctively Russian mix of Slavic tradition and orthodox Christianity”.117 President Putin had always boasted, to boot (especially in the wake of his annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula), that he would defend ethnic Russians anywhere they live.118 Although he said that it was a joke, but he had reportedly said in a televised awards ceremony for geography students that Russia’s border “doesn’t end anywhere”; which, if taken seriously, may amount to the expression of the geopolitical doctrine he vowed in July 2014 to Russian ambassadors thus: “I would like to make it clear to all: our country will continue to actively defend the rights of Russians, our compatriots abroad, using the entire range of available means—from political and economic to operations under international humanitarian law and the right of self-defence”.119 In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had in his ethnic chauvinism, “turned away from the European Union [especially in the wake of his government’s postcoup crackdown on human rights] and from peace talks with the Kurdish minority in favour of a strident Islamic nationalism that is quick to detect insults and threats

115 Loc.

Cit.

116 See “The new nationalism: With his call to put “America first”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit

to a dangerous nationalism”, The Economist, November 19th–25th, 2016, p. 9, op. cit. Cit. 118 See “Russia’s border has no end, says Putin”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, November 25, 2016, p. 50. 119 Loc. Cit. 117 Loc.

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from abroad”.120 This was in addition to Turkey’s dalliance with Russia. Ankara’s dalliance with Russia remained a source of concern for Washington. It was a dalliance that both countries were determined to preserve, even when on Monday, December 19, 2016, a gunman, identified as Melvut Altintas, an off-duty Turkish policeman, shot and killed the Russian Ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, as he delivered a speech at an art exhibition in Ankara; with the gunman yelling the Arabic phrase “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) “don’t forget Aleppo”.121 The killing of the Russian Ambassador to Turkey was apparently done to undermine that thawing of ties between both countries, a relationship that had been strained by the Syrian civil war; but which was being rejuvenated, despite the fact that the Russian-backed Syrian forces had mustered the ability to defeat and end the Syrian rebels’ resistance in the Syrian northern city of Eastern Aleppo.122 Even in India, although Prime Minister Narendra Modi “remains outward-looking and modernizing, but he has ties to radical ethnic-nationalist Hindu groups that preach chauvinism and intolerance”.123 Although this chauvinism and intolerance had existed at the subterranean level in Europe since the end of the Second World War, their eruption in the United Kingdom with the Brexit vote—also evidently a reaction to the cultural and security threats inherent the refugee flow in wake of the ISIS’s devastation of Syria and Iraq—coupled with Donald Trump’s emergence as President of the United States—no thanks to “the convoluted American electoral college laboratory”—with his anti-immigration and anti-Muslim tantrums, have all apparently buoyed the far-right movement in Europe and their characteristic chauvinism and intolerance of others.124 Thus, Brexit and Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United State represented, not just the repudiation of globalization and free trade, but also the resurgence of nationalism and authoritarian streaks across the globe. But Brexit may well have been the first open electoral manifestation of populism, yet the incidence of the Donald Trump White House was clearly populism’s first aggressive enunciation of this principle by a leading western government as an article of faith in foreign policy. Hillary Clinton recalled that President Trumps inaugural speech “was dark and dystopian; I heard it as a howl straight from the white nationalist gut” [as] its most memorable line was about American carnage”.125 This populist 120 See “The new nationalism: With his call to put “America first”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit

to a dangerous nationalism”, The Economist, November 19th–25th, 2016, p. 9, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 121 See “Russian ambassador to Turkey shot dead in Ankara”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, December 20, 2016, p. 45; and “Russian ambassador shot dead in gallery”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, December 20, 2016, p. 41. 122 See “Body of Russian Ambassador flown home, as Turkey arrests 6”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, December 21, 2016, p. 44. 123 See “The new nationalism: With his call to put “America first”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit to a dangerous nationalism”, The Economist, November 19th–25th, 2016, p. 9, op. cit. 124 See Owei Lakemfa in “Watch out for Europe, not just Trump”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, November 25, 2016, p. 31. 125 See Hillary Rodham Clinton (2017); What Happened …, p. 7, op. cit.

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foreign policy was also very starkly stated by President Trump on Tuesday, September 19, 2017 when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly for the first time; for he said: In foreign affairs, we are renewing this founding principle of sovereignty. Our government’s first duty is to its people, to our citizens—to serve their needs, to ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values. As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like you, as the leaders of your countries will always, and should always, put your countries first. All responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens, and the nation-state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition. But making a better life for our people also requires us to work together in close harmony and unity to create a more safe and peaceful future for all people. … But we can no longer be taken advantage of, or enter into a one-sided deal where the United States gets nothing in return. As long as I hold this office, I will defend America’s interests above all else.126

The populist wave of 2016 and 2017 was such that, although the anti-nationalist and anti-populist German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, won a historic fourth term as Chancellor, in other parts of Europe, the “anti E.U. firebrands Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen pushed past establishment parties to finish second earlier [in 2017] in Holland and France, respectively”; while “Germany’s anti-immigrant, Euroskeptic party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), became the first far-right party to win seats in the German Parliament since the Nazi surrender in 1945”.127 Meanwhile, in Spain, the anger of nationalists brewed, culminating in the October 1, 2017 referendum in Catalonia that was partially put down, discountenanced and declared illegal by the authorities in Barcelona; but which the independence-seeking Catalans sought to use to declare their independence from Spain.128 In the Middle East, the Kurds of the northern Iraqi Kurdistan region of Erbil, after nearly a century of agitations for self-determination, organized a referendum (also discountenanced, as in Spain, by the central authority in Baghdad, the United States, Iran, Turkey and many other countries in the region and the international community) on September 15, 2017 in which they voted 92.7% in favour of independence.129 This was even—in Asia (among the Rohingyas of Myanmar or Burma) and Africa (among the Englishspeaking Cameroonians and some people of the defunct Biafra in the southeast region of Nigeria)130 —as nationalist agitations for self-determination and independence continued to erupt in many parts of the world. 126 See the transcript of President Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations, Tuesday, September

19, 2017; available at https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2017/09/19/read-text-presidenttrump-speech/4vlazWj8AsiRURrsqRN5lI/amp.html (last visited on Tuesday, September 19, 2017); op. cit. 127 See Ian Bremmer in “Yes, Merkel won again. But the fires of European populism are still raging”, Time (New York), October 9, 2017, p. 9, op. cit. 128 Loc. Cit.; see also, Owei Lakemfa in “Catalans, Rohingyas and other minority eruptions”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, October 6, 2017, p. 31. 129 See Jared Malsin in “Storms gather as Iraq’s Kurds vote for independence”, Time (New York), October 9, 2017, pp. 13–14. 130 See Owei Lakemfa in “Catalans, Rohingyas and other minority eruptions”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, October 6, 2017, p. 31, op. cit.

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Populism, nationalism and the attendant demand for self-determination or political independence creates crises in foreign policy in many unimaginable ways. Apart from inducing the perception of international relations as a zero-sum game—like the U.S. President Trump in his “America first” mantra—populism and nationalism also create interesting times for the capacity for international coalescence on basic values. For instance, it was nationalism and populism that animated in the southeast region of Nigeria, a group that went by the name, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), and triggered the federal government of Nigeria into following the path of the Algerian state131 in manifesting the controversial characteristic of a security state while countering terrorism. In its tilt toward the security state, the federal government of Nigeria conflated the IPOB’s agitation for self-determination and independence—an issue that the United States said bordered on democratic rights and, thus, merited a debate132 —with terrorism (declared IPOB a terrorist organization) and insinuated that France was hosting the ‘financial headquarters’ of the IPOB and ipso facto sponsoring the group133 —even as the United States disagreed with the characterization of IPOB as a terrorist organization.134 But it was not only in the federal government of Nigeria’s relationship with the United States and France that nationalism has created a crisis in international relations. This crisis has also happened in China’s relationship with the rest of the world. Although China “depends upon open markets, embraces some global institutions and wants to be close to America”, but as once predicted by Fareed Zakaria,135 it has also manifested its own chauvinistic nationalism; and this is in its Han-centrism, the smug assumption that “to count as properly Chinese, you have in practice to belong to the Han people”; otherwise, domestically, you are only but a second-class citizen136 ; and internationally, you cannot be entitled to citizenship or even granted or allowed the right to immigration as a refugee.137 China’s Han-centrism is different from Nigeria’s Afro-centrism to the extent that unlike the latter, it is, in addition to its outward orientation, internally oriented and culturally insensitive (with respect to its internal dynamics); such that “ordinary manifestations of local culture in border regions have been criminalized”.138

131 See

Agwu (2018, pp. 31–35), op. cit. Clifford Ndujihe in “Terror Tag: FG tackles US on IPOD”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 29, 2017, pp. 1, 5. 133 See Abdallah el-Kurebe, Denis Agbo & Bashir Bello in “IPOD: France disagrees with FG”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 22, 2017, pp. 1, 34. 134 See Clifford Ndujihe in “Terror Tag: FG tackles US on IPOD”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 29, 2017, p. 5, op. cit. 135 See Agwu (2016, p. 776), op. cit. 136 See “The new nationalism: With his call to put “America first”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit to a dangerous nationalism”, The Economist, November 19th–25th, 2016, p. 9, op. cit. 137 See “Who are the Chinese?; The upper Han: The world’s rising superpower has a particular vision of ethnicity and nationhood that has implications at home and abroad”, The Economist, November 19th–25th 2016, p. 22, op. cit. 138 Ibid, p. 21. 132 See

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When the Chinese trumpet “win–win”, “co-prosperity”, and “peaceful-rising” as the cornerstone of their foreign policy, they say nothing about their “Han-centered worldview [that even] extends to refugees” and the “sorting [of] citizens abroad by their ethnic identity rather than their national one—whether by claiming to defend “its own” or punish them for disloyalty”; thus, running the risk of clashing with other countries.139 The implication of the foregoing is that if you are, for instance, a Chinese-American (a US citizen), but you are of the Han ethnic extraction, you are claimed by China as one of “its own”; with Beijing, thus, being insensitive to, and a times out rightly banning dual nationality and orchestrating the situation where, probably with a few exceptions, “those who become eligible for a foreign passport, by birth, wealth or residency, face a choice”; and this is not to talk about the fact that it is “so difficult for foreigners to become Chinese”.140 China’s Han-centrism has continued to cause it some ethnic tensions, so much so that “unlike the Tibetans [and the] Muslim Uyghurs of its West where spilitism and oppression are fought, China’s ethnic Mongol population”, which had long been seen as pacified, content and well assimilated, fulfilling the stereotype of a “model minority” in the country, had itself started bubbling with ethnic tensions.141 Just as in China’s repressive campaign in Xinjiang against the Urghurs, even as international outcries grew, Han-centrism also stood at the center of “the Chinese government’s recent crackdown in Hong Kong” with its national security law; together with its nationalist aspirations over Taiwan.142 In addition to the territorial problems in the South China Sea143 and the tinderbox border relations with India,144 these ethnic tensions clearly question the assumptions behind China’s so-called peaceful rise. It was probably because of China’s Han-centric policy that some bookshop owners that were spirited (abducted) away from Hong Kong to jails on the Mainland on allegation of selling salacious work about China’s leaders were not properly given their due diplomatic protection, being citizens of Britain and Sweden; even though they were of the Chinese Han ethnic extraction.145 In other words, although one of the booksellers had a British passport and the other, a Swedish passport, they 139 Ibid,

p. 22. Cit. 141 See Isabella Steger in “China’s insatiable appetite for control is forcing even its “model minority” to rebel”, Quartz, September 4, 2020, available at https://qz.com/1899397/inner-mongolians-inchina-rise-up-against-language-suppression/ (last visited on September 5, 2020). 142 Loc. Cit. 143 See James Bickerton in “South China Sea: Beijing joins new negotiations in bid to prevent all out war”, Express, September 11, 2020, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/133 3650/south-china-sea-news-Beijing-world-world-war-3-ASEAN-Vietnam-Philippines-conflict (last visited on September 11, 2020). 144 See Isabella Steger in “China’s insatiable appetite for control is forcing even its “model minority” to rebel”, Quartz, September 4, 2020, available at https://qz.com/1899397/inner-mongolians-inchina-rise-up-against-language-suppression/ (last visited on September 5, 2020), op. cit. 145 See “Who are the Chinese?; The upper Han: The world’s rising superpower has a particular vision of ethnicity and nationhood that has implications at home and abroad”, The Economist, November 19th–25th 2016, p. 20, op. cit. 140 Loc.

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both suffered the same disregard for legal or diplomatic processes acceptable in international law (access to the British and Swedish embassies) and were treated as Chinese citizens who angered the Chinese regime.146 And because both men were Han, the Chinese government considered them intrinsically “Chinese”, which is the same attitude it extends to all Chinese Diaspora, and which is capable of putting Beijing in a collision course with other countries and disrupting international relations.147 Viscerally nationalistic and antithetical to globalization and international law, it is this same China’s chauvinistic attitude (perhaps, beguiled as it were “by the purity of Han China”) that also goes for immigration and the refugees in particular.148 Today, it is highly improbable that China would take refugees from troubled spots around the world; and, indeed, “the only large influx China has accepted since 1949 were also all Han: some 300,000 Vietnamese [that] fled across the border in 1978–1979, fearing persecution for being Chinese”.149 It is also evident that “Guangzhou’s government has launched a three-year plan to tackle illegal migration”, and that although it named no specific target, there is no doubt that it is eyeing the “up to 5000,000 Africans” in the place; many of whom have allegedly overstayed their visas in the “chocolate city”.150 Apart from the ultra-nationalism in China, and in what has been described as the sway of “populist insurgencies”151 in which globalization is perceived as a threat instead of a phenomenon in which (if well managed) nations are (given the unification of their individual strengths in multilateral settings) stronger together; nowadays, “the off-springs of the fascist parties in the Europe of the 1930s–1940s when Hitler held sway in Germany, General Francisco Franco in Spain, Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini in Italy, and Marshall Henri Philippe in France” are making a comeback.152 These off-springs of the European fascist parties of yester-years are Norbert Hofer of the far-right Freedom Party in Austria; Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France; the far-right Golden Dawn Party in Greece that master-minded in 2015, the murder of an anti-fascist rapper, Pavlos Fyssas; the far-right Freedom Party in Netherlands, headed by Geert Wilders; the Frauke Petry-led far-right Alternative Party in Germany. There is also the fascist and populist Giuseppe “Reppe” Grillo of the Five Star Movement in Italy, a country (that is, Italy) where in the election of March 4, 2018, the right-wing and anti-establishment parties angry about immigration carried the

146 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 148 Ibid, p. 22. 149 Loc. Cit.. 150 Loc. Cit. 151 See “Angela Merkel declares: Not running for world savior”, The Economist, November 26th 2016, p. 21. 152 Loc. Cit. 147 Loc.

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day”.153 In the wake of the March 2018 electoral victory of the right-wing parties, the inability to form a coalition government by these populist victors that are the anti-establishment Five Star Movement led by Luigi Di Maio and the far or hardright Northern League party led by Matteo Salvini, made the Italian President Sergio Mattarella to invite a compromise option in the person of the populist euroskeptic Giuseppe Conte (regarded as a political novice154 though law professor) to form “Western Europe’s first all-populist cabinet”.155 Acceptable to both the Five Star Movement and the Northern League, Giuseppe Conte had once confessed that “his heart had always beaten on the left”, while Mr Salvini of the League is known to be in “chummy terms with the likes of populist and ultra-right Marine Le Pen of France.156 Meanwhile, Giuseppe’s personal controversy seemed to obscure the angst over the shape or character of his cabinet—one of which was the prospect of hiring Paolo Savona for the finance portfolio, “a fierce foe of the euro”, an economist favoured by the League but whose antipathy towards the euro (which he described as a “German cage”) chimes with the view of the Five Star Movement, which is equally skeptical and firmly opposed to a single European currency.157 There was, thus, no doubt that this product of a failed populist coalition was poised to leave Italy in a government of populist doldrums. There are also the ultra-nationalists in Hungary that are targeting the minority Romas; the Flemish Vlaaams Belang of Belgium; the Danish Peoples Party; the United Kingdom Independent Party (UKIP); and, of course, the Finns Party, amongst others.158 Of course, whereas their role model ultra-nationalist parties of the 1930sthe 1940s were “racist, anti-Jew, anti-black and anti-communist”, today’s’ ultranationalists are “racist, anti-immigrants and anti-Muslims”.159 These are forces that are also hiding behind the façade of anti-globalization to try to throw humanity back to the dark days of Adolf Hitler. In France, Marine Le Pen’s anti-Islam rhetoric and anti-immigration rhetoric are benumbing; having been noted to have told the French in many of her deviant remarks that “immigration is an organized replacement of our [French] population; this threatens our very survival; we don’t have the means to integrate those who are already here; the result is endless cultural conflict”.160 She maintained that France must remain for the French and described as a monster, a 153 See

Ian Bremmer in “The Success of Italy’s populists sets off alarm bells for Europe”, Time (New York), March 19, 2018, p. 21. Parenthesis mine. 154 Report on CNN, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Friday, June 1, 2018, between 6am and 7.30am local time. 155 See “The servant of two masters: A bizarre new government takes shape”, The Economist, May 26th –June 1st 2018, p. 28. 156 Loc. Cit. 157 Loc. Cit. 158 See Owei Lakemfa in “Watch out for Europe, not just Trump”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, November 25, 2016, p. 31, op. cit. 159 Loc. Cit. 160 Loc. Cit.

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France with a demographic outlay that is corrupted by immigration (with populations that are, for instance, African, Arab or Dutch).161 Marie le Pen’s focus, as it were—and she had found an alliance with other far-right parties in Europe in order to realize this objective—was to take over the European Union, smash it and kick out the refugees and immigrants from Europe.162 It was this kind of tendency—in addition to the ultra-right outburst (shared also by the far-right Alternative Party in Germany that was critical of the country’s acceptance of about one million Syrian refugees)—that forced the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to lament that “we are facing struggles in Europe and internationally for our values and our interests and, simply put, for our way of life …”163 This was Angela Merkel’s angst or sense of frustration when declaring to run for a fourth term in the German election, which she admitted “will be more difficult than any before it, at least, not since national unification”.164 Angela Merkel was concerned that those resisting globalization and the admission of immigrants and the Syrian refugees in particular were harming the liberalness, tolerance and inclusiveness of Western culture; but her opponents were concerned as well that globalization and the admission of migrants and refugees posed a threat to Western values because of the attendant demographic and cultural contaminations. This was what Van Jones called a “whitelash” against globalization and migration that allowed Donald Trump to prevail in the American election; and which Angela Merkel feared might torpedo her chances at the 2017 German elections. But she eventually “won a fourth term as Germany’s Chancellor”.165 But as Ian Bremmer observed, in the victory of the populist right-wing and anti-establishment parties in the March 2018 elections in Italy, “the message for Europe is loud and clear: populism isn’t dead; it isn’t even wounded”.166 But apparently in scorn of Angela Merkel’s touted reputation as the “defender of cosmopolitan globalism”, and buoyed by populist Donald Trump’s trouncing of Hillary Clinton in the United States, Frauke Petry, leader of Germany’s populist and anti-immigrant Alternative Party, proclaimed that Merkel’s declaration to run again was an “ultimate campaign gift”, being an opportunity “to run against the very Chancellor who caused the “migrant chaos” in Germany.167 Unfortunately, Angela Merkel was evidently under political pressure because of her disposition towards immigration in general and refugees in particular. Her chances at the polls seemed to be shaky or threatened with every new terrorist attack in Germany because of 161 This

was the position of Marine Le Pen on immigration as reported on CNN on Sunday (7 pm to 8 pm) through Monday (6am), January 22 and 23, 2017; monitored in Lagos (Nigeria). 162 See Owei Lakemfa in “Watch out for Europe, not just Trump”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, November 25, 2016, p. 31, op. cit. 163 Loc. Cit. 164 Loc. Cit. 165 See Ian Bremmer in “The Success of Italy’s populists sets off alarm bells for Europe”, Time (New York), March 19, 2018, p. 21, op. cit. 166 Loc. Cit. 167 See “Angela Merkel declares: Not running for world savior”, The Economist, November 26th 2016, p. 21, op. cit.

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her government’s open door policy to the refugees; which her opponents said were security threats as well as a threat to Western values and way of life. This sentiment was pervasive in the wake of the Monday, December 19, 2016 Berlin Christmas market terrorist attack that left 12 people dead and 49 hurt.168 A critic did not mince words when he opined that for her “courageous and humane gesture” in defying “local and regional opposition to grant entry to tens of thousands of refugees”, Angela Merkel was running a clear risk of defeat in the election; making it seem as humanity was entering “an era of meanness, in which it is politically unwise to show kindness, to enter into solidarity with the other”.169 Angela Merkel was confident of victory in an encouraging optimistic way; even though the same sentiment was expressed in the United States before the Donald Trump dramatic electoral upset. On the façade, Merkel’s prospect of victory was bolstered by “Geert Wilders’ poor showing” on the March 15th 2017 elections in the Netherlands, where his far-right party was trounced to the second place, dousing the speculation and fears that the Netherlands “might become the third “domino” to fall to nationalist populism, following the vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in America”.170 Unfortunately, Trumpism continued to thrive and spread because after the Sunday, October 28, 2018 poll in the State of Hesse in which her center-right CDU party suffered an electoral slump—the second time her authority was dented by electoral “setbacks and a close ally losing his role as leader of her conservative parliamentary group”—Angela Merkel announced that she would not seek re-election as Chancellor in 2021 as “this fourth term is my last as German Chancellor”—a post she had held since 2000.171 It was equally at a time that Brazil—after four elections won by the left—had equally swung to the far-right as its populist politician, Jair Bolsonaro, with a reputation for racism, misogyny, and a rabid aversion to homosexuality that earned him the sobriquet of “Trump of the tropics” won the Brazilian presidential election.172 But populism and liberalism were doing a ding-dung battle. The worlds waited in a bated breathe to see which one of them would ultimately carry the day. For the far-right Marine Le Pen candidacy in the French elections, the defeat of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands also left her electoral chances severely challenged. But eventually, Marine Le Pen was trounced in the French Presidential election of May 7, 2017 by the centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron, signaling not only that “the season of growth of populism has ended”, but that the battle between globalism 168 See

“Berlin Christmas market attack suspect released”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, December 21, 2016, p. 44. 169 See Olatunji Dare’s “The year of Whatchamacallit”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, December 27, 2016, back page. 170 See “Domino theory: Geert Wilders’ poor showing does not necessarily mean Marine Le Pen will lose”, The Economist, March 18th 2017, pp. 10–11. 171 See “Germany’s Merkel to step down as Chancellor in 2021”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, October 30, 2018, p. 38. 172 See “Far-right candidate wins Brazil presidential poll”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, October 30, 2018, p. 38; and David Andelman in “As Merkelism fades and Brazil moves right, Trumpism is thriving”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, October 30, 2018, p. 39.

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and nationalism across the Western world was seeing the triumph of globalization despite its many problems at the moment.173 This was not withstanding the fact that Trump’s election was truly an international upset that sent jitters down the spine of many countries, especially the underdeveloped nations in Africa that would, in addition to marginalization by globalization, consequently face the extreme nationalist foreign policy of Washington under the Trump Presidency. Africa had experienced a Trump-like nationalist policy in the 1970s when Gerald Ford was in the White House and the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Chancellor Helmut Kohl were in power in the UK and West Germany respectively—Western leaders who in their extreme nationalism had made decolonization very difficult in Africa, empowering the platform that was the apartheid regime in South Africa to acquire nuclear weapons for the sake of driving fears into African countries.174 There is, nevertheless, a limit to nationalism and populism. Under such critical international moments as the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic—when the likes of President Trump espoused their growing geopolitical tendencies towards authoritarianism, nationalism, xenophobia, and unilateralism in order to decouple and deglobalize the world—the attendant destabilization of neoliberalism that were exemplified in ills like the information and disinformation that flowed freely in the social media, the international medical crisis, the panic buying and herd behavior as well as the travel disruptions that exposed the vulnerabilities and inhibitiveness of populism, the world was clearly enjoined to apprehend the limits of populism and embrace a cooperative international behaviour.175 In other words, although populism tries to discourage internationalism, an era like the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic called for a stronger diplomatic action in which world leaders were convened to act with a global response rather than responses that were restricted to their internal borders.176

3.4 Populism, Nationalism and President Trump’s Trade War At the onset of nationalism and populism (for those in the developing and the underdeveloped nations who inhabit the global periphery), it is important to point out that between many of the so-called populists on the one hand and the proponents 173 See

Ian Bremmer in “The wave to come: The forces that made nationalism a crisis in the West will go global”, Time (New York), May 22, 2017, pp. 18–21. 174 See Owei Lakemfa in “Thank you Fidel, Africa is free!”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, December 2, 2016, p. 31. 175 See Thomas Wright and Kurt Campbell in “Order from Chaos: The Coronavirus is exposing the limits of populism””, Brookings, Thursday, March 5, 2020, available at https://www.brookings. edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/03/05/the-coronavirus-is-exposing-the-limits-of-populism/ (last visited on Aprill 11, 2020). 176 Loc. Cit.

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of globalization on the other in the metropolitan countries of the West, Asia and Eurasia, there was actually no difference between them. Any attempt to essay out a distinction a clear distinction between the two groups was really a distinction without a difference as there was no discernable difference—only a silhouette. Between the two ideological groups as far as the truly marginalized are concerned, all that existed was distinction without a difference, for they were all actually united in the defence of neo-liberalism, which is indistinguishable from globalization. It is unimaginable that a Donald Trump or a Hillary Clinton would be genuinely anti-globalization. They are not anti-globalization per se. These are nationalist individuals who (like Elizabeth Warren177 ) represent the indivisibility of the gains of globalization, those who want free trade only on the terms acceptable or favourable to the United States.178 In fact, it is interesting to note that despite the wide gulf of differences between the Democrats and President Trump’s Republicans, the two groups had a bi-partisan understanding on the trade war with China. The politics of the escalating trade war (one of the denouements of which was on Friday, May 10, 2019) was complicated by the Democratic support for the confrontation; with the Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, urging President Trump not to back down because “strength is the only way to win with China”.179 The fact that the so-called nationalists, anti-globalists and advocates of protectionism only wanted globalization and free trade in America’s own terms was evident in the bilateral summit between President Trump and Nigeria’s President Buhari on April 30, 2018 (a Summit that seemed to be poised to restore the strained relationship of the Obama era when the US blockaded arms sales to Nigeria180 ); where, despite Trumps avowed protectionist stance, he urged the Nigerian President to rip “down those trade barriers” between the two countries in order to enable American goods to flow into Nigeria freely—a cloven hoof stance that was not lost on some of the critical voices in the Nigerian media.181 While daring Nigeria to end the protection of the country’s farmers, President Trump could not imagine that the United States was giving Nigeria “well over $1 billion in aid every year” and was being owed “fairness and reciprocity” by Nigeria in terms of bringing down “substantial trade barriers”.182

177 Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, intoned that ‘trade creates many

benefits for us [that is, the United States]; but only if done on terms that strengthens the American economy’; see “Briefing”, Time (New York), May 25, 2015, p. 5; see also Agwu (2016, p. 434), op. cit. 178 See “Briefing”, Time (New York), May 25, 2015, ibid, p. 5; see also Agwu (2016, p. 434). 179 See John Walcott in “The real trade war: Whose rules will reign”?, Time (New York), May 27, 2019, p. 8. 180 See Lagun Akinloye in “Is Trump Buhari’s ace in the pack?”, New African, June 2018, p. 54. 181 See Owei Lakemfa in “Dining with Trump; recalling colonial tactics”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, May 4, 2018, p. 31; see also Sonala Olumhense in “The challenge of independent journalism”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, May 6, 2018, back page. 182 See Sonala Olumhense in “The challenge of independent journalism”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, May 6, 2018, ibid, back page.

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Meanwhile, given the technological disparity between the two countries in favour of the United States, critics were also concerned that in conceding to President Trumps desire that Nigeria should disavow the protection of its farmers and bring down trade, “she might have to brace up for American GMO [Genetically Modified Organisms] agricultural products and other goods flooding the Nigerian market and muscling out small scale farmers, producers and industrialists”.183 But despite deploying all “his usual tough talk on trade” to get “a deal that would open the doors to U.S. farm products by “ripping down” Nigerian trade barriers that protect the fragile state of [Nigeria’s] agricultural economy …, President Trump [at least, there and then] couldn’t land a deal with Nigerian leader Muhammadu Buhari at their tête-àtête in Washington184 ”. Earlier on, in Elizabeth Warren’s support for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 American presidential campaigns, she took “principled and fiery stands for more financial regulation and fewer trade deals” if they did not redound to more benefits for the United States.185 The feeling of anguish and dismay in the United States and global community at large was more in the circles of the advocates of globalization and free trade because President Trump, within his first one hundred days in office, could make good his vow during the campaigns to disrupt global trade, which can be accomplished with “a flick of his pen” by invoking “a handful of federal statutes”, particularly if Congress refused to pass his bill on the matter.186 President Trump made good his threat to pull the United States out of the TPP; but his action, rather than dampen enthusiasm, only served to reinforce the commitment of the other participating nations like Japan and Canada, even raising the prospect of the inclusion of China in the fold.187 Later, in Santiago (Chile), some eleven countries, including Japan and Canada, signed and re-dedicated themselves to the landmark TPP, now re-christened the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).188 But fears had also prevailed that President Trump, as he promised during his campaigns, would disrupt the rhythm of globalization and free trade by, for instance, introducing in the United States, “the End the Off-shoring Act that “would tax certain goods made in foreign countries” (the imposition of large tariffs on goods made abroad); and this policy was guaranteed to “trigger a trade war”, that can, according

183 See Owei Lakemfa in “Dining with Trump; recalling colonial tactics”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday,

May 4, 2018, p. 31, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. “Did Trump Meet His Match in President of Nigeria?”; available at https://www.yahoo. com/news/m/3b34842c-ccb3-3af9-ba9f-9a80b9c210cd/ss_did-trump-meet-his-match-in.html (last visited on May 16, 2018). Parentheses mine. 185 See Sam Frizell and Maya Rhodan in “The end of an era: What does the future look like for a post-Clinton Democratic Party?, Time (New York), November 21, 2016, p. 45. 186 See Haley Sweetland Edwards in “Remaking global trade with a pen”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, p. 30. 187 See Agwu (2018, pp. 285–286), op. cit. 188 See Dave Sherwood, Felipe Iturrieta in “Asia–Pacific nations sign sweeping trade deal without U.S.”, Reuters, available at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trade-tpp/asia-pacific-nations-signsweeping-trade-deal-without-u-s-idUSKCN1GKOJM (last visited on April 13, 2018). 184 See

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to the apologists of free trade, possibly hasten “a new global recession”.189 In early 2018, he proclaimed his intent and, indeed, arbitrarily imposed 25% tariffs on steel and 10% tariffs on aluminum from China and other countries”190 ; to which China threatened to respond in addition to a complaint at the World Trade Organization (WTO).191 In what seemed an escalating trade war, the Chinese government slammed a tariff on about $3 billion worth of US imports that hit 128 products, “ranging from pork, meat and fruits to steel pipes”.192 But tensions were to temporarily ease a little later when President Trump suddenly “suspended its plan to impose sweeping tariffs on China”, apparently realizing that he would not unilaterally and successfully pull through in a trade war, thus, pressing forward with trade talks with Beijing, a gesture that China also acquiesced in.193 President Trump appeared to be waking up to what Dambisa Moyo termed “protectionism’s false promise”.194 The reprieve was truly temporary because on July 6, 2018, President Trump again “imposed tariffs on $35 billion worth Chinese goods, which then led China to respond with similar sized tariffs on U.S. products”.195 After another U.S. tariffs of about $16 billion to which China also retaliated,196 President Trump raised the tariffs to $200bn197 ; he “ordered the US Trade Representative (USTR) to expand the list of Chinese goods to be slapped with tariffs by another $200 billion … worth of additional Chinese goods”.198 This time, China had no proportional or equivalent response because its trade capacity with the US (what the US exports to China) was not up to that level. However, when later the United 189 See

Haley Sweetland Edwards in “Remaking global trade with a pen”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, p. 30, op. cit. 190 See “The threat to world trade: The rules-based system is in grave danger”, The Economist, March 10th–16th, 2018, p. 11. 191 See “China will respond to US tariffs: WTO envoy”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Friday, March 23, 2018, p. 18. 192 See “Trade war escalates as China hits US with $30b tariffs”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, April 3, 2018, p. 45. 193 See Ana Swanson and Alan Rappeport in “US suspends tariffs on China, stoking fear of a loss of leverage”, The New York Times, available at https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/us/politics/ mnuchin-kudlow-china-trade.html (last visited on May 20, 2018). 194 See Dambisa Moyo in “Protectionism’s False Promise”, Time (New York), June 4, 2018, pp. 15– 16, op. cit. 195 See “2018 China-United States trade war”, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_C hina%E2%80%93Unied_States_trade_war (last visited on Thursday, July 12, 2018). 196 Reported on the CNN programme, “Quest Mean Business”, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Wednesday, July 11, 2018, circa 8.30 pm local time. 197 See “Markets rattled as Trump escalated China trade war with tariffs on $200bn of imports – as it happened”, available at https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2018/jul/11/markets-rattledtrump-escalates-china-trade-war-200bn-new-tariffs-business-live (last visited on Thursday, July 12, 2018). 198 See “Live updates: China, US governments drive ‘misguided strategy’, says NFI”, available at http://www.intrafish.com/marketplace/1514805/live-updates-china-us-governments-drivemisguided-strategy-says-nfi (last visited on Thursday, July 12, 2018).

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States began implementing the tariffs measures (levying a new 10% on $200 billion of Chinese products beginning September 24, 2018, with the tariffs to go up to 25% by the end of October 2018), China unleashed a tit-for-tat measure by levying tariffs on about $60 billion worth of US goods.199 This was in addition to Beijing’s earlier vow to take “necessary countermeasures” to protect itself—its “core interests”—from the US tariffs it described as “totally unacceptable”—the behaviour (the escalated trade war) of Washington that is “hurting China, hurting the world, and hurting itself”.200 In addition to other measures like targeting American companies operating in China that Beijing might vow,201 there were still other safeguard measures like filling a lawsuit against the US with the WTO.202 This was quintessential American superpower status being flaunted—Washington’s hegemony and violation of the liberal global rules which establishment it was at the fore-front in championing. And before a sigh of relief could be heaved by US allies, the mercurial President Trump was at his protectionist game again them too. Although he excluded US allies when he slapped the tariffs on China and later reversed himself, President Trump was to tergiversate and slapped a 25% tax on steel and 10% tax on aluminum from US allies namely, the EU, Mexico and Canada.203 These US allies vowed not only to retaliate against these tariffs—described by moderate Republican John Kasich in tweeter as emblematic not of “America First” but the “America Alone”204 that Trump had earlier foresworn in Davos205 —but to also report the matter to the WTO,206

199 See Enda Curran, Andrew Mayedan, Jenny Leonard, in “China Strikes $60 Billion of U.S. Goods

in Growing Trade War”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/china-vows-retaliate-tru mps-200-223936556.html (last visited on Wednesday, September 19, 2018); see also “China hits back at Trump with tariffs on $60bn goods”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 19, 2018. 200 See “Live updates: China, US governments drive ‘misguided strategy’, says NFI”, available at http://www.intrafish.com/marketplace/1514805/live-updates-china-us-governments-drivemisguided-strategy-says-nfi (last visited on Thursday, July 12, 2018), op. cit. 201 See “Markets rattled as Trump escalated China trade war with tariffs on $200bn of imports – as it happened”, available at https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2018/jul/11/markets-rattledtrump-escalates-china-trade-war-200bn-new-tariffs-business-live (last visited on Thursday, July 12, 2018), op. cit. 202 See “Live updates: China, US governments drive ‘misguided strategy’, says NFI”, available at http://www.intrafish.com/marketplace/1514805/live-updates-china-us-governments-drivemisguided-strategy-says-nfi (last visited on Thursday, July 12, 2018), op. cit. 203 See “US imposes metal tariffs on key allies”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, June 1, 2018, p. 44. 204 Reported on CNN and monitored in Nigeria on June 1, 2018, at 7.30 am local time. 205 See Jacob Pramuk in “Trump tells Davos: America first does not mean America alone”, available at https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/trump-to-tell-davos-when-the-united-states-grows-so-doesthe-world.html?__source=yahoo%7Cfinance%7Cheadline%7Cheadline%7Cstory&par=yahoo& doc=104970161&yptr=yahoo (last visited on Friday, June 1, 2018). 206 See US imposes metal tariffs on key allies”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, June 1, 2018, p. 44, op. cit.

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an organization—the WTO—against which, ironically, President Trump was also indirectly dealing with or threatening an action.207 As a matter of fact, the trade war against China and American allies were in circumvention of the WTO rules; this was in addition to the fact that the President Trump administration was also “blocking nominations to seats on the WTO’s appellant body, which could leave it unable to hear the cases [lodged in reaction to America’s imposed tariffs] after 2019”.208 Like the League of Nations that was “crippled by American isolationism”, the WTO “is also at the mercy of decisions taken in Washington”.209 The fact is that “the WTO was supposed to contain trade disputes and prevent retaliatory pile-ups”; but today with the President Trump’s armstwisting, it seemed to be a “horrified bystander as the system it overseas” threatens to crumble. The powers of the WTO under President Trump’s America now seemed fanciful in the face of the American President’s belligerence.210 By February 2019, global trade tensions were already gripping the international economic order as the United States and China engaged in trade negotiations to avoid a trade war between the two countries. Trade war serves no country no good. If prompted by President Trump, a trade war—if America ratcheted up its duties on China in March 2019—would entail that “the average tariff rate on American imports will rise to 3.4%, its highest for 40 years [as] most firms plan to pass the cost on to customers”; there would be a geopolitical rivalry amongst firms; the “rules on privacy, data and espionage” would splinter; tax systems would be “bent to patriotic ends—in America to prod firms to repatriate capital, and in Europe to target Silicon Valley”.211 In fact, as a result of any trade war, the United States and the European Union would have new regimes for vetting foreign investment; the United States in particular would continue to weaponize the power its gets from running the world’s dollarpayments system in order to punish foreigners like Huawei; and China, despite its bluster, would have no intension of giving foreign firms a level playing field.212 As The Economist put it, “even humdrum areas such as accounting and antitrust” would fragment, firms would “begin to lower their exposure to countries and industries that carry high geopolitical risk or face unstable rules; and “the global value of cross-border investment” by multinational companies would sink.213 This was the extent to which the liberal global trade system that America helped built was being destroyed by President Trump. It is in this context that some critics 207 See

Doina Chiacu and Jeff Mason in “Trump threatens action on WTO after reports he wants to withdraw”, Reuters, available at https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trump-threatens-actionwto-reports-wants-withdraw-102031763-business.html last visited on Tuesday, July 3, 2018). 208 See “A plan to save the WTO: Global trade is in grave danger …”, The Economist, July 21st–27th, 2018, p. 7. 209 Loc. Cit. 210 Loc. Cit. 211 See “Slowbalisation: A new pattern of world commerce is becoming clearer – as are its costs”, The Economist, January 26th 2019, p. 9, op. cit. 212 Loc. Cit. 213 Loc. Cit.

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began talking about the risk of America and China not escaping the Thucydides’ trap because “for seven decades since World War II, a rules-based framework led by Washington has defined world order, producing an era without war amongst great powers”—an era in which, since China joined the WTO in 2001, the organization has been the arbiter of U.S.-China trade for nearly 20 years—but, according to Walcott, “today, an increasingly powerful China is unraveling this order, throwing into question, the peace generations have taken for granted”.214 In the United States’ trade war confrontation with China, President “won applause in some quarters, including from Democrats on Capitol Hill, for his go-it-alone approach”, although “others see danger in the U.S.’s facing off with the Middle Kingdom on its own”.215 Although the leaders of the BRICS bloc met in South Africa in the wake of the threats by President Trump and signed a declaration supporting an open and inclusive multilateral trading system under the WTO216 ; but the grave test here was for the United States “to decide for itself what rules it wants to play by; particularly as President Trump had talked about abandoning the WTO.217 The fact here is that the West, including the United States, claims that China has remained an ideological chimera—half capitalism and half socialism—that is not helped by its unconventional or undemocratic political arrangement—the so-called “new normal. China is obsessed with economic mercantilism, against which the EU, Japan and the United States share a very strong desire to constrain.218 It is certainly apposite to fully quote a Western view of China on this matter. According to Walcott, “Beijing has a skeptical view of international rules, seeing the WTO as just another extension of centuries-long mercantilist and colonialist Western policies”.219 So, he maintained that: Much of the blame lies with Beijing. Successive Western leaders bet that “constructive engagement” with China’s leaders would ease the world’s most populous nation into the liberal, free-trading world order. After China joined the WTO in 2001, it made occasional nods to Western trade rules, but as it gained economic clout, it increasingly resisted demands to transform its state-controlled economy. Year after year, it dumped cheap goods overseas and favoured Chinese companies over foreign firms, siphoning off intellectual property and trade secrets. China has used the illicit profits of that engagement to construct a direct challenge to the American-led post war order. China’s Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure plan includes 126 nations and 29 international organizations and is producing global strategic benefits, from a 99-year lease on a new Indian Ocean seaport in Sri Lanka to an overseas military base in Djibouti at the entrance to the Red Sea. China now publicly declares its goal 214 See

John Walcott in “The real trade war: Whose rules will reign”?, Time (New York), May 27, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 215 Loc. Cit. 216 See “BRICS emerging economies reaffirm support for multilateral trade under WTO rules”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 27, 2018, p. 23. 217 See John Walcott in “The real trade war: Whose rules will reign”?, Time (New York), May 27, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 218 See “A plan to save the WTO: Global trade is in grave danger …”, The Economist, July 21st–27th, 2018, p. 7, op. cit. 219 See John Walcott in “The real trade war: Whose rules will reign”?, Time (New York), May 27, 2019, p. 8, op. cit.

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of becoming the world’s dominant superpower and has used stolen technology to “[alter] the calculus of global power, according to a March report by the U.S. Navy.220

The fact is that “China’s state-owned firms and its vast and opaque subsidies have distorted markets and caused gluts in supply for commodities such as steel”.221 In fact, “foreign firms operating in China struggle against heavy-handed regulations, and are required to hand over their intellectual property as a condition for market access”.222 This is the extent to which China is allegedly cheating and being inconsistent with a clearly cut market economy because its companies are state-owned and inconsistent with the Western market economies with whom they are interacting in the WTO—and as already said, China having joined the WTO in 2001.223 In fact, although President Trump started the trade war, all the ideological sides in the United States and other parts of the liberal world were agreed that China possesses a “steroidal state capitalism” that is accompanied by the complaints about the role of the government—a government that “funnels cheap capital towards state firms, bullies private companies and breaches the rights of foreign ones”, thus, grossly distorting markets at home and abroad”.224 So, even while the BRICS were agreeing in their three-day summit in South Africa in July 30, 2018 aforementioned to fight unilateralism and protectionism,225 China’s essentially mercantilist institutions and processes were actually not compliant enough with true market forces. With China, the United States and the entire West began “facing something they have never seen before: an adversary that is an economic, technological and, increasingly, military rival”.226 The poser has now become has to respond to China’s rule breaking that enables its threat—would it be with a similar abandonment of the rules or a renewed attempt to re-impose them”227 ? Some traditional free traders or neoliberalists believed or were horrified at the idea of throwing those rules, built over a generation to American advantage, overboard.228 But more importantly, some of President Trump’s “administration officials” that belonged to this neoliberal category “think sticking by the trade rules is a sucker’s game and believe economic isolation through a permanent trade war is the only way forward”—with some of President

220 Loc.

Cit.

221 See “A plan to save the WTO: Global trade is in grave danger …”, The Economist, July 21st–27th,

2018, p. 7, op. cit. Cit. 223 Loc. Cit. 224 See “Can pandas fly?: If Xi Jinping reforms the economy, he could both calm the trade war and make China richer”, The Economist, February 23–March 1st 2019, p. 11. 225 See “BRICS emerging economies reaffirm support for multilateral trade under WTO rules”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 27, 2018, p. 23, op. cit. 226 See John Walcott in “The real trade war: Whose rules will reign”?, Time (New York), May 27, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 227 Loc. Cit. 228 Loc. Cit. 222 Loc.

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Trump’s aides believing “that the Chinese Communist Party is more vulnerable and sensitive to economic harm than is the U.S.”.229 But at some point, instead of President Trump (as suggested by an Iowa farmer named Ray Gaesser), rallying up the support of American allies that export to China in order to firm up Washington’s position on the trade war230 ; he, in his fixation on “America first”, also declared tariffs against its allies, including Canada, which in return, also imposed tariffs on $12.6 billion in U.S. goods as retaliation for the Trump administration’s new taxes on steel and aluminum imported to the United States.231 And although the EU did not lay out any specific measures in a letter it sent to the U.S. Department of Commerce, there was also what seemed to be a new escalation in trade-war tensions as the organization threatened fresh tariffs on nearly $300 billion in U.S. products if President Donald Trump followed through with new levies on European car makers.232 The European Commission and other major economies warned that Trump could trigger a devastating global trade war with his auto-tariff threats, which they believed he could carry out in no time; warning, in addition, that they were “likely” to retaliate against a broad swath of U.S. sectors — adding up to tariffs worth as much as $294 billion.233 President Trump equally contemplated proceeding to renegotiate (rework) or withdraw from NAFTA, which he had described during his electoral campaigns as the “worst trade deal in human history”; but either way, tampering with NAFTA was guaranteed to “end the U.S.’s commitment to the 22-year old pact”,234 unsettle the business community and cause some rumpus in the region. But going back to the trade war with China, President Trump was truly making good his threats during the campaigns. President Trump’s reliance on American allies in the trade war was very problematic because “the economies of America’s allies in Asia and Europe depend on trade with China”, so much so that “only an unambiguous threat could persuade them to cut their links with it”.235 In addition to imposing exorbitant tariffs on China and countries like Mexico, the U.S. President equally declared his capability to also declare China as a currency manipulator; that is—in Beijing “keeping its exchange rate artificially low to gain an unfair export advantage against global competitors”, a declaration, alongside other policies like the imposition of sanctions and the preclusion of China from some U.S. financing 229 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 231 See a Paul Wiseman and Tracey Lindema of the Associated Press in “Canada tariffs on US goods from ketchup to lawn mowers begin” available at https://finance.yahoo.com/news/canada-tariffsus-goods-ketchup-175132537.html (last visited on Monday, July2, 2018). 232 See, “EU threatens $300 billion tariffs against U.S. after fresh trade salvo from Trump: report” available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/bb914f4a-6f2f-3798-ab5f-de2eaad4a390/ss_eu-threat ens-%24300-billion.html (last visited on July 3, 2018). 233 Loc. Cit. 234 See Haley Sweetland Edwards in “Remaking global trade with a pen”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, p. 30, op. cit. 235 See “A new kind of cold war: How to manage the growing rivalry between America and the rising China”, The Economist, May 18th–24th 2019, p. 11, op. cit. 230 Loc.

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deals—that could “spark a diplomatic row with Beijing and hobble U.S. strategic interests in Asia”.236 Before the escalation of the trade war on Friday, May 10, 2019, a trade deal between the United States and China had failed. In the failed deal, some of the challenges were in President Trump’s efforts “to force China to buy more U.S. agricultural products [make American crops to continue to move to the market in China], open up to foreign business and rewrite laws that incentivize intellectual-property theft”.237 In the failed deal, it was not just that the United States and China were competing over who would be the world’s dominant economic, technological and military power, there were also questions about who writes the rules, not just for trade but also for disputed areas—from cyberspace to the outer space.238 The eventual failure of the deal resulted in the United States and China—“the world’s two largest economies”—formerly announced billions of dollars worth of new tariffs in the first half of the month of May.239 Whereas the United States “increased tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods after accusing Beijing of “breaking the deal” aforementioned in terms of reneging on earlier commitments made during months of talks, China announced plans to impose tariffs on $60 billion dollars worth of U.S. goods at the beginning of the month of June 2019.240 As Beijing doubled down rather than cave in to U.S. demands in the trade war,241 President Trump sent an aid of $16 billion to help American farmers reeling financially from the incident.242 And having, because of the failed deal, failed to secure American crops moving to China, President Trump was aware that American farmers, producers and ranchers would face agricultural trade surplus in the trade disputes.243 The agricultural aid to farmers was a clear violation of international trade rules. President Trump had continued to violate trade and multilateral rules, both within the context of the WTO and beyond—including in multilateral political arenas. The Trans-Atlantic trade deals (with Europe) and the Trans-Pacific trade deals with some Asian countries 236 See

Haley Sweetland Edwards in “Remaking global trade with a pen”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, p. 30, op. cit. 237 See John Walcott in “The real trade war: Whose rules will reign”?, Time (New York), May 27, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 238 Loc. Cit. 239 Loc. Cit. 240 See “China strikes back at U.S. with tariff hike on goods worth $60bn”, The Guardian (Lagos), Tuesday, May 14, 2019, p. 47; see also “China hits back in trade war with U.S.: Increases tariffs on $60bn worth of goods”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, May 14, 2019, p. 44. 241 See Brendan Murray and Shawn Donnan in “Trump’s ‘easy’ trade war hits snags as China plays the long game”, Bloomberg, available at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-25/ trump-s-easy-trade-war-hits-snags-as-china-plays-the-long-game (last visited on May 25, 2019). 242 See Donnelle Eller, Stephen Gruber-Miller in “Trump’s second ag bailout for farmers slammed by trade wars”, Des Moines Register, available at https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/ agriculture/2019/05/23/trade-war-donald-trump-china-farm-bailout-farmers-16-billion-financialaid-agriculture-package-iowa/1203784001/ (last visited on May 25, 2019). 243 Loc. Cit.

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that the Obama administration initiated in faithfulness to the unstoppable dynamics of globalization had been clearly torpedoed by President Trump. In the face of the “Chinese assertiveness” and “North Korean provocation” with its aggressive nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles programmes, and despite President Trump’s assurances to the contrary, his ultra-nationalist behaviour has created anxieties around the world, especially amongst America’s close allies that look up to Washington for not only nuclear protection, but also global stability and steadiness.244 But as The Economist argued, which is worth fully recounting immediately below, the United States’ trade war with China is clearly part of the emergent realities that constitutes “a new kind of cold war” in which they “are contesting every domain, from semiconductors to submarines; and from blockbuster films to lunar exploration”.245 Until now, China and the United States “used to seek a win–win world”; but “today wining seems to involve the other lot’s defeat—a collapse that permanently subordinates China to the American order; or a humbled America that retreats from the western Pacific;, … a new kind of Cold War that could leave no winners at all”.246 Although President Trump bragged about America’s strength in the trade war, The Economist was to argue about the possibility of shutting China out the way the United States shut out the Soviet Union before its collapse during the Cold War that attended World War II; but this argument the Magazine also admitted would not be possible because “with China, that risks bringing about the very ruin policymakers are seeking to avoid”.247 For instance, although “global supply chains can be made to bypass China”; but that would only be “at a huge cost”, more so because “in nominal terms, SovietAmerican trade in the late 1980s was $2bn a year”, but today, “trade between America and China is now $2bn a day”.248 This difficulty is accentuated by the fact that although the United States successfully shut out Huawei the way it successfully shut out the Soviet Union, but with China’s ascendancy in 5G telecoms kit, and “in crucial technologies such as chipmaking and 5G, it is hard to say where commerce ends and national security begins”.249 The implication of the foregoing, according to The Economist, is that “it would just be as unwise for America to sit back” in the trade war; for despite China’s dictatorship (even if dictatorships tend to be more brittle than democracies—as President Xi Jinping has reasserted party control and begun to project Chinese power around the world), there is no law of physics that

244 See

Kurt Campbell in “Trump’s new wrinkle brings promise and risk”, Time (New York), April 3, 2017, p. 32. 245 See “A new kind of cold war: How to manage the growing rivalry between America and the rising China”, The Economist, May 18th–24th 2019, p. 11, op. cit. 246 Loc. Cit. 247 Loc. Cit. 248 Loc. Cit. 249 Loc. Cit.

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says “that quantum computing, artificial intelligence and other technologies must be cracked by scientists who are free to vote”.250 Despite China’s defiance in its insistence that it would “never in on major issues of principle” because it was the United States that had put the pressure on trade, and that Washington led the breakdown in the negotiations and must withdraw its latest round of tariffs before a deal would be reached251 ; and President Trump’s braggadocio to win the trade war (especially by banning Huawei—China’s tech’s champion—from doing business with US companies252 ), The Economist was to argue that America must stop undermining its own strengths but should rather build on them—particularly by admitting “that migrants are vital to innovation” and that President Trump’s hurdles to legal migration are self-defeating”.253 With the ban, Huawei lost all access to Google’s, Andriod and Intel’s chips, seeing other international partners like ARM and Panasonic bowing to America’s influence and discontinuing trade; thus, losing its track in becoming the world’s biggest Smartphone maker and finding itself in dire straits.254 Now humbling Huawei and leaving the company’s founder describing it with the metaphor that the company was now like a plane with a hole in its side—not doing great, but still up in the air—President Trump considered his bludgeoning of Huawei as a negotiating tactic that would force China’s discontent with the existing trade relations between it and the United States.255 Sequel to this and other developments, The Economist argued that another strength of the United States lies in its “alliances and the institutions and norms it set up after the Second World War”—all of which, unfortunately, “team Trump has rubbished” (instead of buttressing them) with its attack on the European Union and Japan over trade rather than working with them to press China to change because soft power cements alliances.256 But as stated above, this new Cold War in the form of a trade war is not one to be easily won by either the United States or China if the world must escape the apocalypse in the Thucydides’ Trap; for China cannot certainly admit being subordinated; neither would the United States admit being humbled in a retreat from the western Pacific.

250 Loc.

Cit. Alexandra Stevenson in “China strikes defiant stance on trade against Trump”, The New York Times, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/business/china-trump-trade-fedex. html (last visited on June 2, 2019). 252 See Vlad Savov in “China has no good options for retaliating against Trump’s Huawei ban”, The Verge, available at https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18637291/huawei-ban-trump-tradewar-china-united-states-tariffs (last visited on May 29, 2019). 253 See “A new kind of cold war: How to manage the growing rivalry between America and the rising China”, The Economist, May 18th–24th 2019, p. 11, op. cit. 254 See Vlad Savov in “China has no good options for retaliating against Trump’s Huawei ban”, The Verge, available at https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18637291/huawei-ban-trump-tradewar-china-united-states-tariffs (last visited on May 29, 2019), op. cit. 255 Loc. Cit. 256 See “A new kind of cold war: How to manage the growing rivalry between America and the rising China”, The Economist, May 18th–24th 2019, p. 11, op. cit. 251 See

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3.5 Trump’s Weaponization of Trade It was against the above background of an escalating trade war with China that President Trump honed his skill in the use of trade as a weapon against both his allies and adversaries. He had railed against his political rivals and raged against foreign leaders, bluffing and using sanctions as red herring for political distraction.257 President Trump applies his economy fixation to every problem, even including migration that is strictly “not a trade problem”.258 Whenever he was faced with a challenge on the world stage, Trump’s reflex was to reach for economic carrot and sticks as a way to advance US interests—from North Korean nuclear weapons to Chinese intellectual-property theft; and Central American migration—President Trump adopted the dollar-driven diplomacy as his default move, targeting other countries’ auto, agriculture and defence sectors, among others.259 The Trump’s approach was “a big break from how past Presidents” had handled international affairs” because traditionally, the U.S. has used a variety of diplomatic tools like “engaging in lengthy, detailed talks with other countries’ diplomats to find areas of possible shared interest; using summits to entice compromise from foreign leaders; and organizing broad alliances with like-minded countries to pressure opponents”.260 This traditional approach “meant more points of influence, experts say, and sent a message that America cared about more than the bottom line”; but with President Trump’s arbitrary economic fixation, there are fears that he “may harm America’s long-term interests by making the U.S. seem fickle and focused on economic value”, resulting “in fears that the U.S. is no longer powerful, principled and predictable”.261 With Mexico, the United States neighbour at the southern border, President Trump had postured so recklessly that he denounced the country “as a place to which good American jobs go and from which evil migrants come, threatening to rip up trade deals with Mexico and close the border with a wall.262 President Trump was clearly taking advantage of Mexico while “Mexican officials try to soothe him with compliments and compromise because they cannot punch back hard” in a situation where “only about 15% of the United States’ export go to Mexico, but a whopping 80% of Mexico’s exports head the other way”—the United States.263 President Trump’s populism and nationalist exertion had so degenerated and acquired a scandalizing intensity that the United States’ Speaker of the House of 257 See

“The Mexican government scrambles to placate Donald Trump – again”, The Economist, June 8th to 14th 2019, p. 42. 258 See John Walcott in “The risks of Trump’s dollar-driven diplomacy”, Time (New York), June 24, 2019, p. 6. 259 Loc. Cit. 260 Loc. Cit. 261 Loc. Cit. 262 See “The Mexican government scrambles to placate Donald Trump – again”, The Economist, June 8th to 14th 2019, p. 42, op. cit. 263 Loc. Cit.

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Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, claimed that he did not deserve any attention for backing off his threat to impose escalating tariffs on Mexico”, describing him as the “diverter of attention in chief” and casting doubt on the idea that Trump struck a substantive deal that would benefit the United States.264 On the issue of the dramatic rise in the number of Central American migrants heading for the United States, President had moved against Mexico on May 30, 2019 with his trade weapon when he “retrieved from his arsenal a time bomb of ruinous proportions: a 5% tariff on all imports from Mexico, beginning on June 10th and increasing by five percentage points each month until it hits 25% in October”.265 President Trump wanted Mexico to stop the massive Central Americans migration to the United States; but as it were, that Central Americans were emigrating was hardly Mexico’s fault because the vast majority were fleeing droughts, poverty and violence in the Honduras, El Salvador and, especially Guatemala.266 The argument of President Trump was that the migrants were travelling through Mexico with unwarranted ease, and that Mexico had done little to stop the people-smugglers from using platforms like legal bus companies to ferry them.267 It was, however, clear that President Trump was in need of a new political boost and was using Mexico as a victim of his re-election campaign.268 Part of the President’s re-election campaign had entailed an attempt to divert money from the Pentagon to pay for his so-called wall on the US-Mexico border.269 Unlike the trade war with China that had a bi-partisan support (apparently because of the security concern as well as the anxiety over the Thucydides trap), some of President Trump’s aides as well as “nearly all economists” had advised him that tariffs against Mexico would impede economic growth, and that they breached “the spirit of USMCA, a free-trade deal signed by the White House only six months ago, which will replace NAFTA” that Congress was yet to ratify270 ; but the President pushed ahead with the threat against Mexico because he wanted to add it to his previous self-proclaimed triumphs in the replacement of NAFTA (that he called the worst trade deal ever made) with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (that he had called a very good deal).271 But unlike in President Trump’s earlier tariff

264 See

Pia Deshpande in “Pelosi on Trump: My stock goes up every time he attacks me”, Politico, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/pelosi-trump-stock-goes-every-153922494.html (last visited on June 12, 2019). 265 See “The Mexican government scrambles to placate Donald Trump – again”, The Economist, June 8th to 14th 2019, p. 42, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 266 Loc. Cit. 267 Loc. Cit. 268 Loc. Cit. 269 Loc. Cit. 270 See “Weapons of mass disruption: America is aggressively deploying a new economic arsenal to assert its power. That is counterproductive – and dangerous”, The Economist, June 8th to 14th 2019, p. 13. 271 See “The Mexican government scrambles to placate Donald Trump – again”, The Economist, June 8th to 14th 2019, p. 42, op. cit.

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threats, this was to be an executive order rather than a series of strongly worded tweets; although it was that too.272 The consequence of this threat was that the Mexican currency—the peso— slumped; while a Mexican delegation, including its Foreign Secretary, rushed off to Washington in search of a solution, while the country’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (also known with the AMLO cognomen) “published an open letter to President Trump calling for dialogue”.273 But after the US-Mexico negotiations were allegedly done, President Trump tweeted that the threatened US tariffs against Mexico were indefinitely suspended because Mexico had agreed to help slow the flow of migrants heading toward the US border.274 But the Trump critics, especially on the liberal news network were unimpressed, panning the Trump deal and describing the so-called negotiation as a “predictable play”, “bluster” that was no “art of the deal”; rather, it was a created drama.275 The critics imagined that “they must have locked up the Mexican delegation in the State Department to keep them there for nine or ten hours and then feed them well and they all had a laugh and they let them out and they said, “well, the problem is solved”—a game that was all about re-election.276 It was this same re-election gambit that prompted President Trump to also move against Germany, one of the United States’ very close allies.277 As a matter of fact, President Trump had ramped up pressure on Germany to scrap a gas pipeline from Russia and boost its defence spending, threatening to impose sanctions on the European ally and move American troops elsewhere if it did not comply.278 President Trump claimed that if the said Nord Stream 2 oil pipeline were to go ahead, the project would make “Germany a hostage of Russia if things ever happened that were bad”—which the President considered was unacceptable because the United States was allegedly “protecting Germany from Russia, and Russia is getting billions and billions of dollars in money from Germany”.279 In fact, the US President would prefer Germany’s 2% of GDP spent on US arms as well as the purchase of US gas—albeit at higher prices.280 This was a trade weapon that the Kremlin considered as “nothing other than blackmail and a form of unfair 272 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 274 See Joseph A. Wulfsohn in “CNN panel knocks Trump’s Mexico deal, suggests it’s a distraction from weak US job numbers”, Fox news, available at https://www.foxnews.com/entertaqinment/ cnn-panel-knocks-trumps-deal-with-mexico-suggest-its-to-distract-from-low-jobs-numbers (last visited on June 9, 2019). 275 Loc. Cit. 276 Loc. Cit. 277 See Theron Mohamed in “Trump is threatening sanctions on Germany over its Russian gas pipeline, opening a new front in the trade war that the Kremlin calls blackmail”, Market Insider, available at https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/trump-trade-war-threatens-germanysanctions-over-russian-gas-pipeline-2019-6-1028276069 (last visited on June 13, 2019). 278 Loc. Cit. 279 Loc. Cit. 280 Loc. Cit. 273 Loc.

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competition”; while Germany felt that “Russian energy is cheap and nobody tells it [that is, Germany] what to do in the liberal world order”.281 Meanwhile, President Trump’s government was arguing that Germany cannot rely on gas from Russia and be scared of it, and not pay the 2% of its GDP demanded by the NATO treaty for its own defence.282 President Trump has, therefore, “measured the value of America’s relationship with allies—including Japan, South Korea and NATO members—in dollars, demanding that they pay more for collective defence and threatening economic penalties, if they don’t”; even threatening Canada with auto tariffs in order to coerce America’s closest ally to go along with his plans to modify NAFTA, a modification that only “made limited changes to the U.S.-Canada trade relationship”.283 Even ahead of his June 12, 2018 summit with North Korean President Kim Jong Un, President Trump dangled the prospect of the United States’ investment in North Korea, telling Kim that North Korea would “be a great economic and financial nation one day”.284 Trump had elsewhere amongst adversaries, “walked away from the 2015 deal constraining Iran’s nuclear weapon programme and imposed broad new economic sanctions instead.285 Thus, with these threats of tariffs against Mexico and Germany, President Trump was weaponizing trade to achieve his political ambitions against the rules of the liberal world order that America had constructed after the end of the Second World War.286 Even in matters of human rights that are fundamental to the American values that Washington exports to places around the world, President Trump had proved remiss. These were illustrated by the downing of the Malaysian passenger flight MH17 in which 298 innocent people perished, but in which President Trump would not accept Russia’s complicity in the missile that brought the airline down over Ukraine287 ; and President Trump’s touting of economic considerations for not engaging Saudi Arabia over Prince Salman’s complicity in the murder of the Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.288 But President Trump’s so-called short-term wins do not make his approach a success—as even William Burns, the President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former senior official in Republican and 281 Loc.

Cit. Parenthesis mine. Cit. 283 See John Walcott in “The risks of Trump’s dollar-driven diplomacy”, Time (New York), June 24, 2019, p. 6, op. cit. 284 Loc. Cit. 285 Loc. Cit. 286 See Theron Mohamed in “Trump is threatening sanctions on Germany over its Russian gas pipeline, opening a new front in the trade war that the Kremlin calls blackmail”, Market Insider, available at https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/trump-trade-war-threatens-germanysanctions-over-russian-gas-pipeline-2019-6-1028276069 (last visited on June 13, 2019), op. cit. 287 See “MH17 victims’ father condemns Trump over Russian lie”, BBC News, 18 July, 2018, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-44868329 (last visited on June 20, 2019). 288 See Aaron Blake in “New gruesome khashoggi revelations reinforce ugly bargain Trump has struck with Saudi Arabia”, Washington Post, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/pol itics/2019/06/19/these-new-gruesome-khashoggi-revelations-reinforce-ugly-bargain-trump-hasstruck-with-saudi-arabia/ (last visited on June 20, 2019). 282 Loc.

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Democratic administrations had warned that President Trump’s “unilateralist tactics and overuse of tariffs will come back to bite us” (America).289 In fact, some US intelligence agencies had equally warned “that instead of bringing Iran and North Korea to their knees, tough economic sanctions may be strengthening their authoritarian rules by fueling popular resentment”.290 Although there may be political logic to President Trump’s approach—as polls suggest that his dollar-driven foreign policy played well with his base—many of the problems he had applied that aggressive policy (including migration, North Korea, Iranian nuclear danger, and China, amongst others) were all hard to solve and could cost the United States so much, even when President Trump had left the White House.291

References Agwu, F. A. (2018). Armed drones and globalization in the asymmetric war on terror: challenges for the law of armed conflict and global political economy. New York and London: Routledge. Agwu, F. A. (2016) Nations among nations: uneven statehood, hegemony and instrumentalism in international relations. Ibadan: HEBN Publishers Plc. Clinton, H. R. (2017) What happened. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lewis, B. (2003) The crisis of Islam: holy war and unholy terror. New York: The Modern Library. Obama, B. (2020) A promised land, New York: Viking, an imprint of Pengiun Books.

289 See John Walcott in “The risks of Trump’s dollar-driven diplomacy”, Time (New York), June 24,

2019, p. 6, op. cit. Cit. 291 Loc. Cit. 290 Loc.

Chapter 4

Trumpism Explodes the Myth of America as City on the Hill

4.1 Exceptionalism and America as City on the Hill Many United States’ foreign policy establishment personages are in the habit of flaunting the country’s exceptionalism.1 Although Wilsonianism is often determined not to retrench the responsibility of its predecessors or overextend America into the abdication of its responsibility to the world—in other words, the Wilsonian rhetoric is balanced with the tactical appeal to the sustenance of the national interest2 )—this exceptionalism is basically invoked in Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric on world peace that stipulates that America does “have a destiny … to give something more to the world simply than an example which other nations in the past have been able to give … an example of spiritual leadership and idealism which no material strength or military power can provide”.3 In other words, rhetorically, the conception of America’s exceptionalism is premised on both the Wilsonian idealism that: We covet no one else’s territory; we seek no dominion over any other people; we seek the right to live in peace, not only for ourselves but for all the peoples of the earth. Our power will only be used to keep the peace, never to break it, only to defend freedom, never to destroy it.4

But the above Wilsonian rhetoric must be balanced with the tactical demand of protecting America’s national interest. What this means is that the conception of America’s rhetorical exceptionalism by some of its elected leaders and foreign policy experts on the one hand must be distinguished from the tactical persuasion of much of the public opinion on the other hand. Although much of America share in their country’s exceptionalism quality5 ; but because the country is a representative 1 See

Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 30–33, op. cit. Kissinger (1994); Diplomacy …, pp. 706–707, op. Cit. 3 Ibid, p. 706. 4 Loc. Cit. 5 See Ian Bremmer in “Worlds apart”, Time (New York), March 4, 2019, p. 16, op. cit. 2 See

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0_4

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and not a direct democracy, this exceptionalism is believed by the elected leaders and experts with highly specialized knowledge that think and make wise choices to be synonymous with the United States “responsibility to guarantee global security and prosperity in the twenty-first century” as well as an “independent America worldview”—an independence to solve other people’s problems.6 But at the level of much of public opinion, what this exceptionalism means or is better believed to be expressed in is what the power of the U.S. does at home rather than by a project to remake the world in America’s image7 —that is, in not retrenching or abdicating its responsibility to itself or the national interest by overextending itself in a chaotic international environment.8 A Eurasia Group Foundation (EGF) survey that was made public in 2019 indicated that “the American public is less convinced than ever that it is the U.S. responsibility to guarantee global security and prosperity in the twenty-first century”.9 This American public’s aversion to the United States taking up of responsibility to assert or forcibly protect global security was typically affirmed when, in the wake of Iran’s attack on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the downing of an American unmanned aircraft (Drone) in the same location, President Trump rescinded his earlier decision to strike back on Iranian three facilities, not just because he was humanitarianly opposed to the death of 150 Iranians10 ; but more because the American public did not gladly view the blowback and total inflammation of the Middle East region that would result from such American attack on Iran.11 Public opinion in the United States was deemed to have perceived that ran’s proxies in Yemen as well as its Shiite and Hezbollah proxies in Iraq and Lebanon respectively were reputedly ever spoiling to be used to attack Israel and American bases all over the Middle East region, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirate, in ways that would embroil Washington in an endless war—similar to Vietnam, Iraq and even Afghanistan.12 But public opinion in foreign policy is very significant. For the United States in particular, and between the policy leaders and the experts on the one hand and the public opinion on the other, it has been argued that in the light of “fraught geopolitical realities of the current moment”, whenever “foreign policy is pursued without significant public support, foreign governments perceive the U.S. as a less dependable and predictable partner; foreign enemies see potential 6 Ibid,

pp. 16, 17. p. 16. 8 See Kissinger (1994); Diplomacy …, pp. 706, 707, op. Cit. 9 See Ian Bremmer in “Worlds apart”, Time (New York), March 4, 2019, p. 16, op. cit. 10 See Kathryn Watson in “Cocked and loaded” to strike Iran, Trump says he called off operation when told 150 would likely die”, CBS News, available at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ trump-iran-strike-trump-says-he-called-off-operation-when-told-150-would-likely-die-today2019-06-21/ (last visited on June 22, 2019). 11 See Zvi Bar’el in “Something stopped Trump from striking Iran, and it wasn’t 150 lives”, Haaretz, available at https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-something-stoppedtrump-from-strining-iran-and-it-wasn-t-150-lives-1.7402428 (last visited on Monday, June 24, 2019). 12 Loc. Cit. 7 Ibid,

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divisions to be exploited”; and that any foreign policy that was developed without the consideration of public opinion falls back on stale ideas.13 Despite the American exceptionalism, the EGF survey aforementioned actually indicated that the American public opinion has been very skeptical of foreign interventions and that in his “America first” catchphrase or attachment, “President Donald Trump is taking an unprecedented approach to foreign policy and the fault lines of American politics”, exploiting the wariness of American taxpayers in foreign interventions.14 But in the Trump Presidency, the conservative if not standard American spirit is also at play. That American spirit, especially the Republican spirit, is a macho spirit that hardly exudes finesse. In fact, Trump and the Republican Party are said to represent the typical military aggressiveness and bullish attitude of the American, a military culture that is allegedly rooted in the Appalachians South.15

4.2 Has Trumpism Trumped America’s Exceptionalism? It was this aggressiveness, the American masculinity, the penchant to dominate others with a sense of entitlement that Donald Trump demonstrated when he bragged “about grabbing women’s genitals” with a “vulgar chest-thumping”16 ; yet, he was elected President at the November 8, 2016 American presidential poll. Indeed, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, redolent as it were with xenophobia, racism, sexism and deviance from normal democratic practice founded in the mass of the people’s choice (candidate Trump lost the popular vote but triumphed in the America’s electoral college/vote system, a huge smudge on popular democracy) is, therefore, a quintessential dent on America’s soft power and, as it were, the country’s capacity to project a post-modernist attitude to the rest of the world. Thus, the Trump presidency has shattered the myth of the American exceptionalism; be it in that country’s capacity for purveying standards at the level of race relations, which (without prejudice to the black lives matter) was thought to be the case with the election of the first black President Obama; the abrogation of sexism in the Supreme Court in pro-choice (Roe v. Wade) and equal marriages (Obergefell v. Hodges); in Hillary Clinton’s Presidential ticket on the platform of the Democratic party (which was thought to be an exemplary democratic practice); the widespread outrage that greeted Trump as a sexual predator; and President Trump’s divisiveness and incompetence in the handling of COVID-19 that reportedly ended America’s

13 See

Ian Bremmer in “Worlds apart”, Time (New York), March 4, 2019, p. 17, op. cit. p. 16. 15 See Agwu (2011), The Law of Armed Conflict and African Wars …, p. 399, op. cit. 16 See Paul Raeburn in “Why some men harass women: It’s not just about sex. It’s about women, work and other men, Newsweek, November 11 (11/11/2016), 2016, p. 48, op. cit. 14 Ibid,

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exceptionalism.17 In addition to the incompetence in the handling of COVID-19, President Trump’s attitude, particularly towards the purvey of fake news (alternative facts), on minorities, and white supremacy, amonst others, had demonstrated the United States a country that is a tale of two cities—characterized by a division between the majority and the minority, the latter consisting of those under the weather, the deprived whites and the so-called people of colour.18 Not even America’s diplomacy was spared in the Trumpian depredation and narcissism. President Trump is reputedly “impulsive and self-indulgent”, always chronically “thinking that he has the flair to broker a breakthrough [in every diplomatic challenge] all by himself”.19 In this gung-ho personality, President Trump brought ruination to America’s traditional diplomatic approach, especially in North Korea. It is customary in diplomatic practice that diplomatic engagements are calibrated and approached from the bottom to the top or summit level. For the United States under the George W. Bush presidency, this calibrated approach or process was at work in the Sino-American relations when a US Navy reconnaissance plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet that stalked it, leading to the crash of the Chinese jet, the incapacitation of the US plane and a diplomatic face-off.20 In North Korea under reference, the US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, insisted in the President Clinton engagement with that country that, unlike “North Korea’s top-down decision-making style, the United States’ practice is “trying to “pre-cook” arrangements as much as possible before committing the President”21 at the level of summit diplomacy. But in the Trump Presidency, this diplomatic practice was completely shattered in President “Trump’s unconventional decision to kickstart negotiations by talking directly with Kin Jong Un.22 Critics who took objection to this unconventional approach to foreign policy contended that even something as trivial, though symbolic, as “a photo-op with the American President is a great prize for Mr. Kim and, rather than holding it out as a reward, Mr. Trump has chosen to give it away cheap”.23

17 See Wade Davis in “The unravelling of America: Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era”, RollingStone, August 6, 2020, available in https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-americanera-wadw-davis-1038206/ (last visited on August 20, 2020). 18 Chris Cumo and Don Lemon on CNN news, monitored in Lagos, Nigeria, on Friday, August 21, 2020, between 7 and 8am local time; see also “Cuomo: America a tale of 2 cities in wake of Floyd’s death”, Friday, August 21, 2020, available at https://www.newsbreak.com/news/157549 7332858/cuomo-america-a-tale-of-2-cities-in-wake-of-floyds-death (last visited on Friday, August 21, 2020). 19 See “American foreign policy after Rexit: Rex Tillerson was not a good Secretary of State. What follows may be worse”, The Economist, March 17th–23rd 2018, p. 13. 20 See Agwu (2013), Themes and Perspectives …, pp. 616–617, op. cit. 21 See Albright (2003); Madam Secretary: A Memoir, New York, Miramax books, p. 584. 22 See “American foreign policy after Rexit: Rex Tillerson was not a good Secretary of State. What follows may be worse”, The Economist, March 17th–23rd 2018, pp. 12–13, op. cit. 23 Ibid, p. 13.

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This photo-op with the American President was exactly witnessed during the June 12, 2018 Trump/Kim Summit in Singapore, a celebrated optic that eventually unraveled by August 2018 when President Trump had to call off Secretary Pompeo’s planned trip to North Korea on the ground that much progress was not being recorded in North Korea’s undertaking at denuclearization programme.24 The entire Trump approach to North Korea came apart when the tension between the two countries ratcheted-up again. North Korea had claimed that the United States was “hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK” while “having a dialogue a dialogue with a smile on its face”.25 North Korea raised the alarm that “we cannot but take a serious note of the doubledealing attitudes of the US as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face”.26 But this alarm over the alleged United States’ “gunboat diplomacy” did not deter Washington, which insisted that “in general, U.S. aircrafts and ships operate from Japan every day in support of our commitment to our allies and partners in the region in the interests of regional peace and security27 ; and that since the initial suspension of military drills in deference to the talks with North Korea had not yielded much in terms of the denuclearization talks, it would no longer suspend the military drills with South Korea.28 President Trump himself vowed that he “could “instantly” re-launch the military exercises with South Korea and that they would be “far bigger than ever before".29 As predicted, “mastering the specifications of the North Korean [nuclear] programme and knowing how to blunt it require deep expertise”,30 which was obviously beyond President Trump’s ken. The contention here was that in President Trump’s impulsiveness and self-indulgence, the United States’ diplomacy in the Korean Peninsula would not be thorough and enduring, especially by ensuring that in any deal with North Korea, Pyongyang would not cheat as it is habitually prone to; and that “America must not enhance its own security at the cost of lower security for

24 See Jesse Johnson in “Trump called off top U.S. diplomat’s Pyongyang visit after belligerent letter from North Korea: report”, Japan Times, available at https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/ 2018/08/28/asia-pacific/politics-diplomacy-asia-pacific/trump-called-off-top-u-s-diplomats-pyo ngyang-visit-belligerent-letter-north-korea-report/#.W4aOHHrTU0M (last visited on Wednesday, August 29, 2018). 25 See “North Korea accuses US of planning invasion”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, August 28, 2018, p. 45. 26 Loc. Cit. 27 Loc. Cit. 28 News report on CNN, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Wednesday, August 29, 2018, between 7 and 8 am local time. 29 See Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press, in “Trump says Korea military drills could be restarted”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-korea-military-drills-could-restar ted-222510431.html (last visited on Thursday, August 30, 2018). 30 See “American foreign policy after Rexit: Rex Tillerson was not a good Secretary of State. What follows may be worse”, The Economist, March 17th–23rd 2018, p. 13, op. cit.

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its allies in South Korea and Japan.31 This was also true of the Iranian nuclear deal that President Trump was threatening to dump, even when the European American allies that were parties to the deal were resolved to stick with it.32 Against the historic background of the Muammar Gaddafi regime that had voluntarily dismounted and disavowed his country’s acquisition of the nuclear weapon only for the US to lead a Western alliance to topple and assassinate him, the greatest sore point with President Trump ditching the Iran nuclear deal would be that the North Korean Kim Jung Un would not confidently strike a denuclearization deal with the US President; and that a collapsed Iran nuclear deal would pave way for Tehran to realize its nuclear ambition, thus, compelling its rivals in the region—Saudi Arabia and Egypt—to go for broke in the acquisition of their own nuclear weapon, thereby, re-opening the nuclear arms race33 ; after all, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), had reportedly said that “we cannot live in a situation where Iran has nuclear weapons and we don’t.34 ” Hence, MbS declared that “if Iran develops a nuclear weapon, that will be unacceptable to us and we will have to follow suit”.35 This was the contest that the critics of the Iran nuclear deal opined that with the deal, “the Obama administration’s attempted outreach to Iran was more alienating to Sunni-Arab countries than President Trump’s Jerusalem embassy move” because “the fatally flawed 2015 nuclear agreement not only emboldened Tehran to expand its regional insurgent network, but it also pushed Arab countries to plan for their own nuclear weapons programmes as a means of self-defence”.36 It was these complex situations that triggered the concern that if President Trump bungled the talks with North Korea, or precipitates the collapse of the Iran nuclear deal, “bad blood” would really flow and some conflicts would likely be precipitated. These are the Trump extremes that have vented the fact that his presidency has shattered the myth of the American exceptionalism. President Trump has adopted a “third world” or developing country-style politics in the United States—a fact that is further confirmed below in his extremist adoption of the benefits of the so-called imperial presidency in his impeachment trial—the exploitation of the prejudice that as the executive branch of government, the presidency cannot be treated as a “scofflaw” (flouter of laws); in which case he can willfully defy subpoenas and frustrate court proceedings with fruitless legal wrangling. This “third world behavior” (especially as it concerned his meddling in the Roger Stone trial immediately his acquittal in 31 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 33 Loc. Cit. 34 See. See “Saudi Arabia will develop nuclear bomb if Iran does—Crown Prince”, Premium Times, March 15, 2018, available at https://www.premiumtimesng.com/foreign/world-foreign/261901saudi-arabia-will-develop-nuclear-bomb-if-iran-does-crown-prince.html (last visited on March 17, 2018). 35 Loc. Cit. 36 See James S. Robbins in “An emerging Arab–Israeli Thaw: Prepare for the historic normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab States”, National Interest, April 3, 2018, available at http://nationalinterest.org/feature/emerging-arab-israeli-thaw-25199 (last visited on April 5, 2018). 32 Loc.

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the impeachment trial in the Senate ended37 ) is strictly inimical to America’s claim to exceptionalism. But again, in the face of the death of unarmed black men and women at the hands of the police and the teetering of American democracy on the brink of crisis because of the anger and mistrust caused by the fundamental contest between two opposing visions of America that had left the politic grossly divided under Trump; amongst other breach of institutional norms and procedural safeguards, the adherence to which both Republicans and Democrats once took for granted, Barack Obama stridently rebuked this notion of America as the city on the hill—the so-called American exceptionalism.38 Former President Obama queried whether Americans cared “to match the reality of America to its ideals; and if so, whether Americans believed “that our notions of self-government and individual freedom, equality of opportunity before the law” applied to everybody?”.39 Against this background, Obama endorsed those who summed that it was time to discard the myth because even a cursory examination of America’s past and a glance at the present have revealed: … that this nation’s ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start.40

In the destruction of the United States’ exceptionalism, its reputation as a city on the hill, President Trump’s incitement of his supporters to invade the Capitol Hill taught the world some hard lessons. The lessons from that invasion of Capitol Hill, according to Anne Applebaum, are that: Americans are not the ones who will suffer most from the terrible damage that Trump and his enablers have done to the power of America’s example, to America’s reputation, and more important, to the reputation of democracy itself. The callow insurrectionists who thought it would be amusing to break into the debating chambers might go to jail, but they will not pay any real price; neither will the conspiracy theorists who believed the President’s lies and flocked to Washington to act on them. Instead, the true cost will be borne by those other residents of Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Caracas, Riyadh, and Minsk – the dissidents and the opponents, the would-be democrats who plan, organize, protest, and suffer, sacrificing their time and in some cases their life just because they want the right to vote, to live in a state governed by the rule of law, and to enjoy the things that Americans take for granted, that that Trump doesn’t value at all.41

The thrust of the above argument is that after that Wednesday, January 6, 2021 invasion of Capitol building to stall the certification of the Electoral Votes that made 37 See Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman in “Really shocking: Trump’s meddling in Stone case stuns Washington”, available at https://www.politico.com/news/2020/02/12/trump-roger-stone-jus tice-department-114684 (Last visited on Thursday, February 13, 2020). 38 See Obama (2020); A Promised Land …, p. xv, op. Cit. 39 Loc. Cit. 40 Loc. Cit. 41 See Anne Applebaum in “What Trump and His Mob Taught the World About America: The allure of democracy was the nation’s best asset abroad, but the President squandered it by inciting political violence”, The Atlantic, January 7, 2021, available at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ 2021/01/what-trump-and-his-mob-taught-world-about-america/617579/ (last visited on January 8, 2021).

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Joe Biden Jr. the President-elect of the United States, the rest of the world that looked upon America as a city on the hill and an exceptionalism in democratic practice “will have one less source of hope, one less ally they can rely upon” as the “power of America’s example will be dimmer than it once was; American arguments will be harder to hear”; and “American call for democracy can be thrown back with scorn: You don’t believe in it anymore, so why should we?”.42

4.3 Trumpism, Electoral College, Victory, Impeachment and Acquittal America’s famed soft power—the attraction in its democracy that is aggressively marketed in the country’s foreign policy—was also bruised in the election, failed reelection and populist conduct of President Donald Trump.43 By Donald Trump’s use of the electoral college vote44 to trump Hillary Clinton’s transcendence in the popular votes, the United States’ democracy betrayed a chink in its armour—the baffling and unfortunate reality that it is the elitist electoral college vote after all, rather that the ordinary American masses’ voters (the hoi polloi) that decides the country’s leadership at the level of the Presidency; and this is not what America projects to the rest of the world. Although reinforced by the widespread backlash against globalization amongst the economically impoverished and disconnected, what happened in the United States was the apotheosis of Donald Trump, who had consistently maintained during his campaigns (while afraid defeat) that the American electoral system was systemically rigged. In an apparent reference to the Electoral College, which, according to some critic, “is not your classic definition of democracy” because, “hiding behind the citizens, it simply asked the states to vote their preferred candidate into the Presidency”— a system that Trump described as “rigged … very corrupt”.45 After describing the Electoral College as rigged and very corrupt, he proceeded to use it when he failed his re-election in the November 2020 presidential election by trying to bring the entire process down to a “street fight” by suborning the Electoral College to vote against

42 Loc.

Cit. David Maddox in “Trump fightback begins: Secret memo shows President’s bid to overturn election result”, Express, November 22, 2020, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/ 1362945/Donald-Trump-latest-news-US-election-result-2020-Facebook-Mark-Zuckerberg-legalchallane (last visited on November 23, 2020). 44 Enshrined in the Constitution, the Electoral College allows each state to nominate a certain number of “electors” who cast the ultimate vote for president (instead of individual voters) in December; see https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/9b63eaa6-0638-33e4-9d3e-6d99fb19f364/getready-for-a-major-push-to.html (last visited on November 11, 2016). 45 See Sonala Olumhense in “As Donald Trump arrives”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, November 13, 2016, back page. 43 See

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Biden.46 In fact, it was believed that before his election in November 2015, candidate Donald Trump distorted facts so much so that Walter Shapiro likened him to a con artist, “a conman who believes his own con”.47 But, without prejudice to Trump’s critics, it turned out at the end of the day that the real rigging that Trump was talking about was this inherent subjugation of the popular vote in the elitist Electoral Vote, amidst other contradictions in the United States’ democratic practice, that are such that Washington should never throw the first stone in castigating other nations for being democracy deficit.48 Enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the Electoral College system demands that the winner wins “enough state-by-state votes”.49 It has 538 members, a number drawn from the sum of the total number of U.S. senators and House members plus three additional electors for Washington, D.C.; and all states except Maine and Nebraska are winner-take-all; meaning that whichever candidate wins the state’s popular vote gets all the electors; Maine and Nebraska doing it differently in the sense that two electors vote for whoever won the state popular vote, plus one elector for each congressional district goes to whoever won that district.50 The Electoral College permits each state to nominate a certain number of “electors” to ultimately choose the President in December, about a month after the November presidential election.51 In the electoral college vote versus the popular vote in the United States, the logic of power from the will of the masses is defeated because the minority (electoral college vote) defeats the majority (the popular vote), a situation that was made more frustrating in the election of Donald Trump as President because even though he dominated the electoral college (290 as against Hillary’s 232),52 Hillary Clinton had a popular-vote lead that “reached more than a million votes”.53 The electoral vote in the United States betrays the expectation that the United States being the lodestar of 46 See David Maddox in “Trump fightback begins: Secret memo shows President’s bid to overturn election result”, Express, November 22, 2020, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/ 1362945/Donald-Trump-latest-news-US-election-result-2020-Facebook-Mark-Zuckerberg-legalchallane (last visited on November 23, 2020), op. cit. 47 Walter Shapiro made this point on CNN to Christiane Amanpour in the programme, Amanpour, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Friday, December 2, 2016, 8 pm to 8.30 pm local time. 48 See Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 388–396, op. cit. 49 See “Trump wins Electoral College vote, as few electors break ranks”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, December 21, 2016, p. 44. 50 See MaryAlice Parks, Shushannah Walshe, and Lauren Pearl in “Electoral Vote: What to know about Monday’s vote”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/gma/electoral-college-know-mondaysvote-025100637--abc-news-topstories.html (last visited on Monday, December 19, 2016). 51 See more details on how the Electoral College allows each state to nominate a certain number of “electors” who cast the ultimate vote for president (instead of individual voters) in December at https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/9b63eaa6-0638-33e4-9d3e-6d99fb19f364/getready-for-a-major-push-to.html (last visited on November 11, 2016). 52 See Kimberlee Kruesi and Bill Barrow in “Trump opponents try to beat him at the Electoral College”, culled from the Associated Press and published in The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, November 21, 2016, p. 47. 53 See Karl Vick in “The U.S. continues to come apart in the wake of a divisive election”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, p. 7, op. cit.

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democracy, “the people, not [the] distant elites, were the guiding force in American politics”.54 But the reality is that “the men who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 had not been interested in establishing the rule of the majority”; on the contrary, “the Federalist and the debates on the floor of the Constitutional Convention largely concerned how the new nation might most effectively check the popular will”.55 Rather than the popular will, the American republicanism built a governing philosophy of “balances and counterweights that tended to put decisive power in the hands of the elites”56 ; the Electoral College, “the election of senators by state legislatures”, with its limited suffrage.57 The understanding here was that “the people, broadly defined, were not to be trusted with too much power”.58 The disaffection over the prospect of a President Trump was so deep that grassroots campaigns sprung up around the United States, trying to persuade members of the Electoral College to, on December 19, 2016, do something that had “never been done in American history— deny the presidency to the clear Election Day winner”, Donald Trump.59 Some of the “electors” were bombarded with messages, while one even reportedly said that he “received death threats from people who do not want him to vote for Trump”.60 After his failed re-election in 2020, President Trump embarked on underground measures like delaying certification processes in battleground states that Biden won; so that if state officials missed their deadline, legislators would subvert the popular vote by voting pro-Trump in the Electoral College instead of the President-elect Biden.61 President Trump did this by inviting re-counts in Georgia and litigating some battleground states like Michigan.62 The allegation of Russia’s hacking or interference that the FBI and the CIA made was enough for the Electoral College to deny Donald Trump of the Presidency because the “Founding father Alexander Hamilton warned in Federalist Paper No. 68 that there may be “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils”, implying that the Electoral College “could serve as a fail-safe to prevent a candidate who may represent the interests of a foreign power from taking office”—a point by Hamilton that “some

54 See

the blurb of the book by Meacham (2008); American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, New York, Random House. Parenthesis mine. 55 Ibid, p. 43. 56 Ibid, p. 44. 57 Ibid, pp. 43–44. 58 Ibid, p. 44. 59 See Kimberlee Kruesi and Bill Barrow in “Trump opponents try to beat him at the Electoral College”, culled from the Associated Press and published in The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, November 21, 2016, p. 47, op. cit. 60 Loc. Cit. 61 See Maggie Astor in “The timeline to Biden’s Presidential certification, that President Trump is trying to disrupt”, economictimes.com, November 20, 2020, available at https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/world-news/the-time-to-bidens-president ial-certification-that-president-trump-is-trying-to-disrupt/articleshow/79325893.cms (last visited on November 24, 2020). 62 Loc. Cit.

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political activists and Hollywood celebrities opposed to Trump” grabbed to “provide a basis for electors [at the Electoral College] to vote against Trump”.63 However, a Texas Republican, Art Sisneros, citing his Christian religion and understanding of representative democracy, announced his resignation from his post as a member of the Electoral College rather than cast a ballot for US President-elect Donald Trump, a man he deems “not biblically qualified for office”.64 Determined neither to vote for Donald Trump nor break his promise to do so by voting for anyone else on the December 19, 2016 electoral college, Art Sisnerous resigned in clear disillusionment with the Electoral College system.65 He rather desired to “follow the will of the general public”—the popular vote; even though that would not change the reality that Donald Trump would be President; but at least, his conscience would have been followed.66 Although there was an initial anxiety over the prospect of the Electoral College denying him the White House; but at the end of the day on Monday, December 19, 2016, Donald Trump prevailed in the Electoral College, dashing the hope of his detractors by garnering more than the 270 electoral votes required; even as history was also made because “at least, half a dozen US electors broke with tradition to vote against their states’ directives, the largest number of “faithless electors” seen in more than a century”.67 In the electoral college, the unprecedented number of “faithless electors” that broke with the tradition of voting according to state directives was an indication of the deep objection that was taken to the Trump Presidency; so much so that in naming him the person of the year 2016, the Time Magazine addressed him as the President of the “Divided State of America”.68 The opposition to the electoral college was so deeply persistent in the United States that Senator Elizabeth Warren, a 2020 Democratic presidential contender, announced at the March 18, 2019 CNN town hall, that the United States needs to “get rid of the Electoral College”.69 These were some of the contentious issues in the United States that (in addition to other failings) prompted a serious query to the integrity of the democratic system of government that America prides itself with—in confidence that the democracy creates lasting security and prosperity, and that democracies are less likely to go to war with one another—so much so that this democracy is inundated with a sense of failure as it was believed that America had “often failed to live up to democracy’s highest ideals.70 63 See MaryAlice Parks, Shushannah Walshe, and Lauren Pearl in “Electoral Vote: What to know about Monday’s vote”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/gma/electoral-college-know-mondaysvote-025100637--abc-news-topstories.html (last visited on Monday, December 19, 2016)., op. cit. 64 See Steven Porter in “Texas elector quits, says pledge binding and Trump ‘not biblically qualified”, Christian Science Monitor, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/texas-elector-quits-says-ple dge-binding-trump-not-152847695.html (last visited on Tuesday, November 29, 2016). 65 Loc. Cit. 66 Loc. Cit. 67 See “Trump wins Electoral College vote, as few electors break ranks”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, December 21, 2016, p. 44, op. cit. 68 See “Person of the Year”, Time (New York), December 19, 2016. 69 See “Get rid of the Electoral College” in For the Record, Time (New York), April 1, 2019, p. 6. 70 See Ian Bremmer in “Selling Democracy”, Time (New York), May 27, 2019, p. 18, op. cit.

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In fact, these are issues that raise “the question of whether the democratic process is a good arbiter of who has and who has not got leadership qualities”.71 In instances where it is argued that “we need to bring young people closer to the leadership system and amplify their political voice”,72 the suggestion is that a democratic system of government would be the most authentic or ideal type for the achievement of this objective. But when the authenticity of that democratic system is hobbled by a system like the Electoral College in the United States; or where, as in Nigeria, the elections are allegedly manipulated and the people denied the valid right of franchise—as alleged in the country’s 2019 presidential election,73 the validity of democracy as an arbiter of good leadership becomes an issue. When the flickering hope that “faithless electors” would keep the Electoral College from certifying Donald Trump’s victory in the November 8, 2016 came to naught, the Trump resistance finally came up with a reason to impeach him when in September 2019, the Inspector-General of a watchdog organization or intelligence community (Michael Atkinson) informed Congress that a Whistleblower had brought him a complaint of “urgent concern” a month earlier—a vivid account of President Trump’s alleged attempt on a July 25, 2019 phone call to extort the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into launching an investigation of the Biden family and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that would help him politically in the 2020 presidential election.74 After Robert Mueller (the Special Council that investigated Russia’s interference in the US 2016 presidential election campaign) closed the investigation without charging President Trump, during which a reason for embarking on an impeachment proceeding against him had failed75 ; but with the July 25, 2019 call on the Ukrainian President Zelensky, a perfect reason for President Trump’s impeachment was thought to have perfectly surfaced,76 even though some Republican Party members deemed

71 See

Anver Versi in “What makes a genuine leaders?”, New African, October 2019, p. 15, op. cit. ReGina Jane Jere in “Investing in youth; Aya Chebbi: Youth Envoy of the African Union”, New African, October 2019, p. 27. 73 See Agwu (2020); Africa and International Criminal Justice: Radical Evils and the International Criminal Court, New York and London, Routledge, p. 150; see also Innocent Anaba, Charles Kumolu, Omeiza Ajayi, Johnbosco Agbakwuru, Dirisu Yakubu, Henry Ojelu and Peter Okutu in “Ballot Box Snatchers: I’ve ordered Army, Police to be ruthless—Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), February 19, 2019, pp. 1, 5, 41; Kingsley Omonobi, Joseph Erunke and Dirisu Yakubu in “Unlawful Orders: Withdraw your statement, Army chief tells Atiku”, Vanguard (Lagos), February 21, 2019, pp. 1, 5, 41; Ronald Mutum in “Buratai: We’ll treat electoral saboteurs as enemies of state”, Daily Trust (Abuja), February 21, 2019, pp. 1, 5; and Kabir Alabi, Danjuma Michael, Eno-Abasi Sunday et.al in “11 feared dead in bloody polls …”, The Guardian (Lagos), February 24, 2019, pp. 1, 2, 6. 74 See Alexander Nazaryan in “How Trump survived impeachment”, Yahoo News, February 6, 2020, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-trump-survived-impeachment-171616313. html (last visited on Friday, 07 February 2020). 75 See Brian Bennett in “Emboldened Trump makes his 2020 case”, Time (New York), February 17, 2020, p. 8. 76 See Bolton (2020); The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir, Former National Security Advisor of the United States, New York, Simon & Schuster, pp. 455–456, 483–487. 72 See

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that phone call inappropriate but not an impeachable reason.77 The reason for the Republican support of President Trump was because the President had made the party infernally fearful of him, having “tightened his grip on the GOP, delivering bolts of fear by tweet and governing from the base to drive astronomical approval ratings among Republicans”; more so when Trump was presiding over a humming economy (as 63% of Americans approved how he was handling the economy) and record low unemployment.78 President Trump’s chokehold on the Republican Party was also because he controlled the base of the party; and because many members of the party were facing re-election in November of his impeachment year (2020), they had “little zeal to publicly confront him.79 It was in this impeachment matter that President Trump’s extreme nationalist viewpoints and distortion of American institutions also manifested themselves with his flat denial of the wrongness of the July 25, 2019 call to the Ukraine President; with the White House issuing a withering eight-page letter to the Speaker of the House (Nancy Pelosi), accusing her of wanting to overturn the results of the 2016 presidential election, arguing that impeaching President Trump was a highly partisan and unconstitutional effort that would threaten grave and lasting damage to American democratic institutions because it lacked any legitimate constitutional foundation.80 It was because of this White House’s allegation that the impeachment was tainted by politics and, thus, invalid that it refused to turn over key documents or make officials available to testify before the Congress, causing the House of Representatives to endorse two articles of impeachment against Trump: the abuse of power and the obstruction of Congress.81 Accompanying the White House and Trump’s responses to the impeachment was an argument of the White House’s counsel (Pat Cipollone), which was predicated on a reading of congressional rules in ways that were at odds with how most legal experts interpreted them, having “knotted parliamentary rules of a congressional inquiry” as “both obscure and in some cases, open to genuine debate”, thus, constituting vagaries that the White House and its allies exploited to their advantage, repeatedly portraying the proceedings as secretive and unfair.82 President Trump’s lawyers also “argued that even if Trump did leverage military aid to Ukraine for his personal political purposes, that’s not an impeachable

77 See Alexander Nazaryan in “How Trump survived impeachment”, Yahoo News, February 6, 2020, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-trump-survived-impeachment-171616313. html (last visited on Friday, 07 February 2020), op. cit. 78 See Brian Bennett in “Emboldened Trump makes his 2020 case”, Time (New York), February 17, 2020, p. 8, op. cit. 79 See Alexander Nazaryan in “How Trump survived impeachment”, Yahoo News, February 6, 2020, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-trump-survived-impeachment-171616313. html (last visited on Friday, 07 February 2020), op. cit. 80 Loc. cit. 81 Loc. Cit. 82 Loc. Cit.

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offence”.83 And it was equally because of Cipollone’s argument that some Republicans argued that the former US ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony was outside the jurisdictional lane of the House’s Intelligence Committee because as a State Department official, she was supposed to testify before the House’s Foreign Affairs Committee.84 But the argument that it was the Foreign Affairs Committee, not the Intelligence Committee, that was suppose to depose Marie Yovanovitch was deemed by the Democrats as a “mischaracterization” that did “not ultimately obscure the fact that witness after witness testified that Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani suborned the diplomatic corps to pressure Zelensky into announcing investigations into Democrats, which they believed Trump had known about and had even endorsed it.85 The Democrats also knew that political appointees at the State Department and the White House budget office urged career public officials to pressure Ukraine to announce investigations into the Democratic National Committee and the Bidens”.86 Thus, witnesses and more witnesses were needed in the House impeachment effort in order to persuade the Senate Republicans enough that 20 of them would have to vote with Democrats in order for Trump to convicted and removed from office.87 Some of the additional witnesses that the Democrats needed were John Bolton88 that was reportedly “a notorious score-settler” that had bitterly departed the White House as a National Security Adviser, and whose coming book on his time in the White House was highly suggestive.89 Another potential witness was also Mick Mulvaney—the acting White House Chief of Staff—who “had given a disastrous press conference in which he seemed to admit to every charge Democrats had made about the Ukraine pressure campaign”.90 But before Bolton and Mulvaney, the House Democrats decided to go after Charles Kupperman that briefly served as the acting National Security Adviser after Bolton’s ouster and who had listened in on the July 25, 2019 phone call between Zelensky and President Trump.91 Kupperman was subpoenaed but he went to court; but because the Democrats needed his testimony at an expedited timeline and were “not willing to go the months and months and months of rope-a-dope in court”, the decided 83 See Brian Bennett in “Emboldened Trump makes his 2020 case”, Time (New York), February 17, 2020, p. 8, op. cit. 84 See Alexander Nazaryan in “How Trump survived impeachment”, Yahoo News, February 6, 2020, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-trump-survived-impeachment-171616313. html (last visited on Friday, 07 February 2020), op. cit. 85 Loc. Cit. 86 Loc. Cit. 87 Loc. Cit. 88 See “Calls grow for Bolton impeachment testimony”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, January 28, 2020, p. 43. 89 See Alexander Nazaryan in “How Trump survived impeachment”, Yahoo News, February 6, 2020, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-trump-survived-impeachment-171616313. html (last visited on Friday, 07 February 2020), op. cit. 90 Loc. Cit. 91 Loc. Cit.

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to forego Kupperman as a witness.92 It was in the now herculean challenge of calling witnesses (which the Democrats never realized or surmounted, both in the House and in the Senate) that President Trump and his fellow Republicans found the “legal wranglings” that decisively tilted the impeachment case in President Trump’s favour.93 President Trump had a reputation of divisiveness, which, amongst others, ranged from “defending white supremacists” to finding a way in great moments to wreck the opposition at the grassroots of his base, with his Twitter outshouting “his accomplishments”94 in an American political system that had become polarized by rancorous politics, as “voters everywhere are splitting into hostile [racial] tribes”.95 It was also in these legal wranglings that they rancorously encountered the vision of the executive branch of government, which had come to be known as the “imperial presidency” or a “quasi-imperial powers”, until now reportedly enjoyed by Trump’s predecessors—Barack Obama and George W. Bush (the latter of which expanded it).96 In the imperial presidency, particularly as it affected the impeachment inquiry and the court cases relating to the Russia investigation, “the power of Congress to check the White House was highly circumscribed, so much so that one could conclude it was effectively nonexistent”.97 It was the benefits of these quasi-imperial powers that President Trump took to the extreme because, as his impeachment attorney, Alan Dershowitz explained, he is the executive branch of government that was “irreplaceable”; so much so that Congress could refuse to confirm his nominees, reject his budgetary priorities, but what the Congress cannot do is to treat the President “like an ordinary scofflaw”.98 In this contentious scofflaw issue, whereas President Trump’s attorneys were lambasting the Democrats for not seeing their subpoenas through the courts; some “other Trump administration attorneys were arguing in court that the President was above such legal challenges”.99 In fact, the deputy White House Counsel, Patrick Philbin, touted in a statement that the Democrats “filed no lawsuits” to compel witnesses like Kupperman to testify; but this, however, was what the Democrats actually did but the subpoenaed Kupperman fought them back in court and they withdrew the subpoena, a withdrawal that unfortunately warranted Patrick Philbin to claim that the “House Democrats were just 92 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 94 See Brian Bennett in “Emboldened Trump makes his 2020 case”, Time (New York), February 17, 2020, p. 8, op. cit. 95 See “Not all democracies are experiencing American-style tribalism”, economist.com, available at https://www.economist.com/graphic-details/2020/02/07/not-all-democracies-are-experienc ing-american-style-tribalism?utm (last visited on Tuesday, 11 February 2020). 96 See Alexander Nazaryan in “How Trump survived impeachment”, Yahoo News, February 6, 2020, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/how-trump-survived-impeachment-171616313. html (last visited on Friday, 07 February 2020), op. cit. 97 Loc. Cit. 98 Loc. Cit. 99 Loc. Cit. 93 Loc.

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in a hurry” and had “not pursued litigation to get any of these issues resolved”.100 Although the Democratic Intelligence Committee Chairman of the House, Adam Schiff, actually recognized that the Democrats were really in a hurry, but this was in recognition of the fact that the White House, in pursuit of the leverage that it cannot be considered a scofflaw, would not comply if the Democrats had insisted in pursuing the subpoenae in court.101 From the forgoing indications, the Republicans had clearly blackmailed and frustrated the Democrats in court because it was equally obvious that John Bolton would have equally tied the Democrats “in court for months or years”, as his lawyers had also made this litigation point crystal clear.102 Thus, in the impeachment, the Republicans had truly constituted the executive arm of government into an ordinary scofflaw they were earlier protesting against above, thus, boxing in the Democrats and sounding a death knell on the impeachment efforts with even President Trump’s attorneys lambasting the Democrats for not seeing their subpoenas through the courts.103 Although impeachment is a political rather than a legal decision, the Trump attorneys effectively used legal arguments in the so-called imperial presidency to frustrate the Democrats. Even the White House defence aspersed the Democrats by telling them that they would not expect Bolton and Kupperman to testify in the impeachment inquiry unless they went to court; meanwhile, it was the same Trump administration officials that asserted that “if the executive branch did not want to abide by Congressional subpoenanas, it was free to do so”.104 Hence, the Trump administration used the courts, the conservative media and the realities of electoral politics to keep crucial documents from being made public, key witnesses from testifying and Republicans from straying”.105 Eventually, President Trump was acquitted as only two Republicans voted for witnesses, and only one, Senator Mitt Romney, voted to convict him of abuse of power and the obstruction of Congress.106 But it was the same President Trump that refused to accept defeat in the November 3, 2020 presidential elections and later sent his supporters that were mainly white supremacists to storm the Capitol Building and disrupt the certification of the Electoral Votes that led to the election of Joe Biden Jr.107

100 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 102 Loc. Cit. 103 Loc. Cit. 104 Loc. Cit. 105 Loc. Cit. 106 Loc. Cit. 107 See Anne Applebaum in “What Trump and His Mob Taught the World About America: The allure of democracy was the nation’s best asset abroad, but the President squandered it by inciting political violence”, The Atlantic, January 7, 2021, available at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ 2021/01/what-trump-and-his-mob-taught-world-about-america/617579/ (last visited on January 8, 2021), op. cit. 101 Loc.

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4.4 Trumpism, Minorities and Alternative Facts Again, in spite of Donald Trump’s xenophobia, his railing at minorities—African Americans, Latinos, women, the disabled and even the Jews—he still triumphed in the presidential elections; which was unimaginable in the light of the all-powerful Jewish lobby that should have stopped him for his anti-Semitism. And although Trump spoke protectively about the Second Amendment (the right to bear guns), he was very dismissive of the First Amendment (the right to freedom of speech and even information), which was why he was very hostile to the media; baring journalists from his first meeting with President Obama and some of the White House press briefings while “blaming the media and “professional” protesters for the demonstrations” against his victory at the presidential poll.108 President Trump also became notorious for the infamous “alternative facts” syndrome109 that was popularized as a euphemism for distortions and outright lies, invented in the wake of the controversy surrounding the size of the crowd at President Trump’s inauguration by Kellyanne Conway,110 one of Trump’s campaign handlers that went on to become a White House counselor in his Presidency.111 Thus, President Trump took off with the unenviable reputation of “a President who peddles falsehoods and dabbles in conspiracy”; a “fact-challenged President” who “delivers deliberate and strategic lies to control the national debate”; be it, amongst others, with respect to his campaign’s contact with Russia, or “his incendiary tweets accusing President Obama of “wire tapping” Trump Tower during the campaign”.112 It was a widely held view after the election that Trump re-wrote the rules of American elections. The outcome of the November 8, 2016 presidential election was anything but logical. The American electorate showed that they could take anything but globalization and its alleged threat to their security, its orchestration of the browning of America (demographic changes) as a result of immigration, and its orchestration of job losses because of the out-sourcing syndrome. It was inconceivable that the American electorate would tolerate an aspirer to public office who refused to declare his tax return even when the convention dictated that he should, not at the level of the country’s presidency. Even when Trump was discovered to have explored some bankruptcy loopholes in the law to evade the payment of federal taxes for years, the electorate still did not give a hoot and the man prevailed over Hillary Clinton. 108 See

“Trump bars journalists from first meeting with Obama”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, November 11, 2016, pp. 1, 6; see also Karl Vick in “The U.S. continues to come apart in the wake of a divisive election”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, p. 8, op. cit. 109 See “Facts vs. Alternative Facts”, Time (New York), February 27–March 6, 2017, p. 4. 110 See Kurt Eichenwald in “Lies and Consequences: Is Donald Trump capable of telling truth from fabrication?”, Newsweek, February 17 (02/17/2017), 2017, p. 12. 111 See Philip Elliott in “White House Chaos Theory: Donald Trump pledged to disrupt the System. He’s keeping that promise”, Time (New York), February 27–March 6, 2017, pp. 15–19. 112 See Michael Scherer in “Can Trump handle the truth?”, Time (New York), April 3, 2017, pp. 1, 21–27.

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Hillary Clinton did not only released her tax returns, she paid federal taxes and even prevailed on Trump in all the three presidential debates (debates touted as the clincher because the winner was supposed to have been proved to be fit for the job and, therefore, voted for by the American electorate). Donald Trump flunked all three debates and still got elected. Apart from the implicit message that the nonpayment of taxes does not matter anymore, what the American electorate have told the rest of the world with the election of Donald Trump is that the American political culture of organizing presidential debates is non-sequitur. And sexism could not have had a better expression in God’s own country, that exceptional nation that Ronald Reagan described as the “city on the hill”,113 the shining example in the firmament of democratic politics that the rest of the world was supposed to look up to. Trump ran a racist campaign and effectively divided America along racial lines, corralling all the white supremacists behind his message of reclaiming the country or making America great again; a slogan which, of course, was de-varnished and (on “a community softball field in Wellsville, N.Y., near the Pennsylvania border, on the morning of Nov. 9”, after the election the previous day) sarcastically portrayed with a Nazi swastika as “Make America White Again”.114 The result of Trump’s base appeal to race during the campaigns was that in the wake of his victory at the poll, hate-inspired messages and violence gained a crescendo with attacks on minorities, “especially the Muslim Americans that Trump called a security risk”.115 Apart from David Duke (leader of the Ku Klux Klan) and the American Nazi Party approbating Trump’s nominations for cabinet posts, in states like Georgia, “an anonymous letter urged a Muslim teacher to hang herself by her headscarf”, while graffiti in Durham, N.C. read that “Black Lives Don’t Matter and Neither Does Your Vote”.116 Moreover, when it was though that compliance with private and public morality was the linchpin of American political life; yet, despite being dogged by multiple allegations of sexual harassment by different women after the tape he bragged about grabbing women’s pussies surfaced, and despite being endorsed by David Duke of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan (who later, with the American Nazi Party, hailed his appointments after the election117 ), Trump still went ahead to win the American Presidential election so resoundingly that what greeted the victory “was not noisy protests but stunned, funeral silence”.118 The triumph of Trump at the US Presidential poll was a function of many factors. The same way that it was a “rural revolution”, a backlash against post-industrialism, internationalism and globalization; it was also a “whitelash” against the American

113 See “The new nationalism: With his call to put “America first”, Donald Trump is the latest recruit

to a dangerous nationalism”, The Economist, November 19th–25th, 2016, p. 9, op. cit. Karl Vick in “The U.S. continues to come apart in the wake of a divisive election”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, p. 7, op. cit. 115 Ibid, p. 8. 116 Loc. Cit. 117 Loc. cit. 118 Ibid, p. 7. 114 See

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elite and the Obama “black” Presidency.119 As a “whitelash” against a “black Presidency”, it was argued that the seeds of Hillary Clinton’s tragic loss were sowed across eight years earlier when the first black President Obama was elected in November 2008 and re-elected on November 2012 with the aid of the power of incumbency.120 The Obama Presidency raised a demographic outrage in white America; for in the eyes of this demographic that resultantly denigrated Obama, he was the “wrong” President, which not only “insulted their sense of self and of America”, that outrage defined the limited or narrow acceptability of that “black Presidency”, and “automatically set the stage for the rejection of any Democratic nominee for President”, which “Mrs. Clinton ultimately paid for”.121 President Trump was not only dismissive of American minorities, he was also dismissive of minorities outside America, not just with his “shithole” stigmatization of African countries,122 but also in his making the Kurds realize “that the philosophy of America is based on self-interest and that unlike the Turks, they are of no strategic value to the Americans”.123 Being a part of the Ottoman Empire, the Kurds—despite being the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East with a population of about 30 to 35 million people—were, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War (although initially provided with a Kurdistan state in the Treaty of Sevres124 ); were stranded by being made a minority and denied the statehood in May 1916 by the Sykes (British) and Picot (France) line in the sand on the map of the Levant that carved up the Ottoman Empire.125 Although a homogenous people with a common language and culture, the Kurds were denied a separate state, sliced and merged with the countries in the region, including Turkey that refer to them as “Mountain Turks” and deny “them the use of their names, costumes, language”, thus, provoking a Kurdish rebellious movement called the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, PKK, that had “fought for three decades for

119 It

was on the day of the American election, November 8, 2018, as the results were coming in favour of Donald Trump, that Van Jones described this outcome on CNN as a “whitelash against the elite” and “against a black President”, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria), November 8, 2016, circa 11 pm local time; see Joe Klein in “Why we must focus now on maintaining democracy, civility and perspective”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, p. 20. 120 See Sonala Olumhense in “As Donald Trump arrives”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, November 13, 2016, back page, op. cit. 121 Loc. Cit. 122 See Woodward (2018); Fear, …, pp. 320–321, op. Cit. In fact, President Trump was ignorant of the fact “that Greek civilization, which gave birth to modern Western civilization and thought, was built upon African civilization; that Plato schooled in Egypt for 13 years and Aristotle for 20 years”; … and that in the 13th Century, Africa “established the first modern university in the world”—the Sankore University in Timbuktu; see Owie Lakemfa in “Boris Johnson: Towards the re-colonization of Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, June 19, 2020, p. 19; see also Owei Lakemfa in “The Kurds as burnt offering”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 18, 2019, p. 31. 123 See Owei Lakemfa in “The Kurds as burnt offering”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 18, 2019, ibid, p. 31. 124 Loc. Cit. 125 See Agwu (2018), Armed Drones and Globalization …, p. 55, op. Cit.

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autonomy from Turkey”.126 It was on this basis that Turkey declared the Kurds as terrorists, a declaration that worsened because Turkey had colluded with the ISIS by allowing its “fighters recruited from Europe to transit legitimately through its airport and land borders”, while “the various Kurdish groups united and fought as a united army” against ISIS, becoming “war-tested combatants” that the Turks were afraid would make a bid for an independent Kurdish country possible.127 Because in the war against ISIS, the Turks covertly colluded by being “instrumental to the passage of foreign fighters from Europe” and, indeed, refused to be involved in the fight while the Iraqis were too weak to fight even though the bulk of the ISIS were Iraqi Sunnis, the Turks tagged the Kurds that valiantly fought ISIS as “terrorists” that “must be crushed”.128 In other words, although the Turks were not part of the rebellion against the Syrian President Assad, they conducted a determined fight against the ISIS alongside the United States; but President Trump, without consulting the Kurds or working out how they would be protected against Turkey’s resolve to cleanse Northern Syria of Kurds and replace them with Arab populations, suddenly decided to withdraw American troops from Northern Syria—a situation that was viewed by Turkey as an express invitation to invade, which it actually did.129 Although President Trump thanks Turkey (together with Syria, Iraq, Russia and Syrian Kurds) for their cooperation in the tracking and killing of the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,130 the mere fact of Turkey’s collusion with ISIS, was also buttressed by the presence of the ISIS founder, Al-Baghdadi, in the Turkey/Syrian border of northwestern Syrian Idlib province (that Turkey also exercised an influence) where he was killed (al-Baghdadi ignited his suicide vest when corned in a tunnel in the village of Barisha) by American special forces in a special operation on Saturday, October 26, 2019,131 was an indication that like Pakistan,132 Turkey was also another example of America’s frenemy. In fact, Turkey’s position of a frenemy was the United States was underlined by the fact that despite being a member of the NATO, it went ahead, despite being at loggerheads with NATO over it, to purchase Russia’s air-defence missiles.133

126 See Owei Lakemfa in “The Kurds as burnt offering”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 18, 2019, p. 31,

op. cit. 127 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 129 Loc. Cit. 130 See “World leaders split as Trump announces death of ISIL leader”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, October 28, 2019, p. 37; see also “U.S. confirms death of ISIL chief in Syria”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, October 28, 2019, p. 15. 131 See Frances Perraudin in “ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed in US raid, says Donald Trump—as it happened”, The Guardian, available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2019/ oct/27/abu-bakr-al-baghdadi-islamic-state-leader-trump-syria (last visited on Sunday, October 27, 2019). 132 See Agwu (2018), Armed Drones and Globalization …, pp. 178, 179, op. Cit. 133 See “Who can trust Trump’s America?: The consequences of betraying the Kurds”, The Economist, October, 19th 2019, p. 13. 128 Loc.

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But embedded in the United States’ relations with the Turkey frenemy was also President Trump’s un-seriousness (creation of a vacuum in the belief that America was 7,000 miles away, thus, withdrawing America’s 1,000-strong tripwire force), betrayal of the Kurds (who fought with America against the ISIS, losing some 11,000 Kurdish fighters when America lost only five, which was a small force with few casualties) and a failed policy on strategy (because of the revival of ISIS, a fillip to Assad to retake the whole of Syria, and Iran and Russia’s takeover of America’s abandoned spaces).134 The United States’ betrayal prompted its abandoning of its Kurdish allies “at the mercy of merciless Turkey”; and which Turkey’s President Erdogan exploited to begin shelling Kurdish positions and rolling into Syria.135 Indeed, at the point that the United States was abandoning the Kurds in the guise of purportedly bringing its troops home from Syria; it was (rather than protecting humans, the Kurds), sending its “troops and tanks to guard Syrian oil fields” from the ISIS fighters.136 The Syrian rebels that the United States had inadvertently supported (as seen below) had eventually turned its true colour as the ISIS, which had metamorphosed into “a Frankenstein monster”—prompting Washington to turn its back on the so-called Syrian rebels (that were indeed members of the ISIS) and turned “their weapons on the terrorists”137 —and, thus, paving the way for America’s exit from Syria. Unfortunately, after pulling American troops and turning its back on the Kurds and even the ISIS terrorists and the Syrian people the US was trying to liberate and democratize—a purely myopic plan to effect a regime change in Syria in the dethronement of President Assad—but the Syrians stoutly resisted that regime change because, supported by Russia, the Hezbollah and Iran, the Assad government fought hard and refused to give up their country (like Libya) to regime change and the ISIS terrorist.138 It was in this same hubristic way that Washington inadvertently supported the terrorists besieging the Libyan capital (Tripoli) from Benghazi (also in Libya) to prompt NATO to intervene in that country, injuring, capturing and executing Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.139 Now, President Trump’s America has equally turned its back on its Kurdish allies. Shortly after announcing American troop’s withdrawal from northern Syria in abandonment of the Kurds, the American President also impulsively provoked another crisis with Iran and its non-state Hezbollah allies in the region with an American drone’s killing of the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, creating 134 Loc.

cit.

135 See Owei Lakemfa in “The Kurds as burnt offering”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 18, 2019, p. 31,

op. cit. 136 See

Bel Trew in “US set to send troops and tanks to guard Syrian oil fields despite Trump vow to bring soldiers home”, Independent, available at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/ middle-east/trump-syria-war-turkey-us-troops-tanks-oil-fields-us-a9171306.html (last visited on October 26, 2019). 137 See Owei Lakemfa in “The Kurds as burnt offering”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 18, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 138 Loc. Cit. 139 Loc. Cit.

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further tension and announcing another surge of at least 3,000 more US troops to the Middle East.140 President Trump’s action here resonated with a foreign policy déjà vu that was confirmed by Senator (and Presidential Aspirant) Elizabeth Warren on CNN, who saw the Trump’s administration’s droning of General Qassem Soleimani as a distraction from the impeachment proceedings against him that was headed for his trial at the Senate.141 The déjà vu inhered in the fact that, according to the Time Newsmagazine (New York), President William Jefferson Clinton, admitted on August 17, 1998 of sexual misconduct with the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and on August 20, 1998, “just days after Clinton finally spoke about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, the United States launched cruise missile strikes in Afghanistan and Sudan, targeting training camps linked to Osama bin Laden, a Saudi financier thought to be behind the US embassy bombings in Africa”.142 The déjà vu was also confirmed in the United States Senate when the Republican Majority Leaders, Senator Mitch McConnell used his statement on the killing of General Soleimani to decry the impeachment at the House of Representatives as rushed, a submission that the Senate Democratic Minority Leader, Senator Chuck Schumer decried, stating further that the killing of Soleimani lacked consultation with the Congress.143 The Democratic Presidential Aspirant, Senator Elizabeth Warren also decried Trump’s lack of congressional consultation and the possible consequences in terms of Iran’s retaliation, which was why Presidents Bush Jr. and Barack Obama did not kill General Soleimani.144 The cumulative effect of President Trump’s “shallowness and impulsiveness” as a hallmark of foreign policy was the unreliability of the United States as an ally.145 Earlier in its lamentation of the action in President Trump’s shallowness and impulsiveness, The Economist stated with regard to Iran’s earlier downing of an American drone that: After Iran attacked an American drone, he [that is Trump] blocked retaliation at the last minute; after Iran or its proxies attacked Saudi oil facilities last month [September] he stood back. As if superpower diplomacy was an extension of domestic politics, governed 140 See “US to send more troops to Middle East as Iran vows ‘retaliation’ after killing of top general—

as it happened”, at DW, available at https://www.dw.com/en/us-to-send-more-troops-to-middleeast-as-iran-vows-retaliation-after-killing-of-top-general-as-it-happened/a-51874503 (last visited on Tuesday, 07 January 2020). 141 Senator Elizabeth Warren made this point on CNNSOTU or State of the Union with Jake Tapper, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Sunday, January 5, 2020, between 3.26 pm and 3.28 pm local time. 142 See the cover story, “Bombshells”, “Clinton’s moment of truth”, “Our Target was Terror”, anchored by Bruce W. Nelan in Time (New York, August 31, 1998, Front page, pp. 3, 19–21. 143 See Sarah Kolinovsky and Trish Turner in “McConnell lauds Iranian general’s killing as Schumer decries lack of consultation with Congress”, ABC News, available at https://abcnews.go.com/ Politics/mcconnell-lauds-iranian-generals-killing-schumer-decries-lack/story?id=68052592 (last visited on Tuesday, 07 January 2020). 144 See Senator Elizabeth Warren made this point on CNNSOTU or State of the Union with Jake Tapper, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Sunday, January 5, 2020, between 3.26 pm and 3.28 pm local time, op. cit. 145 See “Who can trust Trump’s America?: The consequences of betraying the Kurds”, The Economist, October, 19th 2019, p. 13, op. Cit.

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by the same hyperbole and showmanship, he has ditched painstakingly negotiated treaties, noisily launched trade wars and, in places such as Venezuela and North Korea, promised transformations that never seem to bear fruit. Mr. Trump takes momentous decisions on a whim, without pondering the likely fallout or devising a coherent strategy to contain it. Mr. Trump seems to think that he can use America’s titanic commercial clout as a substitute for hard power. Economic sanctions have become his answer to every problem – including that of Turkey’s invasion. Yet when vital interests are at stake, states rarely seem to give ground. Just as Russia still occupies Crimea, Nicolas Maduro runs Venezuela and Kim Jong Un has his nukes, so Turkey has vowed to fight on in Syria. As China’s economy develops, sanctions may also be a wasting asset. Even today, pressed by America to cut ties with Huawei … Chinese telecoms giant, many countries are reluctant to comply.146

In fact, it is clear that President Trump’s shallowness and impulsiveness represent the unraveling of the United States and the world order it “worked hard to build and sustain in the decades since the Second World War, and from which it benefits in countless ways”.147 On the basis of President Trump’s mercurial nature, The Economist argued that “other countries would be less keen to strike long-term trade [and other technical cooperation] deals with America”, like deals concerning countering the Chinese industrial espionage or rule-breaking that harms the United States” because America is undermining its values, human rights, democracy, dependability and fair dealing that used to be the country’s most powerful weapons.148 And in a world of such a circumstance where might is right, the world would be profoundly hostile.149

4.5 Trumpism as a Cuban-Americanlash The election of Donald Trump was, in addition, a “Cuban-Americanlash” against “President Barack Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba, which included the resumption of diplomatic relations, strengthening trade and lobbying the US Congress to terminate an economic embargo in place for 50 years”.150 When the death of Fidel Castro of Cuba was announced on Friday, November 25, 2016, the Cuban-American community in Florida (the United States) erupted in celebration and scorn of a leader it apprehended as a tyrant that denied the people of Cuba their fundamental human rights, forcing many of them into exile in the United States, a clear indication that the Cuban community in the United States was not pleased with President Obama’s decision to improve the US’s relations with Cuba, a policy he followed up with a visit to Cuba in March 2016.151 146 Loc.

Cit. Parentheses mine. Cit. 148 Loc. Cit. 149 Loc. Cit. 150 See “Trump threatens to terminate US-Cuba thaw”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, November 29, 2016, p. 44. 151 Loc. Cit. 147 Loc.

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To confirm his affinity with the Cuban-American community in the United States, the President-elect, Trump, tweeted that if “Cuba is unwilling to make a better deal for the Cuban people, the Cuban-American people, and the US as a whole, I will terminate the deal”.152 The former Foreign Minister of Mexico, Jeorges Castaneda, explained Donald Trump’s reaction to Castro’s death (whom Trump also referred to in his tweet as “a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades”) as only a form of appreciation for the Cuban-Americans’ votes in the November 8, 2016 American presidential election, insisting that Trump won the White House because he won Florida; and he won Florida because he won the Cuban-American votes, the Cuban-Americans that ostensibly never took kindly to President Obama’s historic rapprochement with Cuba.153 This was one radical policy that President Obama clearly would not have embarked upon in his first term because of this obvious backlash. It was clear that in addition to the protest votes for Trump (in reaction to globalization) by those that had been rendered unemployable by the technological sophistication associated with the phenomenon (for their skills became obsolete without college education), some of President Obama’s policies—foreign policies (like the Cuban rapprochement under reference) and domestic policies (like the nation-wide extension of gay marriage by virtue of the equalization of marriages by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges, which, when implicitly extended to gay marriages, was fiercely resisted by many states as well as conscientious individuals in America154 )— had also orchestrated a backlash; exemplified by the estimated “3.5 million Obama voters who did not show up for Clinton”.155 Even as President Trump’s re-election drew nearer in 2020, there were still fears that his inclination to divisiveness—his racial penchant in the United States politics—could still draw away voters at the state level from the Democratic Party, thus, enabling him to lose the majority vote but increase his electoral vote and then re-election.

4.6 Nationalism and Monarchical Conservatism in Trumpism’s Rise of the ISIS The very first conclusion of President Trump was that it was President Barack Obama that created the ISIS. However, it is an established fact that the creation of the alQaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was a product of the failure of the United States’ foreign policy.156 Apart from the Arab–Israeli conflict, the second 152 Loc.

Cit.

153 Jeorges Castaneda to Christiane Amanpour in the Amanpour

programme on CNN, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on November 28, 2016, at 8 pm local time. 154 See Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 353–355, op. cit. 155 See Joe Klein in “Why we must focus now on maintaining democracy, civility and perspective”, Time (New York), November 28–December 5, 2016, p. 20, op. cit. 156 See Agwu (2018), Armed Drones and Globalization …, pp. 70–81, op. cit.

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most divisive issue in the Middle East, which brought about the ISIS or ISIL is sectarianism—that is, the schism between the Saudi Arabia backed-Sunni and the Iran backed-Shiite Muslims in the region. The United States’ invasion of Iraq in the false promise of eliminating Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was to politically unseat the Sunni in Iraq with the fall of President Saddam Hussein now giving power to the Shiites.157 It was the fall of the Sunnis in Iraq that promoted the Sunni discontent that led to the Sunni’s formation of the ISIS (ISIL) which, from the outset, the United States, advertently or inadvertently supported.158 It was more of an inadvertent support because, although Syria was practicing the Western-style democracy that the Western world could not push for, the United States were in league with the monarchical conservative Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirate (UAE), Bahrain and Jordan that were uncomfortable with the Syrian government’s radicalism and alliance with Shiite Iran and Lebanon.159 The Gulf state of Bahrain had a Sunni minority running the government, unlike Syria that had a Shiite minority equally running the government.160 The state of Bahrain was itself equally wracked by sectarian divisions in which “privileged minorities governed large and resentful majorities”, but the US condoned the beleaguered Bahrain’s Hamad’s government’s “unprecedented step of inviting armed divisions of the Saudi and Emirati armies to help suppress his own citizens”161 ; but it was the same United States’ objection to Iran and the Hezbollah in Lebanon that made it to join the alliance of these monarchical Gulf and Sunni states in getting the “unsuspecting Syrians” in the streets to form a well-armed militia in the name of the Free Syrian Army (FSA)—an army that was capable of taking on the Syrian military in the Arab Spring protests that started in Syria on March 11, 2011, with the United States getting a front organization—the Syrian Support Group—with which it funneled funds and arms to the FSA.162 So, whereas the FSA thought that they were fighting for a new Syria where the Al-Assad family would not dominate the government, it did not know that it had been deceived and was really fighting or buoyed up by foreign fighters that flew into Turkey and were escorted as fighters into the Syrian battle fields—foreign fighters that “were actually a mix of fundamentalists trained in Jordan by the Americans and funded by the conservative Gulf states, [the] … Islamic fundamentalists from Europe” that believed they were going to Syria to fight a jihad against Shiites and Christian unbelievers.163 As a matter of fact, the bulk of the foreign fighters were mainly from Iraq and belonged to a group formerly known as the al-Qaeda in Iraq 157 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 159 See Owei Lakemfa in “Syrians deserve peace after 10-year proxy war”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 19, 2021, p. 17. 160 See Obama (2020); A Promised Land …, p. 652, op. cit. 161 Loc. cit. 162 See Owei Lakemfa in “Syrians deserve peace after 10-year proxy war”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 19, 2021, p. 17, op. cit. 163 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 158 Loc.

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(AQI) that later became the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or the ISIL).164 In Syria, the ISIL linked up with a local Islamic fundamentalist group known as the al-Nusra Front, both of which by the end of 2012 united and jointly eliminated the FSA.165 In fact, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who was to briefly become the National Security Adviser (succeeded by John Bolton) under President Trump, was to also argue that the Obama administration’s nurturing of the ISIS was “a willful decision”.166 This narrative has prevailed in Donald Trump’s circles even during the Presidential campaigns, so much so that Trump willfully trumpeted the ideology that it was President Obama that formed the ISIS. But this narrative by President Trump was a reflection of an inadvertent reality. It was not President Obama that led the United States guidance of the coalition of the willing to invade Iraq. It was President George W. Bush Jr. that did it in 2003, toppling the secular government of Saddam Hussein and “moulding [the] blocks of what was to become the ISIS.167 What actually happened was that “Saddam was from the minority Sunni group” in Iraq; “and his ouster not only put the majority Shiites in power but also alienated many Sunnis”, culminating in the fact that “when the old Iraq army was disbanded and its leadership imprisoned, many Sunni officers were imprisoned”.168 The consequence of this was that the Sunnis later provided the leadership of the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) that fought the American invaders and the new Shiites government that succeeded Saddam Hussein.169 This was why the bulk of the ISIS was Iraqis.170 Thus, what later emerged as the ISIS was originally called the al-Qaeda, the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI)—a mere network that had no physical territory or caliphate anywhere in the world.171 In addition to fighting the Shiites government that succeeded Saddam Hussein’s Sunni government in Iraq, the AQI collaborated with its sister al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria that was called the al-Nusra Front.172 But the fortunes of the AQI changed when there was an anti-Assad demonstration in Syria and the US decided on a regime change.173 By this time, the AQI had changed its name and added Syria to it to now become the ISIS and was caused to cross into Syria, linking up with the al-Nusra and getting its share of the arms that were supplied by the US, the European and Middle East allies to the so-called Syrian opposition 164 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 166 See Owei Lakemfa in “How US, Europe, Israel and Gulf States nurtured ISIS”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 11, 2019, p. 31. 167 Loc. Cit. 168 Loc. Cit. 169 Loc. Cit. 170 See Owei Lakemfa in “The Kurds as burnt offering”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 18, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 171 See Bill Powell in “The New ISIS Crisis: As the Caliphate crumbles, the Jihadis are evolving”, Newsweek, October 21, 2016, p. 30. 172 See Owei Lakemfa in “How US, Europe, Israel and Gulf States nurtured ISIS”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 11, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 173 Loc. Cit. 165 Loc.

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or rebels (the FSA) that it had populated or inadvertently mixed with the ISIS.174 It was in 2012 that David Petraeus as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under the Obama administration proposed a programme to train, arm and fund the Syrian rebels that were then populated by the ISIS, a proposal that was rejected by President Obama; but which he later succumbed to under the pressure of King Abdullah II of Jordan and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.175 President Obama’s caving in to the pressure to train, arm and fund the ISISdominated Syrian rebels was considered as “the most regrettable error of judgment his administration made”,176 and which was why President Trump and his government erroneously considered Obama as the founder of the ISIS. The Obama administration’s decision to train, arm and fund the Syrian rebels was most lamentable because it “was in no position to vet the over 3,000 rebels it decided to train [in order] to differentiate the so-called “moderates” from the al-Qaeda affiliates like the al-Nusra and the ISIS, which had added Syria to its name to become ISIS”.177 Furthermore, what were to become President Obama’s worst mistakes could have been made in 2014 when Obama almost directly attacked Syria and handing the country over to the ISIL on the accusation that the al-Assad administration used chemical weapons in the war.178 It was in June 2014 that the ISIL, after taking over parts of Syria and Iraq, proclaimed itself a Caliphate—a turning point for the United States, Western Europe and their Arab allies that eventually turned their weapons on the ISIL, “just as Syria and its Lebanese, Iranian and Russian allies had done over a year before.179 This reality vindicated General Michael Flynn, who as the Director of Defence Intelligence under the Obama administration, had joined the leadership of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to protest the training, arming and funding the Syrian rebels, “pointing out that Islamic terrorists linked to al-Qaeda were not only in control of the Syrian rebel forces but that they populated it”.180 Under the Obama Presidency, General Flynn and the intelligence community’s argument was that there was a free flow of jihadists from various countries through the connivance of Turkey into Syria, to which the Obama administration ignored or turned a blind eye to while continuing to arm the rebels.181 In fact, when the ISIS cultivated a territory as its Caliphate, the advantage of territory intensified “the flow of

174 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 176 Loc. Cit. 177 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 178 See Owei Lakemfa in “Syrians deserve peace after 10-year proxy war”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 19, 2021, p. 17, op. cit. 179 Loc. Cit. 180 Owei Lakemfa in “How US, Europe, Israel and Gulf States nurtured ISIS”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 11, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 181 Loc. Cit. 175 Loc.

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foreign fighters” to it as a group.182 It is believed that one of the unfortunate things that General Flynn did not mention concerning the United States and the West’s support for the ISIS was “that over 40,000 foreign jihadists from 33 countries, including France, Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom and Denmark, were able to join ISIS because of the connivance of the West and the pressure it exerted on Turkey to allow them free passage, including through the airport and the Turkish borders”.183 Even when it suffered a loss of territory and the “flow of foreign fighters” going to them dwindled, the ISIS was able to conscript locals for $50 a month”184 —the purchase of local fighters that it was able to achieve because of the heavy funds available to it, partly from Western funding. Because of the Jordanian support of the lobby for President Obama to train, arm and fund the Syrian rebels, “the training of the Syrian rebels, which was primarily the training of ISIS and the al-Nusra fighters, took place in Jordan”—executed by the CIA, the United States Defence Department, the Jordanian Armed Forces and its General Intelligence Directorate, the British Secret Intelligence Service, the Qatar State Security and the Saudi Arabian Al Mukhbarat Al A’amah”.185 Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is a Sunni rather than a Shiite state. After the Jordanian training, arming and continued funding, the trainees “returned to Syria where most joined or rejoined the ISIS and the al-Nusra”, which “became the most powerful force in Syria outside the Syrian military”.186 As a matter of facts, the EU had estimated in 2017 that weapons had been pouring into ISIS, including anti-tank weapons that were “purchased by the United States that ended up in possession of the Islamic State within two months of leaving the factory”.187 In addition to the weapons the ISIS had been given by the US, and the American and Saudi weapons sold to it in the black market with the connivance of Jordanian intelligence agents, a strong and well funded and consolidated ISIS in Syria was able “to invade Iraq, taking towns and cities within a few weeks as the American-backed Iraqi troops fled, leaving more weapons for ISIS”.188 In fact, in respect of the intelligence that was produced to dissuade President Obama from training, arming and funding the ISIS, General Flynn remarked that: If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic … We understood ISIS’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the fact that Turkey was looking the other way when it came to the growth of the Islamic State inside Syria … I felt that they (Obama and his administration) did not want to hear the truth … The (American) Joint Chiefs believed that Assad should not 182 See

Bill Powell in “The New ISIS Crisis: As the Caliphate crumbles, the Jihadis are evolving”, Newsweek, October 21, 2016, p. 30, op. cit. 183 See Owei Lakemfa in “How US, Europe, Israel and Gulf States nurtured ISIS”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 11, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 184 See Bill Powell in “The New ISIS Crisis: As the Caliphate crumbles, the Jihadis are evolving”, Newsweek, October 21, 2016, p. 28, op. cit. 185 See Owei Lakemfa in “How US, Europe, Israel and Gulf States nurtured ISIS”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 11, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 186 Loc. Cit. 187 Loc. Cit. 188 Loc. Cit.

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be replaced by fundamentalists. The administration’s policy was contradictory. They wanted Assad to go but the opposition was dominated by extremists.189

It was for this reason that in frustration, according to Flynn, the Joint Chiefs decided to secretly assist President Assad to win the Syrian war, allegedly “by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations on the understanding that it would be passed to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State”.190 Evidently, what General Flynn revealed here was that the American intelligence community surreptitiously parted way with the Obama administration in order to actualize the defeat of the ISIS. The American intelligence parting of ways with the Obama administration would certainly not be unconnected with the complicity of not only the United States but also many Western countries in the aforementioned easy passage of foreign fighters/jihadists, through Turkey, to join the misconstrued ISIS that dominated the Syrian opposition. The indictment of the West’s complicity in the ISIS happened in the fact that some members of the terrorists’ fighters were never brought to trial after the fiasco in British courts.191 An illustration of this reluctance to try these groups happened when: In one case, the British had in October 2014, arrested a Swede, Bherlin Gildo, while transiting through Heathrow Airport, London. He was a well-known jihadist fighting in Syria and had posted on the web, his exploits, including Syrians he had killed. The British charged him with terrorism but withdrew the case when he accused British intelligence of directly and indirectly funding the terrorist groups he was accused of supporting.192

In another instance, an ISIS terrorist, Moazzem Begg, was from October 2014, detained for seven months by the British government before his arraignment in court for terrorism; but when he disclosed that in all the instances he travelled to fight for the terrorists in Syria, he briefed the British intelligence (the M16), which also debriefed him on return.193 In response, the British government hurriedly withdrew the case from the court.194 On the basis of the foregoing, it has been feared that Mohammed Emwazi (alias Jihadi John), the infamous Briton from Manchester who notoriously beheaded ISIS hostages like the American journalists James Foley and Steven Scotloff, might have been known to the British intelligence.195 In fact, it was equally feared that if President Obama had made good his threat in 2014 to bomb the Syrian government out of existence if it “crossed the red line”, he would have easily handed Syria over to the Syrian ISIS terrorists the way the United States led another so-called United Nations’ coalition-of-the-willing to hand Libya over to terrorists after the overthrow and death of Muammar Gaddafi.196 189 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 191 Loc. Cit. 192 Loc. Cit. 193 Loc. Cit. 194 Loc. Cit. 195 Loc. Cit. 196 Loc. Cit. 190 Loc.

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4.7 Trumpism as a Contradiction All in all, the election of Trump was unsettling. In fact, what the foregoing shows is that, both domestically and internationally (and with Trump’s hostility to U.S. allies despite America’s treaty commitments), the Trump Presidency, as Carl Bildt, the former Swedish Foreign Minister put it, means “the end of the West as we it. If Trump’s grand illusion that he will make America great again is not an empty political propaganda that it really is (since America is already great, practically the world’s most powerful country today); and if this illusion is predicated on his vision of America’s retreat to isolationism and the realization of its national interest at the expense of very vital global or inclusive interests, then, he risks plunging the whole world into a catastrophe, the Trumpocalypses that critics of his worldview have branded his emergence as US President. President Trump was clearly a bundle of contradiction—for which reason the Trump appeal to the elite that made him President in the Electoral College, having lost the popular vote or approbation of the American masses, was doomed to unravel in no time. There had never been any hesitation amongst critics in drawing attention to the irony that it was the same “nationalist” Donald Trump that fundamentally disagrees with his own Republican Party (especially on trade as he campaigned to put America first, re-industrialize America by returning all the companies that had gone overseas, and make America great again) that had built his hotels with Chinese steel; used foreign workers in the projects; used products in his enterprises that were produced outside the United States; and has significantly invested outside the United States, including the Middle East and China, places that he had unsparingly castigated in his campaigns.197 Neither has it escaped attention that Trump’s slogan of making America great again is hollow, more so because it was actually his Party, the Republican Party under George W. Bush, that liquidated and turned into deficit, the budget surplus he inherited from a Democratic Bill Clinton administration.198 As noted by Boima Rogers, “whereas Clinton had overseen record job creation and economic growth, Bush gave us the great recession and it was Democratic Obama, presiding over America’s longest running period of job creation that made America great again …; Trump wants to use the same tax cuts, remove sensible regulations and start trade wars that may instead of making America great, end up with another recession”, a scheme that “is, indeed, perverse”.199 It was against the background of Trumpism that the question can be asked, can President Trump with his “America first” fixation lead the United State back to isolationism? The answer to this question is a definitive nay because the contradictions of President Trump have their limits, especially with the existence of the United Nations where the United States currently takes a dominant position. Rather than the US 197 See

J. Boima Rogers in “Nationalism trumps liberalism and globalization”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, December 2, 2016, p. 16, op. cit. 198 Loc. Cit. 199 Loc. Cit.

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Republican foreign policy undergoing a permanent shift with the election of Trump by the GOP morphing into the Party of Trump with Trumpism being “a disrupter, and his policies being informed by his heterodox perspective; …”; yet, even though the changes that Trump has initiated (like his personal hostility to alliances and democracy promotion; and his focus on great-power competition with China) may go far, these changes will only challenge and ensure that the international order remains favourable to US interests and values, including the interests of others in free and open societies.200 Concerning the United States and the United Nations as declared above, it was Jeffrey Feltman that declared, when the United Nations turned seventy-five (75) years old and remained “relevant and a force multiplier for U.S. interests in global peace, development and human rights”, that for as long as a “strong U.S. leadership remains in the organization” [and] “for reasons ranging from changed global power dynamics to U.S. arrears in its dues”: Washington [needs to push harder and] cannot assume the same automatic deference inside the U.N. system that it enjoyed for years. The United States needs to compete inside the U.N. for what matters to us, lest we hand over vacuums for the Chinese and Russians to gleefully fill, at the expense of our interests.201

When Fareed Zakaria queried who America’s isolationism will be a victory to,202 it is obvious that it would be a victory to American rivals like China and Russia because these are the countries that will occupy the global leadership position that the US abandons. Well, the fact is that in most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the United States was able to afford the policy of isolationism from the European “power politics” because of the existence of a balance of power on the European continent.203 But that American isolationism was forced to end in the First and Second World Wars (followed by the Cold War) when “the possibility that one state or a coalition of states [Nazis and Communists] might conquer most of Europe, organize its vast resources in manpower and industrial strength, and use these to menace the United States”, became a real or potent threat.204 Acting against the systemic logic of international relations that “a balance of power is the prerequisite for each nation’s security”, survival and the preservation 200 See

Thomas Wright in “Will Trumpism change Republican foreign policy permanently?”, Brookings, Saturday, August 29, 2020, available at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-fromchaos/2020/08/29/will-trumpism-change-republican-foreign-policy-permanently/? (last visited on September 4, 2020). 201 See Jeffrey Feltman in “U.N. relevance depends on U.S. leadership”, The Foreign Service Journal, September 2020, available at https://www.afsa.org/un-relevance-depends-us-leadesrship? utm_campaign=Foreign%20Policy&utm_medium=email&utm_content=94567889&utm_sou rce=hs_email (last visited on September 4, 2020). Parentheses mine. 202 See Fareed Zakaria in “How is this a victory for America?”, Washington Post, available at https:// fareedzakaria.com/columns/2018/9/27/how-is-this-a-victory-for-america (last visited on Sunday, September 30, 2018). 203 See Spanier (1972); Games Nations Play: Analyzing International Politics, London, Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, p. 10. 204 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine.

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of the international system itself, Nazi Germany expanded its powers and attained dominance and hegemony, which was enough that it could threaten the United States; hence, the abrupt end to American isolationism in the World Wars and the subsequent Cold War.205 The above scenario repeated itself in recent times when Iran (with its nuclear programme) was feared to be attempting (to borrow from the words of John Spanier) “to expand its powers and attain dominance or hegemony”206 ; this prompted a US-led six-nation Iran nuclear deal to prevent it from happening. Although with respect to Europe, as Joe Klein wrote, “the threat of communism and the scourge of European nationalism that created the carnage of the twentieth century” and necessitated the ending of American isolationism (when “Harry Truman and his Wise Men created” the post-World War II United Nations architecture), the new threat of the moment is the threat of terrorism, arising more than ever from “the tide of immigrants coming from the Middle East”.207 The year 2016 may have witnessed the resurgence of the far-right movement and political parties in many European countries; but it was nowhere close to or comparable with the “real fear of German militarism” that was engendered by Nazism.208 And despite President Trump’s right-wing orientation and its attendant in-ward looking, racist, xenophobic and anti-trade postures, which culminated in his killing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, he still wanted a free trade with Japan, requesting the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to “open [the] long-restricted sectors of Japan’s economy to U.S. companies”; requesting, in addition, increased “Japanese investment in U.S. infrastructure and proposing joint work on robotics and artificial intelligence”.209 For the Americans (both liberals and populists), therefore, globalization must be a zero sum game in their favour. It was actually this kind of zero sum attitude—that is, the liberals and populists’ unity in purveying globalization as a zero-sum game, and their desire to exclusively appropriate its benefits—that inflamed passion amongst the marginalized around the world (especially in the developing and the underdeveloped nations in particular) and resultantly ignited terrorism as a weapon of resistance by the weak; even though, in some cases, this resistance was tinged with a millenarian (“secular terror”) worldview. Thus, the United States’ aspiration of dominance at the United Nations, in addition to the zero-sum game in its foreign policy in this era of increased globalization, the anti-globalism contradictions of Trumpism are systemically inhibited by the forces of globalization and alliances.

205 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 207 See Joe Klein in “The ideological challenge at the core of Donald Trump’s radical Presidency”, Time (New York), February 6, 2017, p. 12, op. cit. 208 Loc. Cit. 209 See Ian Bremmer in “Sorry, Brits: Abe and Trump have the real ‘special relationship”, Time (New York), February 27–March 6, 2017, p. 6. 206 Loc.

References

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References Agwu, F. A. (2011). The law of armed conflict and african wars. Ibadan: Macmillan Nigeria. Agwu, F. A. (2013). Themes and perspectives on Africa’s international relations. Ibadan: University Press Plc. Agwu, F. A. (2016). Nations among nations: Uneven statehood, hegemony and instrumentalism in international relations. Ibadan: HEBN Publishers Plc. Agwu, F. A. (2018). Armed drones and globalization in the asymmetric war on terror: Challenges for the law of armed conflict and global political economy. New York and London: Routledge. Agwu, F. A. (2020). Africa and international criminal justice: Radical evils and the international criminal court. New York and London: Routledge. Albright, M. (2003). Madam secretary: A memoir. New York: Miramax Books. Bolton, J. (2020). The room where it happened: A white house memoir, former national security advisor of the United States. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kissinger, H. (1994). Diplomacy. New York, London, Tronto, Sydney: Simon & Schuster. Meacham, J. (2008). American lion: Andrew jackson in the white house. New York: Random House. Obama, B. (2020). A promised land. New York, Viking, an imprint of Pengiun Books. Spanier, J. (1972). Games nations play: Analyzing international politics. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd. Woodward, B. (2018). Fear: Trump in the white house. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Chapter 5

Globalization, Populism and Nationalism in Regional and New Geopolitical Landscapes

5.1 Preface to Regional Hegemony With a completely fractured globalizing world now clearly in place, there is an attendant geo-political context that is also fueled by populism and nationalism; a geo-political context, which, from the Trumpian perspective, is dramatically defined by demagoguery, deception, lies (as in the so-called alternative facts) and all manner of geo-political intrigues. It is basically a fractured world because of the rivalry between the United States and China, which the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, had warned had generated tensions that risked dividing the world into two blocs.1 As a matter of fact, despite the so-called theory of the peaceful rise of China, which also had some moral claims,2 there is a flip side of it that some critics call the rise of “China and the new imperialism”.3 According to the latter; that is, the obverse or critical narrative of the rise of China that rattles the United States and creates the fear of the Thucydides trap: In the ancient times, China and India dominated the world economy. Their combined GDP accounted for nearly 40 percent of the world total. In the first millennium of our Christian era, geopolitical power shifted to the Mediterranean powers, notably Venice, Spain and Portugal. It later shifted to the trading states of central Europe, notably Holland and Sweden. Then came France, England and Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Britain in particular achieved world mastery through conquest of the high seas and acquisition of colonies. Through sterling and the gold standard, Britain also became the treasurer and creditor of the world. The rise of the young American republic and the toll or two world wars spelt the death-knell of British Empire. Our 20th century, as Walter Lippmann described it, was “the American Century”. From Woodrow Wilson to Truman, American statesmen largely crafted the economic and political institutions of global governance in their own image. Without American assistance through the Marshall Plan, Europe would not have risen 1 See

Justin Worland in “U.N. Secretary-General warns U.S.–China tensions risk dividing world into 2 blocs”, Time (New York), August 18, 2020, available at https://time.com/5879439/antonioguterres-un-us-china/ (last visited on August 19, 2020). 2 See Kissinger (2011, p. 500). 3 See Mailafia (2020, p. 17). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0_5

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Phoenix-like from the ashes. For better or worse, my generation grew up in the shadows of the American Imperium – in the frosty atmosphere of the Cold War and the prospects of thermonuclear war. With the benefit of hindsight, the “balance of terror” ensured a long peace. The disintegration of the Soviet Empire and the ending of the Cold War have undermined the post-war international equilibrium. Today, history has come full circle. Over the last 30 years, the center of world gravity has gradually been shifting towards the East. China and India have resurrected Phoenix-like from the ashes of a millennial servitude. Napoleon Bonaparte famously warned his contemporaries long ago: “Let China sleep, when she wakes, she will shake the world”. The rise of China is one of the defining features of our twenty-first century.4

It is clear that for centuries, the Chinese defined themselves as the Middle Kingdom or essentially the “center of the universe”5 —a worldview that, in addition to some weaknesses (like being frozen in insularity because of overimagined self-sufficiency), also embodied strength and bolstered a cultural confidence about their stature as a race and civilization.6 But an epic drama to this new geopolitical landscape—the emergence of China as a new rival to the United States—came with the election of Donald Trump in the United States—an office he assumed proclaiming “America first” (to ‘make America great again’)—a proclamation that Western critics said he was decidedly going about in a very wrong way because he was shunning multilateral organizations, treating allies as unwanted baggage and sometimes openly admiring the authoritarianism of America’s adversaries.7 Meanwhile, allies are in general, a very important instrument of economic and national security interest. It was for this functional requirement of allies that it was very controversial when President Trump attempted to terminate the United StatesKorea Free Trade Agreement, known as KORUS.8 The KORUS was “one of the foundations of an economic relationship, a military alliance and, most important, top secret intelligence operations and capabilities”.9 It was because of the KORUS treaty dating back to the 1950s that the United States stationed 28,500 US troops in South Korea and operated the most highly classified and sensitive Special Access Programmes (SAP), which provided Top Secret, codeword intelligence and military capabilities.10 Today, North Korean ICBM missiles have the capacity to carry nuclear weapons to the American homeland, while its missiles can take 38 min to reach Los Angeles; but the SAP can enable the United States to detect an ICBM launched in North Korea within seven seconds, which makes the American presence in South Korea a very important essence of national security.11

4 Loc.

Cit. Kissinger (2011, pp. 3, 10, 43, 58, 60), op. Cit. 6 See Mailafia (2020, p. 17), op. cit. 7 See “The next war: Shifts in geo-politics and technology are renewing the threat of great-power conflict”, The Economist, January 27th 2018, p. 9. 8 See Bob Woodward (2018, p. xvii), op. cit. 9 Loc. Cit. 10 Ibid, pp. xvii–xviii. 11 Ibid, p. xviii. 5 See

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Trump was a transactional (not transformational) President whose reason for wanting to terminate KORUS was because “the United States had an $18 billion annual trade deficit with South Korea and was spending $3.5 billion a year to keep US troops” in South Korea—all at the risk of “losing vital intelligence assets crucial to U.S. national security”.12 So, steeped in his nationalism, which was clearly analogous to nativism, President Trump’s attempt to terminate the KORUS as well as his trump-card (the magical wand he vowed he would use to “make America great again”) was replete with messages and actions that were geo-politically controversial, chaotic and capable of stoking the furnace of tension that (with a little miscalculation) could trigger a global or regional conflict. And all of this was happening in the wake of a global order that was squarely facing the risk of the “Thucydides trap”,13 with China (buoyed by economic prosperity) and Russia (restoring its hard power after the collapse of the Soviet Union)—with all the emergent powers thinking that their time had come and that they deserved respect and seat in the post-world wars international order that was established and sustained by the United States.14 Messrs Tibor Nagy, the United States’ Assistant Secretary of State for Africa himself recognized that “there is a global power competition” that has many facets, some of which had caused “very complicated relationship with China”.15 In Africa in particular, Nagy recognized that it was this global competition that caused the United States to commence in Africa, the initiative of guichet unique or Prosper Africa—the concept of a “one-stop-shop” or a single point in each of the African countries where US companies can “go to and see it’s okay”, a platform in Africa “to bring the various US government agencies that have something to do with Africa, thanks to technology, under the digital umbrella”.16 This would not only help the American companies that are looking for deals in Africa, it would also engage with the host governments.17 It was in the atmosphere of this global competition or geopolitical context that bilateral or unilateral multilateralism with African countries became heightened, with the likes of President Putin hosting the African Heads of State at a two-day Summit in the southern Russian city of Sochi.18 And while the summit was beginning on Wednesday, October 23, 2019, Russia landed two nuclear-capable bombers (two Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bombers) in the South African Waterkloof air force base in Tshwane, a mission that the Russian Ministry of Defence said was designed to increase Russia’s influence on the continent

12 Loc.

Cit. Agwu (2018, pp. 281–282), note 118, op. cit. 14 See “The next war: Shifts in geo-politics and technology are renewing the threat of great-power conflict”, The Economist, January 27th 2018, p. 9, op. cit. 15 See Nicholas Norbrook’s interview in “Tibor Nagy: For the US, there is a global power competition”, The Africa Report, No. 111, April–May-June, 2020, p. 83. 16 Loc. Cit. 17 Loc. Cit. 18 See “Russia lands nuclear bombers in Africa as Putin hosts continent’s leaders”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 24, 2019, p. 39. 13 See

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and, indeed, nurture military ties with South Africa.19 The Sudanese Sovereignty Council (the highest authority after the overthrow of Al-Bashir in April 2019) sent emissaries to the Russia-Africa summit in Sochi in October, which formed the basis of Kremlin’s plan to set up a naval base on the Red Sea in Sudan, which would have “global geopolitical implications”.20 It was also in Sochi that Nigeria and Russia inked on the sidelines, a deal which was to let Russia supply Nigeria with 12 attack helicopters (the Mi-35 attack helicopters), a weapon that would enable Abuja to bolster its resolve to defeat the Boko Haram insurgents and other bandits wreaking havoc in different parts of the country.21 The Sochi summit, being the first Russia-Africa summit, was part of Kremlin’s desire to win business and restore Moscow’s influence that had faded after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which had backed leftist governments and movements on the African continent during the Cold War.22 In addition to many Russian companies successfully working with partners from different sectors of the African economy, and with plans to expand further,23 President Putin also said at the Sochi (Black sea resort) summit that up to twenty billion ($20 billion) dollars of African debts had been written off by Russia as part of the initiative to ease the debt burden of countries on the continent.24 The prize of the Russian Sochi summit is a “greater political clout on a continent with 54 United Nations member states, vast mineral wealth and potentially lucrative markets for Russian-manufactured weapons”.25 In fact, although Russia had enjoyed considerable successes in selling arms to African countries, it still lagged far behind its competitors in trade terms.26 Despite the fact that Russia said its trade with African countries rose to $20 billion in 2018, Eurostat maintained that it still did not rank among the African continent’s top five largest partners for trade in goods.27 As a matter of fact, it was against the backdrop of the “Thucydides trap” that both China and Russia saw the pillars of the post World War II international order that was created by the United States (comprising “universal human rights, democracy and the rule of law) as an imposition

19 Loc.

cit. Roman Goncharenko in “With Sudan naval base, Russia may have key to Africa”, DW.com, December 2, 2020, available at https://www.dw.com/en/with-sudan-naval-base-russia-may-have-akey-to-africa/a-55791124 (last visited on December 4, 2020). 21 See Jude Egbas in “Russia hands Nigeria 12 attack helicopters after Buhari meets Putin”, Pulse, available at https://www.pulse.ng/news/local/russia-hands-nigeria-12-attack-helicopters/jkb 9jp7 (last visited on October 26, 2019). 22 See “Russia lands nuclear bombers in Africa as Putin hosts continent’s leaders”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 24, 2019, p. 39, op. cit. 23 Loc. Cit. 24 See “Russia writes off $20 billion of African debt”, The Guardian (Lagos), October 25, 2019, p. 42. 25 See “Russia lands nuclear bombers in Africa as Putin hosts continent’s leaders”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 24, 2019, p. 39, op. cit. 26 Loc. Cit. 27 Loc. Cit. 20 See

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that excuses foreign meddling and undermines their own legitimacy”.28 The result of this reality was that both China and Russia (in grouse) were ostensibly in pursuit of global recognition via the establishment of regional hegemonies; using, for instance, “asymmetric-warfare strategies to create “anti-access/area denial” network”: with China allegedly aiming “to push American naval forces far out into the Pacific where they can no longer safely project power into the East and South China Seas”; while Russia wants the world to know that from the Arctic to the Black Sea, it can call on greater firepower than its foes—and that it will not hesitate to do so”.29 Some Western megaphones are of the persuasion that while studiously trying to avert the risk of a frontal military confrontation with the United States, Russia exploited a “grey zone” in Ukraine for unleashing its aggression and coercion, blending same with “misinformation, infiltration, cyber war and economic blackmail in ways that democratic societies cannot copy and find hard to rebuff; while China, although more cautious, claim, occupy and garrison reefs and shoals in disputed waters in South East Asia.30 All these are also happening at a time when nuclear weapons, which have largely been a source of instability since the end of the Second World War in 1945, have entailed added dangers as follows: “their command and control systems are becoming vulnerable to hacking by new cyber weapons or “blinding” of the satellites they depend on”; such that “a country under such an attack [that is, whose satellites were blinded by hackers] could find itself under pressure to choose between losing control of its nuclear weapons or using them”.31

5.2 A Gung-Ho Trump Populist Donald Trump assumed the United States Presidency and began his own geo-political intrigues at a time some critics thought that America had played into the hands of China and Russia with the strategic drift in George W. Bush’s “unsuccessful” invasion and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as America’s abdication of its “global role” with former President Barack Obama’s “foreign policy of retrenchment” that was shored or propped up by his open skepticism about the value of hard power.32 Apparently, President Trump’s geo-political sensibility was as if to counter those cynics who thought that American politics had become too dysfunctional to enable it to muster the right response to the challenges from China and Russia.33 So, when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017, President Trump was gung-ho and seething with hubris, declaring, for instance, that 28 See “The next war: Shifts in geo-politics and technology are renewing the threat of great-power conflict”, The Economist, January 27th 2018, p. 9, op. cit. 29 Loc. Cit. 30 Loc. Cit. 31 Loc. Cit. 32 Loc. Cit. 33 Loc. Cit.

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“North Korea’s reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles threatens the entire world” and describing that country’s leadership as a “band of criminals” and its President a “Rocket Man … on a suicide mission for himself and his regime”34 ; to which, in retaliation for a perceived insult, the North Korean President, Kim Jong Un, replied, describing President Trump as a “mentally deranged US dotard”.35 Also early in the Trump Presidency, “the Pentagon issued a new national defence strategy that put China and Russia above jihadism as the main threat to America”.36 In addition, in his first state of the union address, President Trump also enthused as follows: “Around the world, we face rogue regimes, terrorist groups, and rivals like China and Russia that challenge our interests, our economy and our values”; declaring that “for this reason, I am asking Congress to end the dangerous defence sequester and fully fund our great military”; for “we must modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal … making it so strong and powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression”.37 In that January 2018 State of the Union Address, President Trump also doubled down on “the cruel dictatorship in North Korea” and its nuclear threat, which he reiterated, “could very soon threaten our homeland”.38 Like as had happened to North Korea, President Trump also intimated in the address that “my administration has also imposed tough sanctions on the communist and socialist dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela”.39 It was disconcerting, the way President Trump was hitting the drums of war against North Korea, even when the United Nations Security Council had unanimously voted to impose sanctions on the regime on account of its nuclear programme. Historically, economic sanctions, as policies of denial (much more than constructive or conditional engagement that concedes some political and economic incentives) promote the desired political and economic changes in the behaviour of actors in the international system.40 In other words, economic sanctions had been an age-long effective instrument for reining in recalcitrant behaviour in the international system, especially when such sanctions enjoy “some degrees of multilateral support”.41 But President Trump sought sanctions arbitrarily—be it against China, Mexico, or Germany, amongst others. 34 See the full text of President Trump’s Speech to the United Nations, available at https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2017/09/19/read-text-president-trump-speech/4vl azWj8AsiRURrsqRN5lI/amp.html (last visited on Tuesday, September 19, 2017). 35 See Steve Holland of Reuters in “Trump says North Korea’s Kim insulted him by calling him old”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-north-koreas-kim-insulted-him-calling-020 513540.html (last visited in December 2017). 36 See “The next war: Shifts in geo-politics and technology are renewing the threat of great-power conflict”, The Economist, January 27th 2018, p. 9, op. cit. 37 See the “Full text: President Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address”, available at https:// www.yahoo.com/news/full-text-president-trumps-2018-state-union-address-021835181.html (last visited on Wednesday, January 31, 2018). 38 Loc. Cit. 39 Loc. Cit. 40 See Richard N. Haass, “Introduction”, in Haass (1998, p. 6). 41 Ibid, p. 5.

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Unlike President Trump, when in 1939, following the outbreak of the Second World War that aimed to counter Germany’s re-armament and aggressive search for Lebensraum, the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration in the United States “imposed a series of increasingly stringent economic sanctions on Japan” (being an ally of Germany), those sanctions enjoyed broad international support by the British and the Dutch who went the whole hog to embargo “exports to Japan from their colonies in Southeast Asia”, thus, obstructing Japan’s advance in Asia and causing it to embark on “a rash mistake by launching a war against the United States”—the Pearl Harbor attack.42 Later, effective economic sanctions were to be very useful in the ability of the West to orchestrate the downfall of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana (by conspiring to bring the price of cocoa ridiculously low and thereby crippling the country’s economy and immiserating the people); the same way same crippling sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe over his government’s arbitrary land reforms brought down Robert Mugabe in the November 2017 subtle military putsch.43 It was this same broad international support that the sanctions against North Korea over its nuke programme enjoyed when all the members of the United Nations Security Council (including all the five permanent members) voted in favour, making it possible for the South Korea authorities to be able to nab “a Panama-flagged oil tanker suspected of violating” the sanctions.44 Indeed, it was beyond incomprehension that President Trump was rather impatient with the United Nations sanctions regime on North Korea, insisting in his 2018 State of the Union Address that “past experience has taught us that complacency and concessions only invite aggressions and provocations”, and that “I will not repeat the mistakes of the past administrations that got us into this dangerous position”.45 President Trump National Security Strategy that was released earlier had branded North Korea a “rogue regime”, thus, not only irking the North Korean regime but also fueling tensions with China and Russia that had censured North Korea for its nuclear programme and warned President Trump not to escalate the situation with a heightened U.S. military presence and activity in the Asia Pacific where the three world powers maintain overlapping interests.46 In fact, while responding to North Korean President Kim Jong Un’s claim that he has a nuclear button on his office 42 See Robert Higgs (2006), “How U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor”, available at http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1930 (last visited on December 31, 2017). 43 See Baffour Ankomah’s Baffour’s Beefs in “Why Robin Cook’s ghost is smiling”, New African, January 2018, p. 29. 44 See Sofia Lotto Persio (Newsweek, December 31, 2017) in “North Korea Sanctions–Violating Oil Tanker Bears Panama Flag”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/north-korea-sanctionsviolating-oil-110… (last visited on December 31, 2017). 45 See the “Full text: President Trump’s 2018 State of the Union address”, available at https:// www.yahoo.com/news/full-text-president-trumps-2018-state-union-address-021835181.html (last visited on Wednesday, January 31, 2018). 46 See Tom O’Connor in “North Korea tells Trump that Kim Jong Un will keep his nuclear weapons and US can blame Obama”, Newsweek, available at http://www.yahoo.com/news/north-korea-telltrump-kim-183403966.html (last visited on December 22, 2017).

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desk, President Trump bragged that “I too have a nuclear button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his”.47

5.3 Trump Kinetic Policy Against Allies, Frenemies and Rivals Paradoxically, President Trump’s geo-political trump card seemed quixotic as he turned his back on some of America’s allies like Pakistan, tweeting in early 2018 that “the United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit”.48 Coincidentally, though allegedly exhibiting a double-standard and as such regarded as a frenemy by the United States,49 Pakistan is still very important in the global war on terror, more so now that with the fall of Mosul (in Iraq) and Raqqa (in Syria) “ISIS fighters from Syria and Iraq [are scattered] around the world”50 in what can be more appropriately described as dispersal rather than the defeat of terrorism. The United States also needs Pakistan’s support in order to effectively continue to deal with its long-running war in Afghanistan, a country where the United States, like the defunct Soviet Union, is at the verge of defeat by the Taliban.51 Although he clarified in Davos that his America first mantra did not mean America alone but merely seeking a “fair and reciprocal” trade instead of the classical or traditional protectionism,52 the danger in President Trump’s quixotic geo-political strategy of insisting on “America first”, especially in places like Pakistan, is that he would be driving Pakistan into China’s embrace, and Beijing is ready to double down on its investment there.53 Turning his back or shifting American support away from Pakistan54 and his zero-sum approach to global competitions were some of President Trump’s policy incoherence that have been touted as having the capacity to redefine China’s global environment or roles.55 The Middle East too was not spared of President Trump’s kinetic approach to foreign policy. His declaration, on December 6, 2017, that the US had recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel was to further stoke the furnace

47 See

“For the Records”, Time (New York), January 15, 2018, p. 4. Bremmer (2018b, p. 10). 49 See Agwu (2018, p. 178), op. cit. 50 See Bremmer (2018b, p. 10), op. cit. 51 See Bremmer (2018c, p. 8). 52 See Alan Murray in “The View from Davos was unusually sunny”, Time (New York), February 12, 2018, p. 9. 53 See Bremmer (2018b, p. 10), op. cit. 54 See Bremmer (2018c, p. 8), op. cit. 55 See Bremmer (2018a, p. 8). 48 See

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of tension in that region.56 Interestingly, as stated earlier above, this was happening at a time when international relations were deemed in some quarters to be taking place in a multi-polar global geopolitical landscape that was characterized by the increased competition or assertiveness of great powers.57 And this great powers competition apparently ensued because the US President Trump was shirking America’s global leadership in his obsession with “America first”, while President Barack Obama before him had practically retrenched America’s leadership in global affairs with his disavowal of the value of hard power or force. Iran may not be competitively asserting itself globally like China and Russia, but this was the background against which, in the Middle East region, it was increasingly becoming a challenger of Israel’s dominance as that region continued to be roiled by the face-off between it (that is, Iran), Israel and Syria (Iran’s proxy) that eventually resulted in a military confrontation between the trio over Syria on Saturday, February 10, 2018, in which the decades of Israel’s air dominance was challenged by the shooting down of an Israeli jet after bombing an Iranian site in Syria.58 The same President Trump’s kinetic foreign policy and quixotic brinkmanship were also true with respect to Russia’s increased global influence. The extent to which President Putin of Russia was allegedly determined to undermine the United States and the entire Western alliance was reflected in the report that he “helped fund the rise of nationalist parties in Western Europe and benefited from the resulting weakening of the European Union”.59 But in wanting to undermine the NATO alliance, much as Moscow and Beijing were not going to adopt the downright belligerent and asymmetric strategies of terrorists, Hillary Clinton nonetheless observed that “they’d love for us to elect a President who would jeopardize that source of strength”; … that “if Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin”.60 Unfortunately, Donald Trump had consistently harped on the obsolesce of NATO61 ; and that if elected, he would abandon the guaranteed protection that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries had traditionally taken for granted from Washington62 ; even though that would clearly amount to reneging from 56 See “Israel’s mismanaged capital: Grants and absolution”, The Economist, January 20–26th 2018, p. 38. 57 See “The New Geopolitics”, available at https://www.brookings.edu/project/the-new-geopol itics/?utm_campaign=Foreign%20Policy&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_con tent=60558728 (last visited on January 20, 2018). 58 See Maayan Lubell and Lisa Barrington (Reuters) in “Israeli jet shot down after bombing Iranian site in Syria”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/Israel-shoots-down-iranian-drone-strikesiranian-targets-051434496.html (last visited on Saturday, February 10, 2018). 59 See Calabresi (2017, p. 20). 60 See “Hillary Clinton speaks about national security on Thursday in San Diego”, available at http://www.marketwatch.com/story/text-of-hillary-clintons-speech-on-national-security2016-06-02?siteid=rss&rss=1 (last visited on Friday, June 3, 2016), op. cit. 61 See “Europeans cooling on NATO”, Time (New York), September 5, 2016, p. 7. 62 See “United States may abandon NATO protection”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, July 22, 2016, p. 53.

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the United States’ obligation to the attack on one attack on all Article 5 commitment in NATO.63 But although he did not out rightly abandon the NATO, but President Trump after his assumption of office, had so rattled the trans-Atlantic relations and NATO in general that the French President Emmanuel Macron began floating the idea that the European Union must stop depending on the United States for its security but should instead rely on its own military forces for protection.64 The EU’s reliance on its own forces for protection was an argument that President Macron had been making even through his campaigns, a responsibility that he insisted can be made possible with a common defence budget and a common security doctrine.65 President Macron even went further to tout the possibility of some measure of defence cooperation with Russia, but on the condition that there would be progress on the fighting in Eastern Ukraine, which had been going on since 2014 with the support of Moscow for the separatist forces.66 Just as Saudi Arabia is not pleased with the prospect of Trump joining Putin to fight Assad because Russia and Iran are propping up the Shiites, many sympathizers of the NATO alliance are not pleased with Trump chumming up to Putin because that might implicitly mean indulging Russia’s geo-political aspirations—that is, giving Putin a carte blanche to take a geopolitical advantage of other nations, especially in its neighbourhood if not Europe in general.67

5.4 A US/Turkey Snafu Too Far To underscore the importance of the US alliance, a brief commentary on how a snafu between the US and Turkey almost unsettled NATO due to the integrity question the snafu posed over Turkey’s commitment. It is significative of the value of alliances to national power that in the wake of the failed coup attempt in Turkey, the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, started “thumping his nose at the West”,68 a situation that resulted in a sense of unease in the community of the NATO alliance, 63 Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (Washington, April 4, 1949) states as follows: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area. Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security”. 64 See “Europe must stop depending on US for security”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, August 28, 2018, p. 45, op. cit. 65 Loc. Cit. 66 Loc. Cit. 67 Loc. Cit; see also Bremmer (2016, p. 8). 68 See Bremmer (2016, ibid, p. 8), op. cit.

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especially in Washington. As a matter of fact, it was in the wake of the failed July 15, 2016 coup in Turkey that speculations swirled that despite an earlier diplomatic spat between Turkey and Russia—which prompted a frosty relationship and probably the downing of a Russian aircraft, a Su-24, near the Syrian border69 —President Erdogan was actually leaning towards Russia. President. President Erdogan was thought to be drifting towards Russia because he had “literally and politically” owed his survival of that coup to Russia when the “Russian security services tipped off their Turkish counterparts after picking up highly sensitive army exchanges and encoded radio messages that the Turkish army was readying to stage a coup”.70 Although this claim was seriously doubted because chances were that “if Russia warned the Turks, they would be disclosing their technical capabilities of monitoring [Turkish military] movements and communications”—a no-go area as far as intelligence services—it remained a reference point for the rapprochement that the failed coup created between Turkey and Russia because of the latter’s strategic support in the wake of the July coup.71 Matters were not helped by the fact that Putin was quick to condemn the coup, expressed support for Erdogan’s government during the coup’s early hours and remained silent as Erdogan jailed those his government accused of treachery; while the West, the United States, “by contrast, was slow to support Erdogan that night” and had sharply criticized his crackdown,72 a crackdown, “not only on rebel soldiers and generals but on journalists, academics, teachers and judges too”; a crackdown in which around 60,000 Turks were suspended from or lost their jobs in the post-coup purge, and over 6,000 jailed.73 Putin and Erdogan had shared the same authoritarian streak and a deep suspicion of the United States (despite Turkey being in the NATO alliance), but between Russia and the United States, there was no love lost.74 Russia’s distrust of the United States—even though deep in history dating back to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and later, the Cold War with the Russian-led behemoth (the defunct Soviet Union)—was clearly founded on Washington’s alleged foxy or crafty hegemony; the narrative that “Putin’s media trots out often that the United States preaches partnership with nations while looking for the first available opportunity to overturn any government that dares to defy Washington’s hegemony”75 ; as in when Putin accused the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, of “giving a “signal” to opponents to rise against him”.76 Even Turkey was no less suspicion 69 The incidence took place in November 2015 and after some bluffing, Erdogan apologized to Putin in June 2016, thus, clearing the path to this rapprochement; see Bremmer (2016), loc. cit. 70 See Owen Matthews in “Strongmen in love: A failed coup is pushing Turkish President Erdogan back into Putin’s arms”, Newsweek, August 12 (08/12/2016), 2016, pp. 12, 15. 71 Ibid, pp. 13, 14. 72 See Bremmer (2016, p. 8), op. cit. 73 See Owen Matthews in “Strongmen in love: A failed coup is pushing Turkish President Erdogan back into Putin’s arms”, Newsweek, August 12 (08/12/2016), 2016, p. 14, op. cit. 74 Loc. Cit. 75 Loc. Cit. 76 Loc. Cit.

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of the United States, especially since the Islamic preacher, Fethullah Gulen fell out with President Erdogan and fled to the United States in exile.77 With this suspicion of the United States by Russia and Turkey, it was not a surprise that when Turkey’s post-coup rapprochement between Moscow and Ankara began, the Russian “veteran nationalist Alexander Dugin, began parroting the controversial narrative that there was a “parallel state” in Turkey; “that Turkey was split between “patriots” and “Gulenist-American agents” and that the shooting down of the Russian plane was a CIA-Gulenist conspiracy to split Turkey and Russia’s natural alliance”78 —playing to the gallery against the background that “the pilot of the Turkish F-16 that had shot down the [Russian] Su-24 had been arrested as an anti-Erdogan coup suspect”79 ; this was clearly a ruse designed to patronize Turkey and inflame its passion to leave NATO, and for a “joint Russia-Turkish action to push NATO from the Black Sea”.80 When the United States’ tardiness in supporting Erdogan and its later criticism of his post-coup crackdown and purge are juxtaposed with the EU’s hesitation to deliver on its promise of a visa-free access to the Europe for Turks if Ankara could help stem the tide of migrants to Europe,81 it can be appreciated why the Turkish President was developing a sense of siege/abandonment and uneasiness with his country’s traditional NATO Western ally and, hence, tilting toward Russia for strategic support. Although alliances are governed by a quid pro quo, Russia stood to gain more if it establishes a joint action with Turkey and put a spanner in the works of the NATO alliance; more so when “Putin will raise doubts within NATO about member state Turkey’s reliability and gain a freer hand to extend Russia’s naval capabilities in the Black Sea” and get a softer Turkish attitude toward … Syria’s Bashar Assad, a man Putin considers an ally and Erdogan has denounced as an enemy” in the war against the Syrian dictator and the ISIS.82 All of this was clearly destructive of NATO’s cohesion, solidarity and capacity, which was why the future of the United States’ alliance was a big issue in the 2016 Presidential election campaigns. Even when Donald Trump won the election and assumed the Presidency, his antagonism against NATO did not abate—so much so that the President equally riled against member states that were unable to pay the 2% of their GDP for the NATO defence contributions.83

77 Loc.

Cit. p. 15. Parenthesis mine. 79 Loc. Cit. 80 Loc. Cit. 81 See “Give us visa-free travel or lose migrant deal, Turkey tells EU”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Tuesday, August 16, 2016, p. 22. 82 See Bremmer (2016, p. 8), op. cit. 83 See Theron Mohamed in “Trump is threatening sanctions on Germany over its Russian gas pipeline, opening a new front in the trade war that the Kremlin calls blackmail”, Market Insider, available at https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/trump-trade-war-threatens-germanysanctions-over-russian-gas-pipeline-2019-6-1028276069 (last visited on June 13, 2019), op. cit. 78 Ibid,

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5.5 China’s BRI There is also another geopolitical re-alignment in China’s Belt Road Initiative (BRI)—used by China to subtly impose itself and build geostrategic claims on Eurasia and parts of Europe.84 Before China’s BRI, there was the Silk Road in the middle ages. Although history is full of long and legendary highways, but none resembled the Silk Road, not just in magnitude (at least 4,000 miles in more than 40 countries) but also in its “mythic potency” as the world was cleft into East and West in the Middle Ages.85 The Silk Road existed since the fourth century BC; and it was not just that trade was its raison d’être—not only of Chinese silk, but also of salt, sugar, spices, ivory, jade, fur and other luxury goods—it forged deep social, cultural and religious links between disparate peoples.86 However, with the emergence of the European seafarers/powers (“first the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish and then Anglos—British/America”) that came to replace the road powers (thus “emerging as the new global hegemons” amongst the Silk Road powers), “trade dropped, sending the Islamic Ottoman Empire which acted as middle-men into precipitous decline”.87 Today, the realignment for the revival of the old silk road was ignited by China with a grand design defined in its “One Road One Belt” initiative—“a new land trade route emerging that will link Eurasia, Middle East and Africa …; underpinned by the construction of Chinese built infrastructure, including high speed rail networks” that could run at 200–300 km per hour and “reduce travel by sea-container from Beijing to Eurasia by a few days”.88 First outlined in two speeches in 2013 by President Xi Jinping in Astana (Kazakhstan) and Jakarta (Indonesia), China touts the BRI (the One Belt One Road initiative) that aims at building roads, ports, railways, and other infrastructure of connectivity across the Eurasian landmass, Africa and the Middle East with up to $1trillion of Chinese investment89 as something that “is full of ‘mutual respect’, win–win relationships and common destiny”90 ; but, from the accounts of Helen Gardiner, there are critics like Tim Summers of the Asian Programme at Chatham House who argue that the BRI “is about building networks of connectivity”—a sort of geographical linkages to multiple locations that are not limited to physical infrastructure but also 84 See “A Ham-Fisted Hegemon: Despite its Economic and Military Might, China Lacks the Finesse to Shape Asia to Its Liking”, The Economist, September 24, 2016, p. 50. 85 See Chris Moss in “Why you must travel the Silk Road in your lifetime”, The Telegraph, available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/activity-and-adventure/silk-road-travel-guide/amp/ (last visited on August 31, 2019). 86 Loc. Cit. 87 See Wambu (2016, p. 98), op. cit. 88 Loc. Cit. 89 See Afshin Molavi in “Enter the Dragon: China’s Belt And Road Rising in the Middle East”, Hoover Institution, Issue 1819, available at https://www.hoover.org/research/enter-dragon-chinasbelt-and-road-rising-middle-east (last visited on October 5, 2019). 90 See “A Ham-Fisted Hegemon: Despite its Economic and Military Might, China Lacks the Finesse to Shape Asia to Its Liking”, The Economist, September 24, 2016, p. 50, op. cit.

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involving trade, investment, finance and flows of tourists and students.91 However, whereas “some people see BRI as a grand geopolitical strategy for China’s dominance, in Tim Summers’ view, the BRI is “driven by economic, commercial and development factors”.92 The Sino-apologists that define the BRI in an entirely Chinese humanitarian perspective appears to lose track of the realist logic of international relations that repudiates realism and conceives of state behaviour only in terms of the national interest— the expansion of the state’s socio-economic and political welfare. According to Zheng Bijian (the former Vice Principal of the Chinese Central Party School), during the Boao Forum for Asia in late 2003, China’s peaceful rise was, however, a repudiation of the notion that the “rise of a new power often resulted in drastic changes in global political structures” because the rising power “chose the road of aggression and expansion”.93 Thus, this notion of China’s “peaceful rise” was a soft power idea that was formulated in avowal of China’s commitment to its own internal issues, the improvement of its own people before interfering with world affairs, thus, avoiding unnecessary international confrontation.94 To this end, this idea of a “peaceful rise” came from the new security concept that was promoted by the fourth generation of the Chinese leadership that comprised Zheng Bijian, Wen Jiabao, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, amongst others.95 Hence, China’s peaceful rise was an economic engagement or a strategic weapon that also “harks back to then President Jiang Zemin’s exhortation that China should “go abroad”—an idea that also “drew its inspiration from Deng Xiaoping’s slogan of to get rich is glorious”.96 This was the implicit assumption that led China to go global, including to Africa, “a region that other powers had virtually abandoned”, casting their operations in terms of “win–win” and “mutual beneficial” cooperation97 —a win–win or mutual benefit that is more rhetorical than realistic. Thus, the BRI is both a geopolitical strategy (geostrategic) and an economic, commercial and development enterprise. Because “the Chinese government does not have an official list of countries involved” and also talks “about it as an open initiative” in which “the line is that anyone can join”, the implication is that it is not a geostrategic tool limited to its neighbours in Asia

91 See Helen Gardiner in “Belt and Road: Recreating China’s historic Silk Road and maritime trading routes”, Newsweek partnered content in association with HSBC, p. 02, link available at http://www.gbm.hsbc.com/insights/technology/china-widens-the-silk-road (read more in newsweek.com/davos-worldview). 92 Loc. Cit. 93 See “China’s peaceful rise” in Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China% 27s-peaceful-rise (last visited on Sunday, January 12, 2020). 94 Loc. Cit. 95 Loc. Cit. 96 See Otobo (2020, p. 17). 97 Loc. Cit.

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or Eurasia.98 This is why the BRI is also open to African countries like Nigeria that has indorsed it. The economic and commercial character of the BRI can be found in the debt trap that it has created for many countries in Africa and beyond because of China’s intervention in infrastructural development in African countries. The economic and commercial factors in the BRI are also inherent in the fact that one of the reasons for its development were “the slowdown in China’s economic growth” and the country’s “overcapacity in industries such as steel, aluminum, coal and cement.99 But as Meredith Sumpter, the Asia Director at the Eurasia Group said, “although Beijing has high hopes that new infrastructure construction along BRI will create opportunities for firms [that were] hit hard by China’s economic slowdown, its utility will be limited in addressing China’s overcapacity problem”.100 But there is no doubt that if firms in China’s power generation and rail industries are likely to benefit from the drive to build greater connectivity along the line of BRI,101 the country’s overcapacity can also be tempered or addressed by the exportation of some of this capacity abroad. In terms of the other consequences for the Western world, there is no doubt that the “One Road One Belt” initiative also has “an impact on China’s currency” because the “large funding of infrastructure projects overseas helps to expand [the] circulation of the Renminbi and internationalizes and diversifies potential currency risks”.102 The BRI also has the prospect of spelling “the collapse of U.S. economic dominance through the dollar” because it would lead “to the prevalence of trade in local currencies”; thus, putting “an end to European dominance in international shipping”.103 For these reasons, it can no longer be doubted that China has since used the BRI to become a great or formidable challenge to the West.

5.6 Critique of Strategic BRI and China’s Response Meanwhile, as all of the strategic expansion of China was going on, the Anglo/American world was increasingly marred by mutual suspicion (exemplified in the Headline Goals and Europe’s attempt at unity). Although Brexit is a threat to European unity, the emergence of the BRI and other alliances like the Shangai Cooperation Council (SCC) resonates with what Chuba Okadigbo described as “the highly manipulative and competitive struggle between the big Eastern and Western 98 See Helen Gardiner in “Belt and Road: Recreating China’s historic Silk Road and maritime trading routes”, Newsweek partnered content in association with HSBC, p. 02, link available at http://www.gbm.hsbc.com/insights/technology/china-widens-the-silk-road (read more in newsweek.com/davos-worldview), op. cit. 99 Loc. Cit. 100 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 101 Loc. Cit. 102 Ibid, p. 03, parenthesis mine. 103 See Wambu (2016, p. 98), op. cit.

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powers” of the defunct Cold War era.104 However, although China and Russia still have their differences, but in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) platform, the SCC, and the BRI, “President Xi Jinping has struck up a good working relationship based on common domestic illiberalism and a desire to counter American ideology and diplomacy”.105 And instead of making sure that bridges are built across geopolitical divides, President Trump was exacerbating the divides, even amongst the United States’ own allies. However, President Trump’s failings themselves did not discount the failings of China’s BRI strategic initiative. There are critiques of the BRI that believe that it is just “China’s signature project” that is merely “a sweeping, poorly coordinated branding effort posing as an infrastructure initiative”.106 This judgment, according to this critic, is justified by the fact that the Chinese President Xi Jinping was just a man in a rush to build a legacy, being just in the leadership or Chinese Presidency for only four months in 2013, when he launched the BRI that was billed as the largest international development scheme in history.107 In other words, the BRI was contrived in an inordinate haste. As an epochal development scheme (with a scope and plan that were mindboggling) the BRI was tagged the “New Silk Road Economic Belt” and promised to connect Europe and Asia over land, through a large network of highways, railways, pipelines, trade corridors, and digital infrastructure—a sort of “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” that would build up a string of industrial port cities, tracing the coastline of the South China Sea, Indian Ocean, and Suez Canal all the way to the Mediterranean.108 Unfortunately, the details of the BRI were allegedly hazy because it was not just that neither the belt nor the road were actual routes connecting hub cities, as the Chinese government’s official maps depicted them, the fact is that the project is also strategic because “any country can join the initiative” and membership carries no concrete commitments.109 The foregoing is one of the reasons some observers of the BRI calumniate it as One Belt one Road (OBOR) and label it the Chinese Marshall Plan; and even though others have argued that it will mark the “dawn Eurasia” that would profoundly reshape global politics, the Trump administration in the United States called it the “OBOR debt-trap diplomacy”—a predatory scheme to get poor countries hooked on Chinese loans.110 On the basis of his research plan on four continents, Eyck Freymann of Cambridge (the UK) concluded that contrary to expectations, the BRI was not treated by the Chinese government as “a carefully calibrated or systematic grant strategy” it 104 See

Okadigbo (1985, pp. vi–vii). Joseph S. Nye Jr. (2015); Is American Century Over? …, p. 37, op. cit. 106 See, for instance, Eyck Freymann in “One Belt One Road’ is just a Marketing Campaign, The Atlantic, Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/beneath-the-veil-ofxi-jinpings-legacy-project/596023/ (last visited on Saturday, August 17, 2019). 107 Loc. Cit. 108 Loc. Cit. 109 Loc. Cit. 110 Loc. Cit. 105 See

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administers; and that even though prominent news outlets have variously described it as a $1 trillion plan, a $5 trillion plan, and an $8 trillion plan, there is no authoritative Chinese document that backs up these figures; neither does the government centrally administers it as an economic and investment policy, since many of its “projects are wasteful and most are executed with minimal oversight from Beijing”.111 One of the pointers to the fact that the Chinese government does no centrally administer the BRI—“that China’s central government lacks the ability to keep the BRI strategically tight and coordinated”—is in the pervert that the BRI project has been put in the fact that China’s provinces were reportedly “sending empty freight trains to Europe through one of its key Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects: the China–Europe Railway Express”.112 In the empty freight trains, China’s local governments and companies were, for perverse incentives, using the BRI’s most visible “connectivity” projects to create huge “bubbles” of ostensibly flourishing rail routes that ran tens of thousands of kilometers across the vast landmass of Eurasia.113 Thus, “sub-national stakeholders, as they do in other policy areas, have the incentive to bend the initiative to their own narrowly defined interests and in the process, undermine the overarching strategy, if such a strategy indeed exists at all”.114 Over time, transporting goods between China and Europe through railroads was not a common choice (representing only 4.8% of the total bilateral trade volume and far behind commodities moved by sea that were about 68% while by air was about 19.4%) because such rail routes “were interrupted by the fragmented customs, quarantine and taxation regimes of countries along the way”.115 Meanwhile, rail routes to Europe have relatively low cost (compared to air transport) and more speedy (compared to shipping by sea).116 Under the umbrella of the BRI, the railway ministry (China State Railway Group) began to highlight the growth of Europe-bound voyages as a major development; and the elevation of freight service in political importance created powerful incentives for players to rig the game”.117 As the number of freight trips to and from Europe became a measurable indicator, the provincial and local governments, particularly those sitting at key railway hubs, saw a clear opportunity to boost their visibility under the BRI and to the Chinese leadership.118 The ambitious local governments circumvented the system by inventing all kinds of additional rewards to lure businesses to their train terminals, sometimes even compensating for the extra mileage of truck transportation to bring containers 111 Loc.

Cit. Ma Tianjie, Calvin Quek and Tom Baxter (TJMa blogger) in “Empty trains on the modern Silk Road: when Belt and Road interests don’t align”, Panda Paw Dragon Claw, available at https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2019/08/23/empty-trains-on-the-modern-silk-roadwhen-belt-and-road-interests-dont-align/ (last visited on August 24, 2019). 113 Loc. Cit. 114 Loc. Cit. 115 Loc. Cit. 116 Loc. Cit. 117 Loc. Cit. 118 Loc. Cit. 112 See

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from thousands of kilometers away.119 The local governments also use tax rebate and land use subsidies to sweeten the deal for freight service companies, thus, bending the gravity of trade because they help first-time users to overcome the initial transportation difficulties and cultivate user acceptance of freight rail as a reliable means of transportation.120 However, it was equally argued that the traders would go back to the sea and air as soon as the subsidies disappeared.121 This called into question the key underlying assumption of the BRI that the power and “deep pocket” of the Chinese state can overcome problems that the market could not solve when left alone; and this was a cautionary tale of the limits of state power in China’s peculiar capitalism122 — a capitalism, as already noted above, that was built on an ideological chimera, the amalgamation of capitalism and socialism in such a manner that has produced China’s steroidal state capitalism. China’s steroidal state capitalism is its “planned commodity (market) economy” in which (in terms of meaning and goals) “the state controls the market, and the market guides enterprises”.123 In other words, although the Chinese state withdraws from a direct intervention in enterprises, it is a steroidal state capitalism in the sense that emphasis is placed on the indirect control of the enterprises by the state’s control of the market.124 It was apparently because this state capitalism or planned commodity economy was elucidated at the Thirteenth Party Congress in October 1987125 that informed the basis of the Chinese people’s unquestioning submission to it and, concomitantly, the BRI—a submission that was clearly orchestrated by the country’s one-party system dictatorship; and which made Freymann to, amongst other criticisms of the BRI, conclude that the OBOR is something else entirely: A sweeping, poorly coordinated branding campaign posing as an infrastructure initiative. The campaign dovetails with Xi’s personality cult and expanding political authority inside China. Since so much of China’s economic and political engagement with the outside world now falls under the banner of OBOR, countries, firms, organizations, and individuals that embrace Xi’s favored brand can expect to be duly rewarded with investments, loans, promotions, or subtle forms of political favor. Likewise, those that show insufficient enthusiasm can be easily punished.126

As a project that is calculated to deliver China’s ambition of coordinating trade routes on both rail and sea, spanning 65 countries, Alan Woolston has also submitted that some of its obvious challenges would, amongst others, be fundability (as the 119 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 121 Loc. Cit. 122 Loc. Cit. 123 See Yabuki (1995, p. 43). 124 Loc. Cit. 125 Loc. Cit. 126 See, for instance, Eyck Freymann in “One Belt One Road’ is just a Marketing Campaign, The Atlantic, Available at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/beneath-the-veil-ofxi-jinpings-legacy-project/596023/ (last visited on Saturday, August 17, 2019), op. cit. 120 Loc.

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funds already provided may not fund the entire scheme and may still need public– private funding structures); the technicality of combining existing rail routes with upgraded and new connections across many countries with varied geographies and conditions on a previously unseen scale that will require complex interfaces to be carefully managed; the legal issues of managing cross border operations; the currency for funding as a project may be funded in one currency, built in another and operated in yet more currencies across different parts of the project with revenues also being generated in yet more.127 There is also the legal (choice of law and dispute resolution) risk associated with technical interfaces, the aggregation of the risk into a single point of responsibility by wrapping all the interfaces under one provider, using well-established contract models such as a Build-Operate-Transfer structure.128 In fact, according to Alan Woolston, the legal challenges to the BRI do not stop at the infrastructure because a global project requires a global approach and experience that will require the harmonization of infrastructure and the harmonization of international agendas.129 It was for this problem of harmonization that “in 2016, the EU refused to endorse OBOR because the proposal did not include commitment to social and environmental sustainability and transparency”.130 It was more so when in 2019, China had become the greatest carbon or greenhouse gas emitter in the world, followed by the United States, India, Russia and Japan.131 In fact, according to Alan Woolston, the BRI is not just about putting the building blocks in place as it must require a broader alignment of regulations and legal principles in a wider sense, such that rights held in high regard in some jurisdictions must also be harmonized to remove barriers to progress.132 Although the BRI can thrive in underdeveloped countries like Nigeria where rights and corporate social responsibilities are not taken seriously; the problem of the BRI in the EU was that, unlike the EU, China is an authoritarian state that does not set much stock by such high standards as individual rights. In 2017, a US federal government investigation found that Metallurgical Corporation of China (MCC)—a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned conglomerate that was operating the Imperial Pacific’s new Casino in

127 See

Alan Woolston in “Overcoming the legal challenges to One Belt, One Road”, Global Railway Review, available at https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/article/65484/legal-challe nges-one-belt-one-road/ (last visited on Friday, 23 August 2019). 128 Loc. cit. 129 Loc. Cit. 130 Loc. Cit. 131 See Andriy Blokhin in “The 5 countruies that produce the most Carbon Dioxide (CO ), Investo2 pedia, October 27, 2020, available at https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/092915/5countries-produce-most-carbon-dioxide-co2.asp (last visited on April 25, 2021). 132 See Alan Woolston in “Overcoming the legal challenges to One Belt, One Road”, Global Railway Review, available at https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/article/65484/legal-challe nges-one-belt-one-road/ (last visited on Friday, 23 August 2019), op. cit.

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Saipan Island—had underpaid millions of US dollars to hundreds of construction workers.133 The result was that a few months later, several former MCC employees sued the company for forced labour, human trafficking, and failing to compensate them for the physical injuries they had suffered while working on the Imperial Pacific’s new casino in Saipan project, which resulted in the Chinese company manager spending time in jail for violating federal immigration and employment laws.134 The MCC was very notorious in its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), especially in its recruitment of workers for the Saipan project back in China after the Chinese had paid recruitment fees on false promises; only to get to the Pacific Island and had their passports confiscated and paid below the minimum wage.135 The fact is that rather than watching its companies engage in human rights violations, it can change these companies’ erratic ways and become a leader in the area of setting high standards for projects in its BRI, its “showpiece foreign policy programme that aim to enhance global development and connectivity by investing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure”.136 Although compliance with Western liberalism and other human rights requirements is very difficult because of China’s authoritarian governmental structure,137 the Chinese companies should be required to carry out human rights due diligence in line with international standards.138 In Cambodia, there are also concerns about the BRI because of its inherent military plans, especially how “Beijing’s ‘string of pearls’ threatens US ties”.139 As a matter of fact, because China pours money into Cambodia under the BRI and Cambodia’s host of Chinese military presence, especially as “several

133 See

William Nee in “Time for China to take action against human rights abuses on its Belt and Road projects”, Hong Kong fp, available at https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/11/03/time-chinatake-action-human-rights-abuses-belt-road-projects/ (last visited on November 4, 2019). 134 Loc. Cit. 135 Loc. Cit. 136 Loc. Cit. 137 In addition to China’s Communist Party’s controversial “New normal” that has been referred to in this book, China is reputably Orwellian with its very intrusive government. For instance, although it “strenuously denies human-rights abuses in Xinjiang, justifying its surveillance leviathan as battling the “three evils” of “separatism, terrorism and extremism”, the political situation in China has been described by the United States and the United Nations as a “horrific campaign of repression”, especially when “eight of the top 10 most surveilled cities in the world are in China”—a country that “today is a harbinger of what society looks like when surveillance proliferates unchecked”; see Charlie Campbell in “The fight for our faces: China shows the worrying future of the surveillance state”, Time (New York), December 2- December 9, 2019, pp. 32–35, 2019. 138 See William Nee in “Time for China to take action against human rights abuses on its Belt and Road projects”, Hong Kong fp, available at https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/11/03/time-chinatake-action-human-rights-abuses-belt-road-projects/ (last visited on November 4, 2019), op. cit. 139 See Shaun Turton in “China’s Belt and Road ports raise red flags over military plans”, Nikkei Asian Review, July 23, 2019, available at https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Asia-Insight/China-sBelt-and-Road-ports-raise-red-flags-over-military-plans (last visited on August 13, 2019).

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small Chinese-made vessels comprise most of the Royal Cambodian Navy’s coastal fleet”.140 Although the United States refurbished the base, Cambodia has signed a secret agreement with China that allows Beijing to use the Cambodian Ream Naval base on its southwestern coast for 30 years.141 In fact, it was probably because of its perception of the BRI as a strategic instrument used by China to increase its influence in Asia that India refused to allow China to dominate its backyard and began to spend and build (road and maritime) interconnectivity and bridges of trust with its “Act East Policy” towards its eastern neighbours, including Thailand, Myanmar, Bangladesh and other ASEAN countries.142 For African countries, the unsustainable nature of the loans accruing to them from the BRI was such that it was argued to be infringing “on the host country’s sovereignty, and hurts the environment”.143 Hence, the debt-trap and sovereignty question that the African apologists’ of Beijing always try to disavow was ballyhooed. The United States’ Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, as highlighted by United States’ ShareAmerica, a Bureau of Global Public Affairs within the State Department, stated in June 2019 that “Beijing’s deals come not with strings attached, but with shackles”.144 In fact, the Center for a New American Security, a United States’ research organization, after examining the Chinese investment projects, ranging from a space complex in Argentina, and the Haifa Port expansion in Israel, found a host of concerns, including the loss of control, debt and corruption.145 As a matter of fact, although this can be contested because of the West’s conditionalities, ShareAmerica wrote that “the United States offers development aid that doesn’t leave countries saddled with unsustainable debt, erode national sovereignty or ruin the environment”.146

140 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 142 See Rupakjyoti Boral in India responds to the Belt and Road Initiative with infrastructure push”, Nikkei Asian Review, August 13, 2019, available at https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Indiaresponds-to-Belt-and-Road-Initiative-with-infrastructure-push (last visited on August 13, 2019). 143 See Leigh Hartman (August 2019) in “Countries in Africa reject Belt and Road deals”, ShareAmerica, August 26, 2019, available at https://share-america.gov/countries-in-africa-reject-belt-androad-deals/ (last visited on August 26, 2019). 144 Loc. cit. 145 Loc. Cit. 146 In fact, despite President Trump’s advertised distaste for African countries that he referred to as Shitholes, this Bureau, ShareAmerica, also quoted President Trump while introducing his Africa Strategy in 2018 as having said that “we hope to extend our economic partnerships with countries who are committed to self-reliance and to fostering opportunities for job creation in both Africa and the United States”. The only shortcoming the Chinese have in their African projects is that they seem to bring in the labour while trying to build the projects themselves instead of creating job opportunities for the African unemployed population. In addition, despite President Trump’s denunciation of Africa, he was also reported to have used “Prosper Africa”, a new presidential initiative, to support America’s investment across the African continent in order to improve the business climate and accelerate the growth of Africa’s middle class; see Leigh Hartman (August 2019) in “Countries in Africa reject Belt and Road deals, Loc. Cit. 141 Loc.

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These concern (particularly with the debt problem and sovereignty deficiency) at this moment that every Chinese project in places like Africa is now denominated as an embodiment of the BRI is among the reasons that countries like Sierra Leone and Tanzania both halted their Airport and Sea Port that were contemplated under the BRI.147 Sierra Leone decided in 2018 to counsel the $300 million Mamamah International Airport project that was to be financed with Chinese loans and built by a Chinese firm, arguing that it was “uneconomical to proceed with the construction”— including the fear of cost and commercial viability that the World Bank had earlier expressed.148 It was also out of concern about its sovereignty that the Tanzanian government (that had chosen to expand its port with a US$ 10 billion Chinese loan) indefinitely suspended the project—a project that was to be given to the Chinese to build its Bagamoyo port, a project that would have seen Tanzania handing over a range of lopsided benefits to China.149 The country’s President John Magufuli told some investors in June 2019 that China wants “us to give them a guarantee of 33 years and a lease of 99 years”.150 The Tanzanian’s case would have resembled that of Sri Lanka that heavily borrowed to build a new port, failed to repay the loan and had to give a state-owned Chinese company a 99-year lease in exchange for debt relief—a port that had little business but had then given the Chinese a strategic berth along Sri Lankan’s key shipping lanes.151 For Tanzania, the agreement with China was signed under its former President Jakaya Kikwete in March 2013, but when John Magufuli succeeded Kikwete as President, he described the project as “exploitative and awkward” because its conditions were tough ones “that can only be accepted by mad people”.152 As stated above, Sri Lanka had landed itself in this hard spot alongside Pakistan, Djibouti, the Maldives, Fiji and Malaysia.153 The BRI is also criticized because although “China readily claims the mantle of environmental leadership” because of its pivotal role in the negotiation of the Paris Agreement, which targets to keep global warming below 2 °C, with China pledging 147 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 149 See “Belt and Road … Tanzania rejects “exploitative” US$ 10B port from China”, Kaieteur News, available at https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2019/09/01/chinas-belt-and-road-initia tive-tanzania-rejects-exploitative-us10b-port-from-china/ (last visited on September 2, 2019). 150 See Dandan Li and Miao Han in “China’s Belt and Road is getting a reboot. Here’s why”, Quicktake, Bloomberg News, August 14, 2019, available at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/art icles/2019-08-14/china-s-belt-and-road-is-getting-a-reboot-here-s-why-quicktake (last visited on August 14, 2019). 151 Loc. Cit. 152 See “Belt and Road … Tanzania rejects “exploitative” US$ 10B port from China”, Kaieteur News, available at https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2019/09/01/chinas-belt-and-road-initia tive-tanzania-rejects-exploitative-us10b-port-from-china/ (last visited on September 2, 2019), op. cit. 153 See https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.modus-operandi/ cited in “Belt and Road … Tanzania rejects “exploitative” US$ 10B port from China”, Kaieteur News, available at https://www.kai eteurnewsonline.com/2019/09/01/chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-tanzania-rejects-exploitativeus10b-port-from-china/ (last visited on September 2, 2019). 148 Loc.

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that its carbon emission would peak by 2030 and readily decline thereafter because of what President Xi Jinping called its “ecological civilization” and large investment in renewable energy (like solar and wind projects, hydroelectric dams and electric vehicles), Beijing’s acclaimed ecological civilization and “flagship infrastructure project has a cost”.154 In fact, it has been argued that “the BRI functions as a smokescreen for China to outsource its pollution and environmental degradation to poorer and more vulnerable countries”.155 Many governments and countries, “including Australia, have expressed some concern about the long-term national security implications of the BRI, the environmental impact of China’s vast infrastructure projects”; with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 2017 producing “a report detailing the potential disruption and degradation of important and protected ecosystems and biodiversity conservation corridors as a consequence of BRI projects that could lead to further loss of endangered or vulnerable species and the collapse of particular ecosystems”.156 It has equally been stated that “most Chinese-financed, coal-fired power plants built overseas use lowefficiency, subcritical coal technology, which produces some of the highest emissions of any form of power generation”, thus destroying the environment.157 China’s involvement in coal is reportedly isolating it further from the rest of the world, more so as it is virtually alone in backing Africa’s coal projects.158 In sum, part of the overall criticism against the BRI (as expressed by Afshin Molavi of Hoover Institution) is that countries, especially in the Middle East and, indeed elsewhere in the world) should: … see the plan as a geopolitical ploy by Chinese President XI Jinping to ensnare developing countries into debt traps and thus become beholden to Beijing. They also see it as a way for China to sell its overcapacity of steel, cement and the like, while giving a jolt of stimulus to its state-owned enterprises. What’s more, Chinese financed ports in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean can also become useful stops for an expanding People’s Liberation Army Navy – a concern shared in Delhi and Washington.159

But many of the developing countries were desperate because, despite the revelations about the debt trap and the loss of sovereignty, they see the BRI as an opportunity to upgrade their position in a world where your prosperity is increasingly 154 See

Kumuda Simpson in “Just how green is the Belt and Road?”, the interpreter, available at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/how-green-belt-and-road (last visited on September 9, 2019). 155 Loc. Cit. 156 Loc. Cit. 157 See Sagatom Saha in “China’s Belt and Road plan is destroying the World”, The National Interest, available at https://nationalinterest.org/feature/chinas-belt-and-road-plan-destroying-world-74166 (last visited on August 20, 2019). 158 See Anthony Squazzin, Godfrey Marawanyika and Jing Li in “China is virtually alone in backing Africa’s coal projects, Bloomberg Green, May 6, 2020, available in https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-06/belt-and-road-china-stands-alone-in-bac king-africa-coal-projects (last visited on May 7, 2020). 159 See Afshin Molavi in “Enter the Dragon: China’s Belt And Road Rising in the Middle East”, Hoover Institution, Issue 1819, available at https://www.hoover.org/research/enter-dragon-chinasbelt-and-road-rising-middle-east (last visited on October 5, 2019), op. cit.

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driven by physical connectivity via road, sea, and air to the rest of the world; and this was besides asking this question to those in the West that lecture them on the pitfall of the BRI: “where are your companies and governments when we need your investment?”.160 This was the context in which many Caribbean nations like Guyana, Jamaica, Barbados, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominica, and the Dominican Republic still signed onto the BRI.161 It was in this same desperation that these Caribbean countries signed the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the EU162 —an act that Nigeria never indulged in, the same way it must be cautious about the BRI because of its many consequences to its economic and technological independence. Although the BRI has been a monumental success in terms of more than 130 countries signing deals or expressing interest in it since 2013, with the World Bank estimating that some $575 billion worth of railways, roads, ports and other projects had been or were in the process of being built, the foregoing remain very severe criticisms, including the fact that China is using it to exploit poor countries—luring them into debt traps and Beijing’s own political and even military gains.163 According to Dandan Li and Miao Han in their contribution to Bloomberg News, these criticisms were part of the reasons about seven countries (including Cote d’Ivoire, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Myanmar, Malaysia, the Maldives, and even Kenya that in June 2019, a court halted the construction of a Chinese-backed power plant on Lemu Island that was a major tourist destination and ordered a new environmental impact assessment), some after a popular backlash or change of government (as in Cote d’Ivoire), ran into trouble with the BRI—complaining about corruption, padded contracts, heavy debt loads, environmental damage and a reliance on imported Chinese labour over local hires.164 As a matter of fact, one of the greatest criticisms of the BRI came from Bertil Lintner and Chiang Mai in the Asian Times, who averred that with the BRI, “Beijing draws on flawed history and appropriates modern misnomers to soft sell its Belt and Road Initiative”.165 According to these critics, the BRI is re-opening trade routes around the world that were once known as the “Silk Roads”, a project that is primarily driven by “the

160 Loc.

Cit. “Belt and Road … Tanzania rejects “exploitative” US$ 10B port from China”, Kaieteur News, available at https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2019/09/01/chinas-belt-and-road-initia tive-tanzania-rejects-exploitative-us10b-port-from-china/ (last visited on September 2, 2019), op. cit. 162 See Agwu (2016, pp. 414–416), op. Cit. 163 See Dandan Li and Miao Han in “China’s Belt and Road is getting a reboot. Here’s why”, Quicktake, Bloomberg News, August 14, 2019, available at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/art icles/2019-08-14/china-s-belt-and-road-is-getting-a-reboot-here-s-why-quicktake (last visited on August 14, 2019), op. cit. 164 Loc. Cit. 165 See Bertil Lintner and Chiang Mai in “Busting the myth of China’s New Silk Roads”, Asia Times, available at https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/11/article/busting-the-myth-of-chinas-newsilk-roads/ (last visited on November 28, 2019). 161 See

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state-owned investment arm” that is “overseeing a range of the US$ 1 trillion tradepromoting infrastructure called the “Silk Road Fund”.166 They contend that the BRI “conjures images of desert caravans of silk and other traders crossing from China through Central Asia and on to European markets” as well as “evokes the travels of thirteenth century Venetian adventurer merchant Marco Polo, who was among the first European traders to arrive in China and whose reports on his peregrination exoticized China and its silken wares”.167 However, these critics particularly contests the assumed or “supposed “Southern Silk Road”, a trade route that reputedly originated in China’s southern Sichuan and wound through the present day Myanmar on to the Bay of Bengal and Indian subcontinent”.168 The contention of these critics is that the “Southern Silk Road” is a “historically dubious route, … embellished by a supposed ocean-spanning “Maritime Silk Road” that “reputedly passed through the Indian Ocean during an unspecified period in history”.169 The point made by these critics here is that although “few, if any, historians dispute the fact that there was substantial trade between China and Europe dating back to medieval times … there is no credible historical record of a “Southern Silk Road” connecting China and India, as China’s multiple attempts to penetrate Myanmar miserably failed; nor did China historically engage in trade-promoting maritime ventures after its only ancient explorer of the seas, Zheng He, sailed across the Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century”.170 The argument here is that the “Southern Silk Road” was an illusion because “if there ever was anything resembling a “Southern Silk Road” connecting southern China to the Indian Ocean through Myanmar, it would have been limited to Chinese imports of jade (then as now considered a “heavenly” stone in China), from mines in what is now known as Kachin state”.171 In fact, “few Chinese merchants were known to venture beyond the northerly jade mines and down to Myanmar’s central plains, where there was little of trading interest at the time”.172 Hence, according to the critics, “the name ‘Silk Road’ is in historical reality, a Eurocentric misnomer of recently recent origin”, stuck in the West because it has an—incorrect—impression that it was [China’s] trade with Europe that was most important and partly because it is exotic and interesting”.173 The foregoing incorrect impression is the reason the Silk Road is used in China today, particularly because “it is good marketing for the nation and contributes to tourism”.174 It has equally continued to help “Beijing to soft sell its otherwise controversial BRI concept, now under rising criticism for causing sovereignty-eroding 166 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 168 Loc. Cit. 169 Loc. Cit. 170 Loc. Cit. 171 Loc. Cit Parenthesis mine. 172 Loc. Cit. 173 Loc. Cit. 174 Loc. Cit. 167 Loc.

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“debt-trap” in recipient nations, to a wider global audience”.175 The reality is that the “Silk Road” is not by any account an originally Chinese term”, having “likely first officially used in China in 1989, when Beijing’s Foreign Language Press published a book by [a] Chinese author, Che Muqi, entitled The Silk Road: Past and Present”.176 Unfortunately, Che’s book failed to mention that the term “Silk Roads” or Seidenstrassen (in German language) was first coined by the nineteenth century German geographer, Ferdinand von Richthofen and later amplified by his student at Berlin’s Humboldt University, Sven Hedin (a Swedish explorer) who began using the term in his studies.177 Thus, the “Silk Roads” were considered by an Australian-born archeologist (Warwick Ball) as “a myth of modern academic exercise” that was invented by von Richthofen and Hedin for reasons that were not very clear; more so because “a variety of goods were traded between China and Europe at the time”; and “in the ancient Roman Empire, silk was widely frowned upon because it was considered an inappropriate luxury item due to its sexually suggestive smooth and glitzy surface”; and especially because “the spice trade between India and Arab countries was far more important for the economies of both the Roman Empire and medieval Europe than the silk trade with China”.178 Hence, “veritable historical facts do not always factor into Beijing’s BRIrelated propaganda, as state spinmeisters are now busy inventing various “New Silk Roads”—like the “Southern Silk Road”, the “Maritime Silk Roads” and even the new plan that is afoot to forge an “Ice Silk Road” connecting China with northern Russian ports in the Arctic Ocean all the way to Europe”.179 Although China has not yet claimed any historical basis for its “Ice Silk Road” (as such a claim would be less plausible than its fanciful Silk Roads), the Arctic project foresees Chinese and Russian companies seeking cooperation on oil and gas exploration in the opening maritime area.180 The “Silk Road” is, therefore, all about an historical ‘revisionism’ that is deemed to “pave the way for the BRI’s modern China-centric vision of a new global trade order” even though the resistance against it (by the US, EU, India and Japan, amongst others contesting Beijing’s rising hegemony) is growing by the day as China “is re-writing history” and reaching “outside of its borders in unprecedented ways” that serve “political purposes” that are “as much geo-strategic as it is commercial”.181 These criticisms, including the worries at home about the cost, all “led China into something of a rethink” as it tried “to increase transparency, improve project

175 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 177 Loc. Cit. 178 Loc. Cit. 179 Loc. Cit. 180 Loc. Cit. 181 Loc. Cit. 176 Loc.

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quality and bring in deep-pocketed partners who can share the risk”.182 Thus, “at a high-profile forum in April 2019, Xi signaled that the Chinese government would exert more control over BRI projects and tighten oversight”.183 The consequence was that rather than boasting about the BRI’s growth as he did at the previous forum in 2017, he focused on the steps China would take to clean up its image, urging “high quality” and “greener” projects and vowing “zero tolerance” for corruption.184 China’s state-owned enterprises that were by far the biggest investors in BRI projects were told to beef-up auditing and increase supervision for their overseas units and personnel.185 In addition, the Chinese government also intensified efforts at “drafting rules for use of the BRI label to try to better protect its reputation” while “the Communist Party’s propaganda machine” “turned down the volume” of its aggressive propaganda on the BRI.186 As a result of these criticisms, particularly the issue of the debt exposure, according to Dandan Li and Miao Han, China “withdrew some $4.9 billion in new loans for a major rail project it had been building in eastern Africa”—a line that was supposed to run from the Kenyan port city of Mombasa to Uganda and beyond, thereby executing only the stretch from the coast to Nairobi.187 In fact, the Export Import Bank of China had to back out of providing financing for a giant solar project because of Zimbabwean government’s legacy in debts.188 Again, despite these criticisms, the BRI is certainly China’s strategic plan for the optimization of its capacity as an emerging power determined to stand up to the United States (especially as an economic power) despite all the risk of a Thucydides trap. In fact, the BRI has been termed to be “a challenge to the Washington Consensus, which had hitherto sought to shape the world economy on the model of development championed by the United States, Europe and Japan”.189 The BRI has begun to assume such a momentum that despite the fact that “the Forum for China and Africa Cooperation had already been in operation for more than a decade before Xi Jinping announced [the] BRI in 2013”, many African countries began signing onto it190 ; and many of the African countries relations with China are beginning to be reduced to a BRI fact. 182 See

Dandan Li and Miao Han in “China’s Belt and Road is getting a reboot. Here’s why”, Quicktake, Bloomberg News, August 14, 2019, available at https://www.bloomberg.com/news/art icles/2019-08-14/china-s-belt-and-road-is-getting-a-reboot-here-s-why-quicktake (last visited on August 14, 2019), op. cit. 183 Loc. Cit. 184 Loc. Cit. 185 Loc. Cit. 186 Loc. Cit. 187 Loc. Cit. 188 Loc. Cit. 189 See Alaba Ogunsanwo in “Belt and Road Initiative in Africa: Lessons from Case Studies of Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti”, paper at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA)’s “One-Day Conference on the Belt and Road Initiative and Africa: Problems and Prospects”, NIIA, Lagos, Thursday, August 15th 2019, p. 15 (unpublished). 190 Ibid, pp. 15–16.

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African countries’ mass endorsement of the BRI has proceeded frenetically despite the fact that intra-regional trade is low, even though the AfCFTA was created to attune for this intra-regional trade deficiency.191 But despite China’s thrust with the BRI, the fact remains that the United States is not resting on its oars, particularly with President Trump’s suspected use of the trade war to allegedly scuttle it.192 But even with the survival of the BRI as China’s economic and strategic international relations tools with particularly the developing countries, doubts still persist that it is totally an avuncular instrument that could redeem Africa in particular from its economic misery. For instance, despite the BRI opening infrastructural and vertical trading routes, and Nigeria’s Bilateral Currency Swap Agreement (BCSA) with China readily making the Renminbi (Yuan) available to the Nigerian banks to be freely traded (amongst other numerous advantages), these Chinese instruments have been deemed to be “opening up the economy to the risk of overdependence on foreign products, which the industrial sector could have produced domestically”.193 In any case, with particular reference to the currency swap: … concerns remain … as to the potency of the Currency Swap Agreement to fully address the challenge of dollar demand by importers; since imports from China account for only 20 percent of Nigeria’s annual total imports. The current annual import bill of Nigerian enterprises moving goods into the country from China reportedly stands at NGN 1.7 Trillion, meaning that the swap deal amount of NGN 720 billion can only take care of about 15 percent of Nigeria’s annual total imports from China. The remaining 85 percent will definitely still require US dollars.194

The implication of the foregoing is that for Nigeria, China (either with the BRI or the currency swap) can never subvert or dethrone the use of the dollar. The dollar is still dominant in the international socio-economic and political system. It has a vise-like grip on the global economy, so much so that irrespective of China and other emerging economies’ sub-imperialist tendencies, the dollar is still supreme.195 So, despite the BRI and its geostrategic intents, the overweening character of the West, especially the United States, is still persistent; not even with the scare of President Donald Trump’s brinkmanship, as will be seen immediately below. Another important point to note here is that China has virtually used its FOCAC and the BRI to buy up Africa in such a way that many views coming out of the continent now sound as if they were dished from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. A famous African proverb had it that “until the lion learns to speak, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter”—meaning that “the only way to change the African narrative is for Africans themselves to write on it”.196 But tragically at the moment, and irrespective of the agreements that China use to hijack African 191 Ibid,

p. 21. p. 15. 193 See Anaeto (2019, p. 46). 194 Loc. Cit. 195 See Agwu (2016, pp. 757–799), op. Cit. 196 See Ahmed Ismail in “And then came ARISE TV”, New African, March 2013, p. 80. 192 Ibid,

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sovereignty over the projects it funded with its loans, and with many African media and opinion wielders, the lion can now speak; but for China, the lion is telling the tale of the hunter as some African Civil Society organizations and scholars are now lauding the success of China’s infrastructural transformation of Africa, especially within the context of the BRI and FOCAC, the latter of which has been characterized as “a winner”.197

5.7 President Trump’s Threat to the Dollar It has since become obvious that President Trump’s kinetic foreign policy has caused tremendous disruptions to the geopolitical landscape that the United States had built since the end of the Second World War; a geopolitical landscape that the United States started using in earnest after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in which the dollar became increasingly weaponized as it continued to serve as the only currency used for global economic transactions.198 In fact: So dollar-centric is global commerce that other countries have long found it difficult to trade, even among themselves, without recourse to American currency, banks and payments infrastructure. At least, half of all trade invoices are in dollars. A majority of cross-border transactions are ultimately cleared through New York.199

In his disruptions, President Trump, in what John Walcott called “the risks of Trump’s dollar-driven diplomacy”,200 has used sanctions and tariffs in international trade as his main “weapons of mass disruption”—and these consisted of his threatened tariffs against Mexico that was to breach the spirit of the USMCA (the socalled United States, Mexico and Canada trade deal that was signed six months earlier in June 2019); his tariffs threat against Germany; his cancelling of preferential trading rules with India; his ratcheting up of tariffs against China—with Beijing’s tech giant (Huawei) severed from American suppliers; and his tightening of the embargo against Iran.201 The Iranian sanctions after the killing of General Qaseem Soleimani (with Iran’s retaliation on American bases in Iraq) heaped “more pain on an economy already pummeled by economic missiles aimed at banks, oil production and shipping”.202 197 See

Lakemfa (2020a, p. 17).

198 See “Spooked by sanctions: America has weaponized the dollar. In the rich and emerging world,

the search is on for an alternative”, The Economist, January 18–24th 2020, p. 12. Cit. 200 See John Walcott in “The risks of Trump’s dollar-driven diplomacy”, Time (New York), June 24, 2019, p. 6, op. cit. 201 See “Weapons of mass disruption: America is aggressively deploying a new economic arsenal to assert its power. That is counterproductive–and dangerous”, The Economist, June 8–14th 2019, p. 13, op. cit. 202 See “Spooked by sanctions: America has weaponized the dollar. In the rich and emerging world, the search is on for an alternative”, The Economist, January 18–24th 2020, p. 12, op. cit. 199 Loc.

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But the trump administration had indiscriminately turned its financial might not only on its Iranian enemy and its rival in China, Russia and a host of other countries203 ; the sanctions and tariffs have also included American allies in the EU and Turkey.204 When Iran accused the European governments of scarifying the troubled 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement (selling out the remnants of the JCPOA) to avoid trade reprisals from the “bully” President Trump that had spend time trying to scupper the deal; but President Trump’s reaction to any attempt by the EU to indulge Iran (or back the nuclear deal) was to threaten to impose a 25 percent tariff on imports of European cars.205 Since the United States pulled out of the deal in 2018, the EU had sought to allow European businesses to continue to trade with Iran without incurring huge US penalties and even triggered a dispute mechanism established under the deal, which reportedly “allows a party to claim significant non-compliance by another party before a joint commission, with appeals possible to an advisory board and ultimately to the UN Security Council”.206 President Trump’s orchestrated tension with Iran remained very explosive since the Russian President Putin—even when Iran shot down an unmanned US aircraft (drone) in the Persian Gulf207 —warned the United States against using force on Iran, reiterating that such a forcible measure would trigger a “catastrophe”.208 Yet, the US partially used force against Iran with the killing of General Qassem Soleimani, forcing Iran to call off the JCPOA and even increased its enrichment of uranium209 ostensibly in search of the nuclear weapon. Iran’s search for the nuclear weapon itself was an exercise in futility because the onset of COVID-19, “a virus that is not as big as a spec that human eyes can see or detect”, a microscopic organism that had chased humanity out of the streets and forced even the most democratic and liberal societies to adopt extra-ordinary dictatorial measures to restrict international travels and lockdown towns and cities without adherence to the freedom of movement, had demonstrated the futility of the nuclear or biological weapons.210 Despite many countries’ enormous physical weapons, the “armies across the world … temporarily [put] down their guns and [played] a frontline role in the war against

203 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 205 See “US threatens tariffs on Europeans unless Iran nuke deal scrapped”, The Times of Israel, available at https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-threatens-tariffs-on-europeans-unless-nuke-deal-scr apped/ (last visited on January 17, 2020). 206 Loc. Cit. 207 See Deb Riechmann in “Trump Suggests Iran’s Shooting Down of Drone Was an Accident”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trump-suggests-irans-shooting-down-180 544473.html (last visited on Friday, June 21, 2019). 208 See “Putin open for talks with Trump, warns against using force in Iran”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, June 21, 2019, p. 33. 209 See Sara Mazioumsaki, James Frater and Jack Guy in “Iran is enriching more uranium now than before the nuclear deal, Rouhani says”, CNN.com, available at https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/16/ middleeast/rouhani-iran-uranium-enrichment-intl/index.html (last visited on January 17, 2020). 210 See Lakemfa (2020b, p. 32). 204 Loc.

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the [corona] virus”—patrolling streets, running hospitals and cancelling drills.211 In Nigeria, being incapable of confronting the coronavirus in a battlefield the way they confronted the Boko Haram, all that the military could do was to enforce President Buhari’s lockdown order on Abuja, Lagos and Ogun State.212 So, because physical weapons could not confront or defeat COVID-19 for Iran too, the situation demonstrated the futility of these weapons and the fact that, in the light of globalization, “any nation that thinks it can unleash toxins, bacteria, viruses, insects and fungi on its enemy and be immune is mistaken”.213 The defencelessness of Iran before COVID19 despite its possession of physical armaments was such that it pleaded with the United States to ease the sanctions against it so that it could acquire the capacity to fight the virus.214 Although President Trump declined to ease the sanctions, he had taken the United States’ capacity for sanctions and the use of tariffs “to a new level of intensity, using sanctions as his main foreign-policy tool and even targeting allies with “secondary” sanctions that punish anyone who trades with states in America’s bad books”.215 But in President Trump’s foreign policy macho conduct, the United States was deploying new tactics, especially the “poker-style brinkmanship” that exploited “its role as the nerve center of the global economy to block the free flow of goods, data, ideas and money across borders”.216 This is a “pumped-up vision of a twenty-first century superpower” that was heavily criticized by The Economist (an icon of neoliberalism), meaning that although it may be seductive to President Trump and some members of his administration, it was sparking crisis in the neo-liberal community; more so because it was eroding America’s soft power, its most valuable asset and legitimacy.217 The American financial muscle-flexing (through the use of sanctions, tariffs and ban on blacklisted firms) has, for instance,” not escaped the attention of 211 See

“Fighting the pandemic: Armies are mobilising against the cononavirus”, economist.com, March 23rd 2020, available at https://www.economist.com/international/2020/03/23/armiesare-mobilising-against-the-coronavirus?utm-campaign=the-economist-today&utm (last visited on Tuesday, March 31, 2020). Parantheses mine. 212 See “Buhari orders total lockdown of Lagos, Ogun and Abuja”, Channels Television, Sunday, March 29, 2020, available at https://www.channelstv.com/2020/03/29/breaking-buhari-imposescurfew-in-lagos-ogun-and-abuja/ (last visited on Monday, March 30, 2020); see also Godsgift Onyedinefu in “Coronavirus: Nigerian Military to enforce Buhari’s lockdown order as military officer tests positive to Coronavirus”, BusinessDay (Lagos), March 30, 2020, available at https://businessday.ng/news/article/coronavirus-nigerian-military-to-enforce-buharis-lockdownorder/ (last visited on Tuesday, March 31, 2020). 213 See Lakemfa (2020b, p. 32), op. cit. 214 See Kirsten Donovan, James Drummond and Frances Kerry (editing) in “US sanctions ‘severely hamper’ Iran coronovirus fight, Rouhani says”, Reuters, available at https://www.reuters.com/art icle/us-health-coronavirus-iran-idUSKBN2110HL (last visited on March 27, 2020). 215 See “Spooked by sanctions: America has weaponized the dollar. In the rich and emerging world, the search is on for an alternative”, The Economist, January 18–24th 2020, p. 12, op. cit. 216 See “Weapons of mass disruption: America is aggressively deploying a new economic arsenal to assert its power. That is counterproductive–and dangerous”, The Economist, June 8–14th 2019, p. 13, op. cit. 217 Loc. Cit.

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other countries, which have been intensifying efforts to avoid the global dollar-based financial plumbing”.218 In its critic of President Trump’s macho attitude, The Economist argued that “you might think that America’s clout comes from its 11 aircraft-carriers, 6,500 nuclear warheads or its anchor role in the IMF”.219 The fact is that aircraft-carriers and nuclear warheads aforementioned are clearly the product of hard power, which does not explain the fact that soft power “is also the central node in the network that underpins globalization”—the “mesh of firms, ideas and standards reflects and magnifies American prowess”; the soft power that includes goods traded through supply chains that are mainly intangible.220 It is in this context of soft power that the American dollar is supreme. This—in addition to the other reason of being the Standard Drawing Right (SDR), which informs the dollar’s ascendancy221 —is because: America controls or hosts over 50% of the world’s cross-border bandwidth, venture capital, phone-operating systems, top universities and fund-management assets. Some 88% of currency trades use greenbacks. Across the planet, it is normal to use a Visa card, invoice exports in dollars, sleep beside a device with a Qualcomm chip, watch Netflix and work for a firm that BlackRock invests in.222

It is obvious from the foregoing that the United States is transcendent; and that globalization and technology have made it more powerful, even when its share of the world’s GDP had fallen from 38% in 1969 to 24% as at this 2019—and even when China cannot yet compete, despite its economy approaching America’s in size.223 But despite this inherent hegemony of the dollars, The Economist argued that “foreigners accept all this because, on balance, it makes them better off”; more so because even though “they may not set the rules of the game, but they get access to American markets and fair treatment alongside American firms”.224 Unfortunately, President Trump and his ideological retainers, acolytes and advisers were not satisfied with this hegemony as they were still “convinced that the world order is rigged against America, pointing to its rust belt and its trade deficit” in illustration.225 But instead of mimicking or being tutored or instructed by its relatively more restrained trade tactics with the Japanese in the 1980s, President Trump and his team embarked upon how a redefined “economic nationalism works”.226 In other words; 218 See “Spooked by sanctions: America has weaponized the dollar. In the rich and emerging world,

the search is on for an alternative”, The Economist, January 18–24th 2020, p. 12, op. cit. “Weapons of mass disruption: America is aggressively deploying a new economic arsenal to assert its power. That is counterproductive–and dangerous”, The Economist, June 8–14th 2019, p. 13, op. cit. 220 Loc. Cit. 221 See Agwu (2016, pp. 48, 148–149), op. cit; see also Willett et al. (2003, p. 29). 222 See “Weapons of mass disruption: America is aggressively deploying a new economic arsenal to assert its power. That is counterproductive–and dangerous”, The Economist, June 8–14th 2019, p. 13, op. cit. 223 Loc. Cit. 224 Loc. Cit. 225 Loc. Cit. 226 Loc. Cit. 219 See

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first, “instead of using tariffs as a tool to extract specific economic concessions, they are being continuously deployed to create a climate of instability with America’s trading partners”; like in the case of the threatened new tariffs against Mexico with respect to migrants crossing the Rio Grande river—a migrant situation that had nothing to do with trade.227 Secondly, the Trump administration extended this activity beyond physical goods and began to weaponize America’s network—with outright enemies like Iran and Venezuela facing tighter sanctions.228 According to Annelle Sheline (of the Middle East programme at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft), the United States’ economic sanctions against Iran had become maximum pressure campaigns that “succeeded in squeezing Iran’s economy”, but it had utterly proved ineffective or “utterly failed in making Iran change its policies in the direction Washington wants”.229 After the killing of the Iranian General Soleimani and Iran’s response with an Iranian missile attacks on US forces in Iraq, President Trump declared at a news conference that the US would “immediately impose additional punishing economic sanctions”, the goal of which was “to deprive Tehran of the capacity to fund “destabilizing” activities and force its leaders back into nuclear discussions.230 Thus, and in respect of the United States’ cumulative sanctions, the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declared “on the last day of 2019 … “that successive rounds of United States sanctions on Iran cost the Islamic Republic $100bn in oil revenue and another $100bn of investment money”; and for this “economic war”, President Rouhani “blamed the dearth of vital foreign exchange currency on [the] punitive US financial measures on Iran’s oil and banking sectors”.231 It was for these sanctions that “Iran experienced the third-largest contraction of any national economy in the world during 2019, something very close to 10 percent”.232 And in addition, Iran had run deficits for years, and its “government’s fiscal gap widened exponentially as sanctions sent oil sales plummeting 90 percent”.233 But despite the United States’ sanctions, the “animosity between the longtime foes” deepened as Iran continued in many regional attacks, continued spending on its military, security and intelligence that it prioritizes over the wellbeing of the ordinary people, vowed not to renegotiate the JCPAO (the nuclear deal) and even had to scrap the limit in the deal it had accepted from the rest of the world powers, in other words, vowing to continue on its nuclear programme.234 The implication of the foregoing is that Iran was actually hit by the sanctions, leading to a bigger division in 227 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 229 See Ben Piven in “Soleimani and the strategic impact of US sanctions on Iran”, Aljazeera, aavailable at https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/soleimani-strategic-impact-sanctions-iran-200107193 046117.html (last visited on January 10, 2020). 230 Loc. Cit. 231 Loc. Cit. 232 Loc. Cit. 233 Loc. Cit. 234 Loc. Cit. 228 Loc.

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its society and mass anti-regime protests, the Tehran and Washington were still likely to “return to the low-intensity tit-for-tat of the pre-Soleimani killing era”, determined to potentially seek a longer pause from the US sanctions by getting “some economic relief from non-US powers”.235 But the rest of the world had even began to face a new regime of tech and financial sanctions—with an executive order that prohibited transactions in semiconductors and software made by foreign adversaries, and a law passed in 2018 (known as FIRRMA policies foreign investment into Silicon Valley), which blacklisted every defaulting firm in such a manner that banks would refuse to deal with it by cutting it off from the dollar payments system.236 This kind of blacklisting was the sort of punishment meted out at war times—being “the legal techniques” that were developed and “used for surveillance” in the payments against haunted terrorist groups like the al-Qaeda.237 This crippling punishment has been meted against firms like ZTE and Rusal, with a “national emergency” declared against the Huawei; so much so that global companies that have the Chinese as clients were sure they would be blacklisted.238 This is the power of American sanctions. In other words, the impact of the supremacy of the dollar is such that if the United States arbitrarily declares a sanction against any country, the whole world is invariably pulled into such a sanction. Thus, “America’s power ultimately stems from its ability to prohibit firms from using its financial system, in turn leaving them isolated and unable to interact with most counterparties”.239 It is in this context that the United States supremacy and even transcendence against international law is obvious because its unilateral domestic act (an act not undertaken by the United Nations Security Council) supervenes and exudes international consequences. But President Trump’s weaponization of America’s economic networks has begun to squander America’s goodwill; so much so that although he “is right that America’s [economic] network gives it vast power” that will take decades and a costly fortune to replace, his abuse of this power is becoming so quixotic and ruinous that America now faces the risk of losing it.240 At the moment under President Trump, there is no doubt that the America’s economic network is labouring under threat.241 The point is that “the moves to explore alternatives to dollar-dependence in the face of [Trump’s] bellicosity are varied” as Russia, for instance, “has substantially de-dollarized its trade flows, foreign debt and 235 Loc.

Cit. “Weapons of mass disruption: America is aggressively deploying a new economic arsenal to assert its power. That is counterproductive–and dangerous”, The Economist, June 8–14th 2019, p. 13, op. cit. 237 Loc. Cit. 238 Loc. Cit. 239 See “Spooked by sanctions: America has weaponized the dollar. In the rich and emerging world, the search is on for an alternative”, The Economist, January 18–24th 2020, p. 12, op. cit. 240 See “Weapons of mass disruption: America is aggressively deploying a new economic arsenal to assert its power. That is counterproductive–and dangerous”, The Economist, June 8–14th 2019, p. 13, op. cit. 241 Loc. Cit. 236 See

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bank assets” while “its energy giants have started switching contracts to roubles”.242 In fact, “Russia, China, India and others are discussing—and signing—bilateral or wider deals to settle trade in national currencies as well as “also exploring alternatives to SWIFT, the dominant payments-messaging network, over which America holds sway”.243 Even some America’s own allies now worry that any trade deal with the United States can be abruptly scuppered with a Presidential tweet after it had been signed.244 In fact, “there are hints of mutiny” amongst “America’s 35 European and Asian military allies”, of which “only three have so far agreed to ban Huawei” in the Chinese firm’s exculpation from America’s trade embrace by the Trump administration.245 The consequence of the foregoing is that there is emerging, a new shift against the dollar. As Fareed Zakaria observed in the Washington Post, that the dollar will not always be king as other countries want to topple it.246 As a matter of fact, “Europe, meanwhile, has built Instex, a clearing-house that could allow its firms to trade with Iran while bypassing America’s financial cops”.247 This was particularly because the Foreign Minister of Germany, “one of the United States’ closest allies [in coordination with Britain and France, both of which helped to create the new payment system called INSTEX], went to Tehran and announced that a European payment system, designed as an alternative to the dollar-based one, would soon be ready”.248 Although the dollar’s dominance is global and hard to replace by the INSTEX which had probably failed or proved to be inadequate because its effort to bypass American sanctions against Iran had fizzled,249 but the INSTEX was a warning sign—“the canary in the coal mine”.250 Germany, France and Britain were members of the Iran nuclear deal that the Trump administration unilaterally reneged from 242 See “Spooked by sanctions: America has weaponized the dollar. In the rich and emerging world,

the search is on for an alternative”, The Economist, January 18–24th 2020, p. 12, op. cit. Cit. 244 See “Weapons of mass disruption: America is aggressively deploying a new economic arsenal to assert its power. That is counterproductive–and dangerous”, The Economist, June 8–14th 2019, p. 13, op. cit. 245 Loc. Cit. 246 See “The dollar won’t always be king of currency. Other countries want to topple it”, Washington Post, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-closest-allies-are-workinghard-to-find-ways-to-undermine-the-us-dollar/2019/06/13/c5c2cf80-8e1c-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36 d4e-story.html (last visited on June 15, 2019). 247 See “Spooked by sanctions: America has weaponized the dollar. In the rich and emerging world, the search is on for an alternative”, The Economist, January 18–24th 2020, p. 12, op. cit. 248 See “The dollar won’t always be king of currency. Other countries want to topple it”, Washington Post, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-closest-allies-are-workinghard-to-find-ways-to-undermine-the-us-dollar/2019/06/13/c5c2cf80-8e1c-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36 d4e-story.html (last visited on June 15, 2019), op. cit. 249 See “American and Iran; playing with fire: Backed into a corner, Iran is lashing out. To what end?”. The Economist, June 22–28th 2019, p. 40. 250 See “The dollar won’t always be king of currency. Other countries want to topple it”, Washington Post, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-closest-allies-are-workinghard-to-find-ways-to-undermine-the-us-dollar/2019/06/13/c5c2cf80-8e1c-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36 d4e-story.html (last visited on June 15, 2019), op. cit. 243 Loc.

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and re-imposed sanctions, using the dollar power to prevent other countries from doing business with Iran because most international transactions use the dollar for convenience.251 Apart from Europe experimenting with building a new payments system with the INSTEX to get round the Iran sanctions,252 the rise of China has also constituted a serious challenge to the dollar because the Chinese are leading an effort to build a rival global infrastructural framework—creating its own courts to adjudicate commercial disputes with foreigners, and now even beginning its blacklist of foreign firms.253 The Yuan status as a Special Drawing Right (SDR) began since November 30, 2015, when China’s currency, the Yuan, was admitted by the West’s IMF into its basket of reserve currencies, now joining the British pound, the US dollar, the Euro and the Japanese Yen in that regard.254 In addition to using the BRI to strengthen the Yuan as an SDR, China is also using the BRICS nations—a global power because of the combination of its members’ collective share of the global GDP, its share in global investment, savings, trade, foreign exchange and manufacturing255 —as a global institutional infrastructure that is an alternative to the American-led or dominated IMF in order to accelerate the Yuan’s status in relations to the dollar. In fact, this is, in addition, to the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)256 and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that—apart from military and other security concerns, is now focused on the social development of its members257 — “is a good venue for designing a good banking system which is independent from international banking systems”258 ; and which can help in boosting the power of the Yuan. And there is also the BRICS states that have since tried to attenuate the power of the United States and the whole West by building the New Development Bank as an alternative to the IMF and the World Bank.259 Hence, Fareed Zakaria’s argument that the Trump administration is only acting to achieve short-term gains and thereby “putting at risk the structure of the international system in which U.S. power is so deeply embedded—a bad trade and one for which all Americans will pay the price in decades to come”.260 251 Loc.

Cit. “Weapons of mass disruption: America is aggressively deploying a new economic arsenal to assert its power. That is counterproductive–and dangerous”, The Economist, June 8–14th 2019, p. 13, op. cit. 253 Loc. Cit. 254 See Agwu (2016, p. 1060), op. cit. 255 Ibid, pp. 775–776. 256 Ibid, pp. 1059–1060. 257 See “Shanghai Cooperation Organization” in Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Shanghai-Cooperation-Organization (last visited on Sunday, June 23, 2019). 258 Loc. Cit. 259 See Agwu (2016, pp. 147–148), 1059, op. cit. 260 See The dollar won’t always be king of currency. Other countries want to topple it”, Washington Post, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/americas-closest-allies-are-workinghard-to-find-ways-to-undermine-the-us-dollar/2019/06/13/c5c2cf80-8e1c-11e9-b08e-cfd89bd36 d4e-story.html (last visited on June 15, 2019), op. cit. 252 See

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The “workarounds” the dollar—that is, the problems with the dollar at the moment is accentuated “by the technological revolution sweeping through finance”; for “the central bankers—from Europe to China—are stepping up work on public digital currencies” that “could help bring down the cost of electronic cross-border payments”, which are still relatively high.261 This is a kind of “cryptobaskets of reserve currencies”.262 Even Iran began ramping up its strategy of using cryptocurrencies (with President Hassan Rouhani declaring since July 2018 his intention of launching a national crypto-currency) to get around the United States expanding sanctions.263 Crypto-currencies like bitcoin have been increasingly used by the Iranian government and the public (launched a month after Rouhani’s declaration in 2018 and affiliated to the Iranian Central Bank and backed by the Iranian national currency— the rial) to evade legal barriers; a situation that led to an attempted crackdown on bitcoin by the international regulators, even though “the crypto-currency industry has been proving more nimble than the enforcers of sanctions”.264 Although it certainly would be overdoing the idea to say that these initiatives to bypass the dollar pose an immediate threat, particularly because “the dollar’s share is holding up on most of these measures (though in forex reserves it has slipped from around 70% to 60% since 2000), but the dollar continues to enjoy strong network effects as the most complex bits of global finance, including a huge mess of the derivatives or alternatives against the dollar are generally dollar-based.265 The dominance of the dollar explains why the INSTEX is yet to be used and the SWIFT alternative is yet to gain traction.266 Fortunately for the dollar, at least for this moment, “the euro is hobbled by structural and governance problems (not least the lack of a proper banking or market union in the euro zone, and a dearth—relative to America—of risk-free financial assets like the German bunds as blockchains267 alone cannot overcome such flaws); the Yuan too has had false dawns (because the tightening of capital controls after a financial crash in 2015 put paid to the brash predictions that it would overtake the dollar by the early 2020s).268

261 See “Spooked by sanctions: America has weaponized the dollar. In the rich and emerging world,

the search is on for an alternative”, The Economist, January 18–24th 2020, p. 12, op. cit. cit. 263 See Tanvi Ratna in “Iran has a Bitcoin strategy to beat Trump”, in Foreignpolicy.com, available at https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/24/iran-bitcoin-strategy-cryptocurrency-blockchain-san ctions/ (last visited on Sunday, January 26, 2020). 264 Loc. Cit. 265 See “Spooked by sanctions: America has weaponized the dollar. In the rich and emerging world, the search is on for an alternative”, The Economist, January 18–24th 2020, pp. 12–13, op. cit. 266 Ibid, p. 13. 267 A blockchain is “a system in which recorded transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are maintained across several computers that are linked in a peer-to-peer network”, see “Blockchain” in Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain (Last visited on Sunday, January 26, 2020). 268 See “Spooked by sanctions: America has weaponized the dollar. In the rich and emerging world, the search is on for an alternative”, The Economist, January 18–24th 2020, p. 13, op. cit. 262 Loc.

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Despite all these, President Trump’s upping of the financial pressure will have the following three repercussions: (a) the continued escalation of sanctions by President Trump could cause a financial shock; (b) the attendant politicization of the hegemony of the dollar (the American financial hegemony) could affect its reliability in the long-term (that is, its role as a lender of last resort to offshore dollar-based financial markets and banks); and (c) the transitions in the global monetary order are inherently unpredictable (as it was believed by some economists that the Depression was partly caused by the absence of a hegemon to steady the world economy.269 So, in a world in which the dollar is tested from several sides, the situation is strictly very unpredictable for this dominant US currency.270

5.8 ‘The Dire Strait of Hormuz’ Of course, it was not just the United States that President Trump was serving as an albatross to in his illusion/delusion of making America great again; it was, indeed, the entire global economic order that he was destabilizing—an economic system that, despite its many short-comings, is still maintaining a semblance of order that his carrying the world along and deterring hiccups that could cause major brutal catastrophes. The above phrase—‘the dire Strait of Hormuz’—is a formulation by The Economist in its attempt to describe the extent that President Trump had used his brinkmanship to turn the Hormuz landscape ( an arena “through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes”271 ) into a zone of instability that was ruinous to international trade. The trade hiccups in the Strait of Hormuz were orchestrated by President Trump’s arbitrary repudiation of the Iran deal agreement; in addition to his re-imposition of sanctions against Tehran. One of the cruelest President Trump’s sanctions—imposed on Monday, June 24, 2019—was described by the administration as “hard-hitting”,272 having been targeted on the Iranian Supreme Leader himself (Ayatollah Khamenei) as well as all those closely and officially affiliated with him (like Foreign Minister Javad Zarif); thus, blocking their access to any financial assets under the United States’ jurisdiction—including their access to the most prominent global SDR—the dollar.273 269 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 271 See “American and Iran; playing with fire: Backed into a corner, Iran is lashing out. To what end?”, The Economist, June 22–28th 2019, p. 40, op. cit. 272 See Joseph A. Wulfsohn in “CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: ‘Thousands’ could die because of Trump’s sanctions on Iran”, Fox News, available at https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/cnns-fareedzakaria-thousands-could-die-because-of-trumps-sanctions-on-iran (last visited on Tuesday, June 25, 2019). 273 See “Trump imposes new sanctions on Iran, targets supreme leader”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 25, 2019, p. 37; see also “Trump imposes new sanctions on Iran’s leaders”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, June 26, 2019, p. 35. 270 Loc.

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It was President Trump that unilaterally abrogated the Iran nuclear deal, but he reportedly accused Tehran of aggressions—ostensibly from the oil tankers attacks and the downing of the Drone.274 Concerning the United States’ crude sanctions, the fact is that in the wake of Iran’s attack on the commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and the downing of an American unmanned aircraft (Drone), President Trump ratcheted up sanctions and pulled back from his earlier policy of striking back on Iran, citing his aversion to the death of 150 Iranians.275 But the Iranian authorities described the sanctions and the abrogated policy of war as two-sides of the same coin.276 These escalating tensions were further heightened when (sequel to the United States’ pulling out of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPAO,—the Iran deal—and its accusation that Iran attacked two oil tankers and downed an American drown) Iran surpassed the limit permitted under the 2015 nuclear agreement.277 The deal (with the United States, Britain, China, France, Russia and Germany as parties) had endorsed the lifting of sanctions after restraining Iran to a 300-kg limit of low-enriched uranium in order to prevent the country from producing enough uranium enriched to a purity high enough for a nuclear weapon.278 But when the United States pulled out of the JCPAO and re-imposed the sanctions against Iran, Fareed Zakaria described the US sanctions as a “weird, impulse-driven policy”, telling Fox News that: The sanctions that are in place in Iran probably – I haven’t done the calculations, but I think it’s fair to say almost certainly will kill several hundred, maybe thousands of people over the next few months in terms of depriving people of medical supplies, food, nutrition; … And when you do a military strike, the people you are killing will tend to be Iranian soldiers, military officers who are volunteering to take part in Iran’s military struggle. The people you kill when you impose sanctions are the most vulnerable in society. These are the poorest people, the sickest people … So, if that’s his concern, he seems almost gleeful about the idea of imposing more and more sanctions on Iran. Has he thought about the human cost of this? I don’t think so.279

274 See “Trump imposes new sanctions on Iran, targets supreme leader”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 25, 2019, p. 37, op. cit. 275 See Kathryn Watson in “Cocked and loaded” to strike Iran, Trump says he called off operation when told 150 would likely die”, CBS News, available at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ trump-iran-strike-trump-says-he-called-off-operation-when-told-150-would-likely-die-today2019-06-21/ (last visited on June 22, 2019), op. cit. 276 Monitored on CNN Newsroom on Tuesday, June 25, 2019, circa 7–8 pm, Nigerian time. 277 See Rick Gladstone in “Iran passed its Uranium limit: What happens next”, The New York Times, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/world/middleeast/iran-uranium-enrich ment-limit.html (last visited on Monday, July 1, 2019). 278 Loc. Cit. 279 See Joseph A. Wulfsohn in “CNN’s Fareed Zakaria: ‘Thousands’ could die because of Trump’s sanctions on Iran”, Fox News, available at https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/cnns-fareedzakaria-thousands-could-die-because-of-trumps-sanctions-on-iran (last visited on Tuesday, June 25, 2019), op. cit.

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Against Fareed Zakaria’s forgoing warning, it was totally strange that President Trump would cringe at the humanitarian implication of killing 150 Iranians in an armed strike, while at the same time, imposing sanctions that would kill very vulnerable civilians not involved in “the hostile conduct of the regime”280 —the Iranian regime. To still heighten the curiosity in his so-called humanitarian concern, President Trump was also reportedly warning about proportionality in the need not to kill 150 Iranians because of the downing of an unmanned aircraft (Drone) while at the same time threatening Iran with “obliteration” if it went into war with the United States—a situation that caused the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to question the sanity in the White House as he argued that the White House was “mentally retarded”.281 But even if it was to be hypothetically taken that President Trump’s unilateral abolition of the nuclear deal was no crime and the declaration of the debilitating sanctions was no crime too (but his intention was to get Tehran to re-open talks on its nuclear and missile programmes282 ), the valid question to be posed here is whether denying the Iranian leadership an access and support of the United States’ controlled financial assets (including the dollar) was the ideal way to achieve that mission? However, the real diplomatic problem in the entire face-off was that the exclusion of the Iranian officials from the “almighty” dollar was recognizably a huddle that would surely constrict the ability of Tehran to embark on diplomatic activities.283 The fact that the Trump administration revoked the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Tehran aggravated tension in the Middle East region and led to Iran’s assumption of its belligerency, utilizing and even “militarizing” its prime location and control of the Strait of Hormuz284 —an area that is a significant maritime security belt between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman region; and which also hosts significant oil tanker shipping. The militarization was such that “the British navy said it prevented three Iranian paramilitary vessels from impeding the passage of a British oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, a day after Iran’s president warned

280 See “Trump imposes new sanctions on Iran’s leaders”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, June

26, 2019, p. 35, op. cit. 281 Monitored in Nigeria on CNN Newsroom, Wednesday, June 26, 2019 at between 6 and 7 am local

time; see also, “US-Iran crisis: Trump lashes out at ‘ignorant and insulting’ statement”, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48763787 (last visited on Tuesday, June 25, 2019). 282 See “Trump imposes new sanctions on Iran, targets supreme leader”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 25, 2019, p. 37, op. cit. 283 Remark on Cable News Network (CNN) on Wednesday, June 26, 2019 on the 6am news cast. 284 Apart from the downing of a sophisticated American unarmed aircraft (Drone) in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran had attacked about six oil tankers between May and June 2019, in or near the Strait of Hormuz; see Sam Meredith in “Oil Tanker attacks in the Strait of Hormuz requires an ‘international response’, US envoy to Iran says”, CNBC, available at https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/22/oil-tanker-attacks-in-the-strait-of-hormuz-requires-an-intern ational-response-us-envoy-to-iran-says.html (last visited on Sunday, June 23, 2019).

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of repercussions for the seizure of its own supertanker by the British in Gibraltar, a seizure that Spain said was at the behest of the United States.285 In terms of maritime security, the Strait of Hormuz is “the world’s busiest transit lane for seaborne oil shipments”286 —the interruption or disruption of which could destabilize oil prices and the rhythm of the global economy. Clearly, the Iranian regime had ostensibly ditched its “strategic patience” and begun to show a strength that smacked of desperation, particularly so because the United States did not only pull out of the JCPAO and declare sanctions on it, Washington had also continued to undermine the country by threatening sanctions on any country that tried to buy Iranian oil.287 Even the attempt by the European Union to keep Iran in the JCPAO by using the mechanism of the INSTEX to bypass American sanctions had failed, resulting in a devastating impact on the Iranian economy in which, “in the 2018–19 fiscal year, Iran’s GDP shrunk by 4.9%, compared with the year before”.288 Another consequence of the United States’ sanctions was that Iran’s oil exports dwindled with its “gloating rivals in the Gulf” readily meeting “the shortfall left by Iran’s dwindling exports of oil”; the Iranian industrial production fell almost as sharply as that of oil, while food prices tripled and supplies of medicine diminished289 —all amounting to a significant act of “economic terrorism”. Iran’s response to this terrorism with the militarization of the Strait of Hormuz was to prove the point that if Iran was not allowed to export oil, “then, no oil would pass through the Gulf”; more so when it was determined “to show that Mr. Trump’s actions have costs for others, too” and that its leaders had “the potential to be crazier than America”.290 This was irrespective of the fact that the European powers were trying to deescalate the tensions by not only with their failed attempt to short-circuit or bypass the American sanctions, but also by de-linking themselves from President Trump’s unilateralism in repudiating the JCPAO, and by urging Iran “to acknowledge the work undertaken by European nations to save the 2015 [landmark] nuclear deal” through reversing its steps and going “back to full compliance with the agreement”.291 As the European Union foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, put it, this was because 285 See

“Britain says it thwarted Iranian vessels trying to block tanker in Persian Gulf”, available at https://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-iran-britain-gulf-tanker-20190711-story.html?utm_ source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+latimes%2Fnews%2Fnati onworld%2Fworld+%28L.A.+Times+-+World+News%29&utm_content=Yahoo+Search+Results (last visited on Monday, July 15, 2019). 286 See Sam Meredith in “Oil Tanker attacks in the Strait of Hormuz requires an ‘international response’, US envoy to Iran says”, CNBC, available at https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/22/oil-tan ker-attacks-in-the-strait-of-hormuz-requires-an-international-response-us-envoy-to-iran-says.html (last visited on Sunday, June 23, 2019), op. cit. 287 See “American and Iran; playing with fire: Backed into a corner, Iran is lashing out. To what end?”, The Economist, June 22–28th 2019, p. 40, op. cit. 288 Loc. Cit. 289 Loc. Cit. 290 Ibid, pp. 40– 41. 291 See “EU presents united front on Iran nuclear deal”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, July 16, 2019, p. 40.

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“the reality is that the deal has avoided Iran developing a nuclear weapon, and so it has been effective …; everyone today recognizes there is no alternative to this deal”.292 But with the killing of General Soleimani, Iran’s missiles revenge attacks on the US forces in Iraq, and the United States’ imposition of additional punishing sanctions on Iran to prevent Tehran from further destabilizing activities and to return to nuclear discussions, Iran not only intransigently refused to re-negotiate the JCPOA, it totally scrapped the limits to nuclear proliferation that it had agreed to.293 This was irrespective of the grueling sanctions that Washington had used to squeeze the Iranian economy, made the Iranian populace unhappy and sent the working class to the streets in protest against the regime in Teheran.294

References Anaeto, E. (2019, August 27). Nigeria-China currency swap, one year after. Lagos: Vanguard Agwu, F. A. (2016). Nations among nations: Uneven statehood, hegemony and instrumentalism in international relations. Ibadan: HEBN Publishers Plc. Agwu, F. A. (2018). Armed drones and globalization in the asymmetric war on terror: Challenges for the law of armed conflict and global political economy. New York and London: Routledge. Bremmer, I. (2016, August 22). Turkey and Russia get closer–and worry the West. Time (New York). Bremmer, I. (2018a, January 15). The global order is coming apart, and liberal democracy is under threat, welcome to 2018. Time (New York). Bremmer, I. (2018b, January 29). Trump turns his back on Pakistan, giving China an opportunity. Time (New York). Bremmer, I. (2018c, February 12). Can Donald Trump accept a defeat in Afghanistan? Time (New York). Calabresi, M. (2017, January 16). The Trouble Maker: Putin is now Donald Trump’s problem. Time (New York). Haass, R. N. (1998) Economic sanctions and American diplomacy (ed.). New York: A Council on Foreign Relations Books. Kissinger, H. (2011) On China. New York: The Penguin Press. Lakemfa, O. (2020a, Friday, December 4) Africa-China in a journey of a score years. Lagos: Vanguard Lakemfa, O. (2020b, Friday, March 20) Coronavirus: Destroy Biological weapons, we’re mere humans. Lagos: Vanguard Mailafia, O. (2020, Monday, August 10). China and the new imperialism. Lagos: Vanguard. Okadigbo, C. (1985). Consciencism in African political philosophy (Nkrumah’s Critique). Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers Otobo, E. E. (2020, Tuesday, January 7). Between the ‘bulldozer’ and the beneficent narrative: China-Africa relations. Lagos: The Guardian. Wambu, O. (2016, August/September). The Old Silk Road and a new world order. New African. 292 Loc.

Cit. Ben Piven in “Soleimani and the strategic impact of US sanctions on Iran”, Aljazeera, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/soleimani-strategic-impact-sanctions-iran-200107 193046117.html (last visited on January 10, 2020), op. cit. 294 Loc. Cit. 293 See

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Willett, T. D., Dean, J. W., & Salvatore, D. (2003) The dollarization debate (Ed.). Oxford: University Press. Woodward, B. (2018) Fear: Trump in the white house. New York: Simon & Schuster. Yabuki, S. (1995) China’s new political economy: The giant awakes (1995, translated by Stephen M. Harner). Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press.

Chapter 6

Globalization, Populism and Nationalism in Sino-Africa Relations

6.1 The Debt Trap In its study of debt sustainability in the Pacific, Roland et al. of the lowly Institute was to conclude that “China has cultivated its attractiveness as a development partner for Pacific governments by operating in sharp contrast to traditional development partners”; and this was particularly because “Chinese assistance is perceived to be faster, more responsive to the needs of local political elites, and have fewer conditions attached”, with one Pacific bureaucrat declaring that “we like China because they bring the red flags, not the red tape”; but this was not even when the Chinese aid activity in the region had been predominantly in infrastructural development and had been fuelled largely by loans rather than grants.1 The logic of China’s entrapment of developing nations with debts is very simple. According to Singh: The modus-operandi is fairly simple – enter a country on the pretext of development activities, hand out fishy loans with exorbitant interests rates, and when the state fails to pay it, capture the territories, buy off the important senators and people of the country and before the public know, China has encircled the country from all side.2

Although in the Pacific, at least as at 2019, China was reputedly not yet engaged in such problematic debt practices “as to justify accusations of debt trap diplomacy … but the sheer scale of Chinese lending and the lack of strong institutional mechanisms to protect the debt sustainability of borrowing countries” meant a continuation of 1 See Roland Rajah, Alexandre Dayant, Jonathan Pryke in “Ocean of Debt? Belt and Road and Belt

Diplomacy in the Pacific: China has not been engaged in debt trap diplomacy—at least not yet”, Lowy Institute, available at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/ocean-debt-belt-and-roadand-debt-diplomacy-pacific (last visited on October 21, 2019). 2 See Abhinav Singh in “Major setback for China’s African Safari. Its Kenyan BRI project is all set to be shelved”, tfipost.com, June 25, 2020, available at https://tfipost.com/2020/06/major-set back-for-chinas-african-safari-its-kenyan-bri-project-is-all-set-to-be-shelved/ (last visited on June 27, 2020). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0_6

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business as usual that would pose clear risks.3 Much of China’s loans to the world at the moment are from the BRI. From 2013 when President Xi Jinping conceived the idea in Kazakhstan with the name “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR), to 2016 when it was renamed to BRI because comprises more than just two routes, there are no official figures on the total amount of loans on the BRI because “some [BRI] projects are driven by local authorities to demonstrate their support for the central government”, and because [the] belt and road projects open doors for new funding from banks”.4 However, an estimate by the Institute of International Finance (IIF) since 2013 shows that “China has agreed to US$690 billion in overseas investments and construction contracts in more than 105 countries”.5 When this is narrowed down to the 72 countries involved in the BRI, it is estimated that China has funneled a total of US$280 billion into 44 countries that are either not rated or do not have an investment-grade rating assigned by Fitch Ratings, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s.6 So, as already noted by Roland et al., the vast majority of China’s global official development finance comes in the form of loans rather than grants, with only a minority of those loans being concessional while the core sources of this Chinese development financing comes from its state-owned policy banks—the Export–Import Bank of China (EXIM Bank) and the China Development Bank.7 The importance of China’s state-owned commercial banks as major overseas lenders grew under the BRI, and it has given rise to concerns that the initiative would generate debt sustainability problems in the developing countries around the world.8 In fact, it has even been argued that with the BRI, China is actively seeking “to push countries into debt problems in order to extract these geopolitical concessions.9 China loans more money to the world than the richest 32 nations as it rapidly rolls out its BRI to build new roads, ports and rail lines in mostly the developing nations, thus, extending its reach across continents.10 Although China says that the infrastructure will benefit countries, critics insist that Beijing is extending unfair influence over 3 See Roland Rajah, Alexandre Dayant, Jonathan Pryke in “Ocean of Debt? Belt and Road and Belt

Diplomacy in the Pacific: China has not been engaged in debt trap diplomacy—at least not yet”, Lowy Institute, available at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/ocean-debt-belt-and-roadand-debt-diplomacy-pacific (last visited on October 21, 2019), op. cit. 4 See Amanda Lee in “Belt and Road Initiative debt: how big is it and what’s next?”, South China Morning Post, July 19, 2020, available at https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/ 3093218/belt-and-road-initiative-debt-how-big-it-and-whats-next (last visited on July 19, 2020). Parentheses mine. 5 Loc. Cit. 6 Loc. Cit. 7 See Roland Rajah, Alexandre Dayant, Jonathan Pryke in “Ocean of Debt? Belt and Road and Belt Diplomacy in the Pacific: China has not been engaged in debt trap diplomacy—at least not yet”, Lowy Institute, available at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/ocean-debt-belt-and-roadand-debt-diplomacy-pacific (last visited on October 21, 2019), op. cit. 8 Loc. Cit. 9 Loc. Cit. 10 See “How much money does the world owe Chia?”, Al Jazeera News, May 30, 2020, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/countingthecost/2020/05/money-world-owe-china-200 530080200892.html (last visited on May 31, 2020).

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others; thus, prompting many nations to rethink their involvement with the BRI; and this is equally amidst the accusations that China has overpriced the BRI projects.11 As a matter of fact: Between 2000 and 2017, the world’s debt obligation to China rose from $500bn to a staggering $5 trillion – about six percent of the world’s economic output – according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Researchers also found that China and its subsidiaries have lent $1.5 trillion directly to 150 nations – making China the world’s biggest creditor, overtaking the IMF and World Bank. It has also made unreported loans worth $200bn.12

For Africa in particular, a Nigerian critic of what he describes as “China and the New Imperialism” was to argue that: China is currently the biggest creditor to our continent. From the year 2000 to 2018, China’s loans to Africa stood at the order of magnitude of US$152 billion. Most of such loans are issued on commercial terms and go into financing projects in such sectors as mining, extractive industries and infrastructures. As matters currently stand, Nigeria’s total national debt stands at an unprecedented US$79.5 billion. We owe some US$10 billion to the World Bank and US$2.56 billion to the African Development Bank Group. We owe the Exim Bank of China the sum of US$3.12 billion, which is about 81.25 percent of our total bilateral debt obligations.13

But it is obvious that China’s opaque lending practices have not only made it difficult for investors and international lenders to make accurate investment decisions14 (as already stated above), China’s lending practices are also giving Beijing some geopolitical concessions. In a new publication entitled “Debunking the Myth of DebtTrap Diplomacy: How Recipient Countries Shape China’s Belt and Road Initiative” (by Shahar Hameiri and Dr. Lee Jones) that was presented at the Chatham House, it was posited that the available evidence has challenged the position that China was projecting a debt-trap diplomacy in Africa and middle income countries with the argument that China’s development financing system was too fragmented and poorly coordinated to pursue detailed strategic objectives; and that the developingcountry governments and their associated political and economic interests determine the nature of BRI projects in their territory.15 But apart from debunking the debt-trap aforementioned, the diplomatic scholars aforementioned also alluded to the perception that the BRI “is widely understood as a geopolitical strategy to create a new, Sino-centric order in Eurasia or even across the entire world”—a geopolitical strategy that ensnares countries in unsustainable

11 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 13 See Obadiah Mailafia in “China and the New Imperialism”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, August 10, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. 14 See “How much money does the world owe Chia?”, Al Jazeera News, May 30, 2020, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/countingthecost/2020/05/money-world-owe-china-200 530080200892.html (last visited on May 31, 2020), op. cit. 15 See Victoria Ojeme in “China not pursuing debt-trap diplomacy in Africa, others—Diplomat”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 16, 2020, p. 36. 12 Loc.

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debt and allow China undue influence.16 But an example of the geopolitical concessions that China is seeking, according to an alarm by geostrategic analysts, is the state-owned Chinese firm that has gained a majority equity stake in the strategically located Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka after the country ran into Chinese debt-related difficulties.17 As it were, “a lack of transparency and official information about the BRI severely limits objective economic analysis of the situation and raises questions about the planned scale, and often commercial terms, of Chinese lending”.18 In Nigeria, controversies once brewed over one of the Chinese railway loans agreements—as a “sovereignty clause in [the] $500 m Chinese railway loan” was deemed by the House of Representative to have implied Nigeria waiving it sovereignty.19 But contrary to the claim by the House of Representatives that it had uncovered a clause in the loan agreement where Nigeria had waived its sovereignty to China (an allegation of forfeiture of sovereignty that the Chinese Foreign Ministry nevertheless denied20 ), Nigeria’s Transportation Minister, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, counteracted the claim, arguing that the clause ‘waiving sovereignty’ in the loan agreement between Nigeria and China was only a contract term, a sovereignty guarantee that assures pay back according to the terms and conditions of the loan.21 In other words, what Amaechi has argued here was that Nigeria merely gave a sovereign guarantee that it would pay China back the loan because: … when you say I give you a sovereignty guarantee and I waive that immunity clause, the immunity clause is that if tomorrow I’m not able to pay you and you come to collect the items that we’ve agreed upon, that these are items I have put down as guarantee. I can use my immunity and say no, you cannot touch our assets, we are a sovereign country … What the clause does is to say to you, I expect you to pay according to those terms and conditions. If you don’t pay, don’t throw your immunity on me (the lender) when I come to collect the guarantee you put forward, that’s all. The waiving of immunity simply means in trade parlance that I’m not giving you this loan free. Just like if you go to take a loan from the bank, the moment you don’t pay, they go after the assets you put down.22

Well, it appeared that those that argued that Nigeria had surrendered its sovereignty to China were not “politicizing it” as Chibuike Amaechi had argued; including his 16 Loc.

Cit.

17 See Roland Rajah, Alexandre Dayant, Jonathan Pryke in “Ocean of Debt? Belt and Road and Belt

Diplomacy in the Pacific: China has not been engaged in debt trap diplomacy—at least not yet”, Lowy Institute, available at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/ocean-debt-belt-and-roadand-debt-diplomacy-pacific (last visited on October 21, 2019), op. cit. 18 Loc. Cit. 19 See “Amaechi explains sovereignty clause in $500 m Chinese Railway loan”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, August 3, 2020, p. 35; see also Sanya Oni in “What’s sovereignty worth?”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, August 4, 2020, p. 23, and Reuben Abati in “Nigeria and Chinese Loans”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, August 4, 2020, back page. 20 See Victoria Ojeme in “No clause in loan contracts ceding Nigeria’s sovereignty to China— Chinese Foreign Ministry; denies political interest in investment financing in Nigeria, Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, August 4, 2020, p. 14. 21 See “Amaechi explains sovereignty clause in $500 m Chinese Railway loan”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, August 3, 2020, p. 35, op. Cit. 22 Loc. Cit.

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argument that “the Chinese can never come and take over Aso Rock and impose a Chinese President or Minister”.23 What mattered most in the Chinese loan agreement was that if the asset that Nigeria had put down to obtain the loan was ‘waiving immunity’ (sovereign immunity over the railway assets), the railway asset that was constructed with the Chinese loan could be ceded to the Chinese as was the case in Zambia24 ; and as was equally the case in the strategically located Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka aforementioned that was ceded when Sri Lanka failed to pay its debts to China. The attempt by the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, to defend Chibuike Amechi’s explanation with the claim that “there is a difference between international diplomatic immunity, ‘which has to do with a nation’s sovereignty, independence existence’, and commercial immunity, which has to do with a commitment to ensure repayment of loans”25 does not make any sense in public international law. In public international law, diplomatic immunity exists sui generis because it is distinct from sovereignty (or state) immunity.26 Whereas diplomatic immunity and sovereign immunity all evoke sovereignty, sovereign immunity strict sensus is a customary international law with a jus cogens characteristic. Differently put, whereas diplomatic immunity is a conventional law elaboration or expatiation of customary law in a uniquely narrower sense of it because it can be waived by the sovereign immunity of the possessing state or declared persona non-grata by another state; sovereign immunity is a peremptory norm that embraces all states, irrespective of their varied legal systems; it has a par in parem non habet imperium characteristic that can only be expressly or implicitly27 waived by the possessing state.28 The Chinese are securely aware of this eternal verity of public international law— that diplomatic immunity is not the same as sovereign immunity; that, although absolute sovereign immunity is a Western concept against which dissenting opinions, 23 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 25 See “Chinese loan agreements: Amaechi, Malami correct NASS on sovereign immunity”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, August 5, 2020, p. 8. 26 See Agwu (2013), Themes and perspectives …, pp. 481–888, op. Cit. 27 A chink in the armour of absolute sovereign immunity only came in the United Kingdom when the case of the Sultan of Jahore v. Abubakar that expresses the principle of par in parem nonhabet imperium (that the king can do no wrong, cannot be sued in its own courts or impleaded in a foreign court without its consent. In fact, it is this principle that made the king to approach and seek absolute immunity as well from foreign courts) went on appeal in 1952, and absolute immunity was denied by the Privy Council in the narrow sense that the Sultan had voluntarily (even though implicitly) submitted as plaintiff to the court from whose decision the proceedings before the Privy Council were in the nature of an appeal. Thus, to prove that there are circumstances where absolute immunity can be denied, especially in the case of an implicit submission to the court, the Privy Council stated that “their Lordships do not consider that there has been finally established in England … any absolute rule that a foreign independent sovereign cannot be impleaded in our courts in any circumstances”; see Badr (1984); State Immunity: An Analytical and Prognostic View, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, pp. 45, 75. 28 See Agwu (2013), Themes and perspectives …, pp. 481, 485–486, 487, op. cit. 24 Loc.

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hesitations and disquiet are expressed in some dicta,29 sovereign immunity, stricto sensus, is a jus cogen that is generally used by nations as a technique for denying compliance with obligations; and that sovereign immunity is “originally a means of protecting a weaker state against actions by stronger interests”, which has made this type of immunity “an impediment in international trade”.30 This is why the Chinese have made the non-waiver of sovereignty immunity over the assets established by their loans a standard landmark of their loan agreements. Unfortunately, Chibuike Amechi equally argued that the National Assembly also saw the waiving of sovereign immunity clause in the Chinese loan agreements, but yet the loans were approved by the Assembly.31 The National Assembly had no choice in this approval because its treaty power in the Nigerian Constitution is only limited to the domestication of treaties (and these are treaties with local applications as it has no control over those with international application like this Chinese loan agreement)—which is a major flaw in the Nigerian Constitution.32 Although Chibuike Amaechi had argued that out of the UU$500 million loan taken from China, Nigeria had paid back UU$96 m33 ; but since the ceding of sovereignty immunity is a standard clause (which was also recognized by Amaechi34 ) in every loan agreement—a standard clause that protects the Chinese in arbitrations (when not waived)35 —it was actually the plague that Sri Lanka, Zambia, and Djibouti had suffered in China’s seizure of their strategic national assets. Like Sri Lanka, Zambia and Djibouti, Nigeria does not have the national power to renounce the sovereign immunity it has ceded on the assets it acquired with Chinese loans. Thus, the loss of Nigeria’s sovereignty over the asset it procured with Chinese loans could happen in the face of Nigeria’s default—either in a non-complete payment of the debt or in an inability to finish paying back at the contractual time. This would produce the typical loss of national sovereignty over the assets that Chibuike Amechi would not deny, despite his argument that the law-makers should eschew their patriotic instincts so that the controversies they raised in respect to the waiving of immunity clause would not be brought to the door-step of the Chinese and stop them from providing more loans for the Ibadan-Kano rail line.36 The Chinese did 29 See

Badr (1984); State Immunity: An Analytical and Prognostic View, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, p. 45, op. Cit. 30 Ibid, pp. 74–75. 31 See “Chinese loan agreements: Amaechi, Malami correct NASS on sovereign immunity”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, August 5, 2020, p. 8, op. cit. 32 See Agwu (2009), National Interest, International Law …, pp. 361–365, op. Cit. 33 See “Amaechi explains sovereignty clause in $500 m Chinese Railway loan”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, August 3, 2020, p. 35, op. Cit. 34 See “$500 m Chinese loans: Reps, Amechi, Finance Minister at daggers drawn over sovereignty clause: It’s standard practice for taking loans—Ministers; It isn’t—Reps”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, August 18, 2020, p. 8. 35 See “Chinese loan agreements: Amaechi, Malami correct NASS on sovereign immunity”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, August 5, 2020, p. 8, op. cit. 36 See Reuben Abati in “Nigeria and Chinese Loans”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, August 4, 2020, back page, op. cit.

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not need to take Aso Rock and impose a President or Minister. It is important to reiterate that the Chinese are really at home with public international law. The loss of sovereignty over a strategic national asset is as good as the loss of sovereignty over the Presidency. The fact is that the Chinese can be very usurious with their loans, even at a very low or local institutional sub-state level. This usury at a very local level was illustrated by a contract on a symposium project in a China-Africa joint research and exchange programme that the NIIA signed with the People Republic of China (PRC) embassy in Nigeria, which stipulated in part that “in such cases as the project falling behind schedule or its submitted report not being accepted, the sponsor is entitled to reduce or retrieve the budget fund”.37 It was inconceivable that there could be a budget refund in a project for which the resource persons had been paid amid other logistics and expenses. Apart from the above aside on the contractual agreement between the PRC’s embassy in Nigeria and the NIIA, it is important to interrogate the issue concerning Article 8(1) of Nigeria’s agreement with China, which states that “the borrower hereby irrevocably waives any immunity on the grounds of sovereign or otherwise for itself or its property in connection with any arbitration proceedings pursuant to Article 8(5) thereof with the enforcement of any arbitral award pursuant thereto, except for the military assets and diplomatic assets”38 —a standard clause that disgracefully “adorns” most of China’s BRI agreements with the developing countries. It is in this context that the Transportation Minister, Chibuike Amaechi, should be asked the manner of sovereignty that Sri Lanka, Zambia, and Djibouti have, countries that have practically ceded sovereignty over some of their strategic institutions on account of their inability to repay the Chinese debts; alongside other African countries like Kenya and the Democratic Republic of Congo that have issues with their Chinese loans?39 Does Nigeria wish to find itself in the above categories of African countries where the Chinese can be part of any business, including the roasting of corn by the roadside?40 Does Nigeria want to revel in more the Chinese usurious loans—a country that reportedly runs remarkably opaque loans, apparently because of its not being a member of the Paris Club, a country that has “stubbornly refused to participate in data calls”, even though it has “committed to the G-20 process on the moratorium for debt service re-payments.41 Apart from the Chinese usury, that fact remains that 37 See the contract agreement for a symposium entitled “China-Africa Cooperation in Information Technology and Digital Economy: Prospects and Challenges” between the PRC and the NIIA as embodied in a contract document entitled “Contract on Symposium Project of China-Africa Joint Research and Exchange Program”, dated March 15, 2018, p. 2. 38 See Reuben Abati in “Nigeria and Chinese Loans”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, August 4, 2020, back page, op. Cit. 39 Loc. Cit. 40 Loc. Cit. As argued by Abati in this ThisDay article, the Chinese are already running these businesses, including retail services, internet services, hospitality, car sales and ride hailing services. 41 Loc. Cit.

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Nigeria has a reputation for incurring very bad terms in the loans from China, and that several of the infrastructure projects that Nigeria has incurred Chinese loans are “badly planned projects”.42 According to a Nigerian critic: … calculations show that the Ethiopians, for example, have negotiated far better terms for their 1,300-rail project from Addis Ababa to the port of Djibouti. The cost is about 50 percent of what we are spending on our own China rail projects. In addition, the Ethiopians insisted that 3,000 of their engineers and technicians must be trained to maintain the coaches, engines and rail lines. They also got a deal by which all the engines and coaches must be assembled within Ethiopia. They have negotiated technology transfer terms that would ensure that the rail project will be sustainable, going forward. By contrast, ours is far more expensive and the terms we settled for are a simple build, operate and transfer (BOT) scheme. There is no real technology transfer component that we are aware of.43

Although Amaechi claimed that the Chinese have engaged over 20,000 Nigerian workers in the construction of the Lagos-Ibadan rail project in compliance with the local content law inherent in the $1.6 billion contract agreement between Nigeria and China, but the Chinese themselves had equally engaged 560 Chinese workers.44 The query here include: are the 560 Chinese workers a category of labour that could be found in Nigeria or are they professionals that Nigeria does not have? Why did Nigeria, like the Ethiopians, not insist that the engines and coaches must be assembled in Nigeria to make way for a meaningful technology transfer instead of settling for a mere BOT? However, Minister Amaechi said that “over 150 Nigerians” are “being trained as engineers in China” and that the Chinese had equally “built two training institutions for us, one at Idu and the other one in the Transportation University in Daura, Katsina state”.45 But is Daura not President Buhari’s home town? Although Minister Amaechi had said that Nigeria was planning a rail line from Daura to Niger Republic,46 is there no ring of nepotism and favouritism here; and are these mere training centers equivalent to the national interest in the assembling of the engines and coaches in Nigeria as the Ethiopians had done to facilitate technology transfer, not just training institutions that deal with mere theories and not the exposure to the work? Unfortunately, despite Nigeria’s bad terms of loans, China’s usury as well as being the biggest creditor to

42 See Obadiah Mailafia in “China and the New Imperialism”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, August 10, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. 43 Loc. Cit. 44 See “Over 20,000 Nigerians employed for Lagos-Ibadan rail project”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, August 18, 2020, p. 7. 45 Loc. Cit. 46 See Bridget Edokwe in “Nigeria to construct Railway from Daura to Niger Republic—Transport Minister Amaechi”, BarristerNG.com, September 18, 2018, available at https://www.barristerng. com/nigeria-to-construct-railway-from-daura-to-niger-republic-transport-minister-amechi/ (last visited on August 19, 2020).

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the African continent,47 the Nigerian Debt Management Office (DMO) continued to allay the fears about Nigeria’s borrowing from China, having reportedly insisted that “the total borrowing by Nigeria from China was $3.121 billion (#1,126.68 billion at USD/#361), as at March 31 (2020).48 The DMO reportedly explained that the above amount “was only 3.94% of Nigeria’s total public debt of $79.303 billion (#28,628.49) billion at USD/N361 at the end of the first quarter”, and that the loans were concessionary, with generous lowinterest terms, that China was not a major source of funding for the federal government, which meant that there was nothing to worry about with regard to Chinese loans to Nigeria.49 But in Nigeria, and on the railways alone, the Muhammadu Buhari’s government signed loans mainly categorized under the BRI as government to government agreement, which ranged to approximately $17 billion—with the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC), a subsidiary of the state-owned China Railway construction corporation—that disregarded Nigeria’s Procurement Act, conducted in secrecy and without accountability and transparency.50 Apart from the BRI’s lack of transparency and official information, Africa’s indebtedness to China has also grown exponentially. This point is illustrated by the fact that in 2012, the IMF had found that China owned only 15 percent of Africa’s external debt, but three years later, it was seen that roughly two-thirds of all of Africa’s new loans were coming from China.51 Again in 2018, “the IMF identified eight low-income countries in Africa experiencing debt difficulties in which total external debt-to-GDP had risen by over 20 percentage points, with more than half of the increase reflecting bilateral loans from China”.52 In fact, even “half of China’s overseas lending was allegedly “hidden” and not captured by official global debt statistics or private credit rating agencies”; and about eight African countries were at “particular risk of debt problems based on the pipeline of debt-financed projects planned under the BRI”.53 About 12 countries were considered by the World Bank in 2019 to be “likely to experience increased debt vulnerability as a result of the BRI over the medium

47 See Obadiah Mailafia in “China and the New Imperialism”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, August 10, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. 48 See Emma Ujah in “DMO explains $3.121bn Chinese loans, says it constitutes 3.94% of $79.3 total public debt: Got FEC, NASS approvals”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, June 19, 2020, p. 7. 49 Loc. Cit. 50 See Kingsley Jeremiah in “Stakeholders demand terms for $47b Chinese loan, projects execution: How they are shrouded in secrecy; FEC accused of taking over procurement process”, The Guardian (Lagos), Tuesday, March 3, 2020, p. 6. 51 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/ January 2020, p. 55, op. cit. 52 See Roland Rajah, Alexandre Dayant, Jonathan Pryke in “Ocean of Debt? Belt and Road and Belt Diplomacy in the Pacific: China has not been engaged in debt trap diplomacy—at least not yet”, Lowy Institute, available at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/ocean-debt-belt-and-roadand-debt-diplomacy-pacific (last visited on October 21, 2019), op. cit. 53 Loc. Cit.

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term”.54 In respect of the state of African loans as it concerns China, Tibor Nagy, the United States Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, was to reportedly declare that: We went through this [the HIPC programme], just in the last 20 years, this big debt forgiveness for a lot of African countries … I certainly would not be sympathetic, and I do not think my administration would be sympathetic to that kind of situation.55

The above epigram is a statement made on Monday, June 24, 2019, in Pretoria, South Africa, by the United States diplomat, Tibor Nagy, warning African countries to desist from further debts from the Chinese because in 1996, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank had used the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) programme/ framework that helps the world’s poorest countries clear billions of dollars worth of unsustainable debt and helped many African countries to exit their so-called unsustainable Western debts.56 Unfortunately, as the African continent did in respect of the West, Africa is now retrogressing into another round of unsustainable debts from the China. In fact, the most unfortunate aspect of the African condition in today’s paradoxical world of globalization, nationalism and populism is the continent’s dependency and mere recipient status in its relations with both the ever competing Western and Eastern power blocs. Africa is yet to acquire the capacity to stand on its own feet. So, both the West and the East play or manipulate Africa in their yeoman game of rivalry. The continent is undoubtedly a pawn in the chess board of the rivalry between the United States and China.57 In his classical novel, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe mythologized the masquerades—the egwugwus—as the guttural, awesome and immortal ancestral spirits (dead fathers of the clan) that emerge from the earth, utterly terrifying children and women.58 But Onyekachi Wambu of the New African newsmagazine truly testified that beyond everything else, the mythical masquerades (the masquerades, like Santa Claus) are just a seasonal performance, steeled with menace, tension and excitement and understood literally by children until wisdom breaks through them with age.59 It is only with this game of age that, like adults, the children understand that the egwugwus or masquerades are ordinary performances in which people don masks and pretend to be what they are not as they are being restrained or held aggressively back by young men with whips attempting to control “their destructive potency”.60 54 Loc. 55 See

Cit. “Do not expect debt relief, U.S. warns Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 25, 2019,

p. 37. 56 Loc. Cit. 57 See Stephen Chan in “China/Africa: New departures; both China and the United States are rethinking their long-term commitment to their partners in Africa, as the rhetorical and other rivalries between the two superpowers heat up”, The African Report, # 99, April 2018, p. 21. 58 See Achebe and Fall (1958, pp. 80–85, 168–170). 59 See Onyekachi Wambu in “Masquerading Africa”, New African, February 2019, p. 74, op. cit. 60 Loc. Cit.

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The objective instruction here—as Onyekachi Wambu put it—is that African leaders or governments are actually playing the masquerades, pretending to be genuine governments when actually they are clueless and ordinary rentseeking governments outsourcing governance—like the proposed African cities that Germany’s Africa commissioner suggested—to external entities like the Chinese and other external institutions.61 There is no doubt that Africa has accepted China as “father Christmas” and the fate of being treated like a toddler, the fate of dependency, and of being babied. Africa exhibits an un-dignifying attitude of entitlement—a sense of entitlement that seems to suggest that the rest of the world owes it a responsibility in the march towards progress and development; which is not true. In an apparent exultant mood while making a sideline comment during the 2018 7th FOCAC in Beijing (China), Nigeria’s Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr. Ibe Kachikwu, reportedly declared that “China has an edge over the US and the UK in Africa because it was providing what Africa needed”.62 This is as if Africa is a lazy bone that cannot provide for itself; that cannot harness and make the most of the huge natural resources endowed on it by Mother Nature to develop itself without mortgaging the future of its present and future generations. As the Nigerian Minister aforementioned was quoted to have told exultingly told Blooberg: They [the Chinese] are active in Liberia, Ghana, [and] Angola. They are throwing money where their mouth is and in very many respects is one area where they have beaten both the US, European and British in things like this. Africa requires a lot of development funds; China is able to provide it. Not just provide in terms of money but provide with adequate technology.63

Kachikwu also reportedly disparaged the United States’ warning that the loans from China were terrible for Africa and that it would be terrible to see African countries go back to debt; and this disparaging of the United States’ view on the ballooning African debt was as if the indebtedness to China, either in cash or kind, did not matter.64 This was irrespective of the fact that in the 6th FOCAC Summit in South Africa three years earlier, China had offered the African continent some $60 billion, including now another $60 billion in the 7th FOCAC—all of which are bandied by critics as quintessential evidence of engaging Africa in the “debt trap”.65 But irrespective of the Nigerian Minister, Ibe Kachukwu’s apparent denial of the China debt trap, the fact remains that it is real; with Africa now facing another potential debt crisis—in which “around 40 per cent of low-income countries” in Africa is now in debt distress or at the risk of it with China66 —with Nigeria itself 61 Loc.

Cit. “Why China has an edge over UK, US in Africa—Kachikwu”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, September 4, 2018, p. 8. 63 Loc. Cit. Parentheses mine. 64 Loc. Cit. 65 See Vera Sam Anyagafu in “China offers another $60 bn to Africa; says no to vanity projects; trade volume now $116 bn—Xiaoliang”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, September 4, 2018, p. 45. 66 See “Do not expect debt relief, U.S. warns Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 25, 2019, p. 37, op. cit. 62 See

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already heavily owing the Chinese government $69.3 million counterpart fund for an ongoing construction of four airports alone.67 The fact is that as critics say, and against the background of the West’s perception of Africa “as a vicious conundrum and an irretrievable basket case”—and hence turned its back on the continent—China has voraciously, in the face of a jittery North America and Europe, engaged the African continent, abandoning its expansive and still largely uncharted territory and bursting forth with the new paradigm of throwing in money into Africa in order to ravage and “create a bonded colony in perpetual peonage”.68 This was as the Europe-American colonial conglomerate (clearly in a state of quandary) tried to counter with propaganda as it sees its “perpetual tokenistic strategy in Africa in jeopardy as China cannot stop shoveling billions of dollars into Africa.69 However, the United States diplomat, Tibor Nagy, which was quoted in an epigram above, was also to make the point that the United States, especially the Trump administration, had criticized China for pushing poor African countries into debt, mainly through lending for large-scale infrastructural projects.70 But what is evident here is what James Jeffery called “A Deadly Game of Chase in the Horn” of Africa and indeed the entire continent71 ; to which Mohammed Dirr (in Washington) and Kokil K. Shah (in Kenya) called “power play games for space within the Horn of Africa” or “power games currently being played out in the Horn of Africa”—a game of Chess with deep, often hidden moves unsuspected until the final checkmate”.72 To the duo aforementioned, whereas the continent needs to be vigilant and hold its pride; and disallow any competing global powers from playing roles for their own selfish gains”, the African intelligentsia and pan-Africanist analysts seem to be “too busy gossiping on Facebook or Twitter”, extraordinarily “gone quiet” and “no longer seem interested” or “have any inkling about the very serious developments; … sleepwalking while deadly games that will decide the future of large segments of our continent are being played out right under our noses”.73 After the nineteenth century scramble in which the European colonialists carved up the continent and seized lands as well as the second scramble during the Cold War in which the East and Western blocs “vied for the allegiance of newly independent African States”, Africa at the moment is clearly in another scramble—a sort of a third

67 See Favour Nnabugwu in “I’II make Nigeria aviation hub in Africa—Buhari: As FG owes Chinese govt. $69.3 m counterpart fund”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, December 21, 2018, p. 9. 68 See Hardball in “Of Chinese hawks and Western crows”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, November 27, 2018, back page. 69 Loc. Cit. 70 See “Do not expect debt relief, U.S. warns Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 25, 2019, p. 37, op. cit. 71 See James Jeffrey in “A Deadly Game of Chess”, New African, January 2019, pp. 16–23. 72 See Mohammed Dirr in “Deadly games: Time to wake up”; and Kokil K. Shah in “We should not be the grass on which elephants fight”, New African, March 2019, p. 4. 73 Loc. Cit.

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“benign” surge now called “the new scramble for Africa”.74 The touted attraction for this so-called third scramble or surge is the continent’s “growing share of the global population”, which has roused governments and businesses around the world to begin to strengthen their diplomatic, strategic and commercial ties with the continent.75 Meanwhile, Africa may be touted by the United Nations to be capable of possessing in 2025, more Africans than the Chinese people76 ; but this population is uncultivated and as dud (meaningless) as many large African economies (like Nigeria’s, with a large GDP but functionally unindustrialized, no infrastructure, ill educational institutions and poverty-stricken population, no industrial skills and with much of the money spent abroad by politicians instead of being invested within, thus, depriving the people of any income and the capacity to make the internal market meaningful). In all of this, the scrambling world is only in Africa for its own interest; and apart from its economic forays on the continent, “China is now the biggest arms seller to sub-Saharan Africa and has defence-technology ties with 45 countries”.77 Although the West is still significantly present in Africa, but it has not matched China’s avuncular disposition to the continent. It was only President Emmanuel Macron of France that, in what was considered an attempt to weaken China’s grip on the African continent, visited the Horn of Africa in early March 2019; and while in Kenya, announced “an estimated 3 billion euros ($ 3.4 billion) worth of deals with the East African powerhouse”.78 This French assistance to Kenya was not only a confirmation of Africa’s dependency; it was a conscious attempt to counter China’s growing hegemony on the African continent. As Onyekachi Wambu wrote in New African, African governments are masquerading performance when actually they are clueless and rent-seekers; and this has raised a very strong alarm over the continent’s freedom, real independence over the sectors of its economy and even the sovereignty of its nation-states because many of its “governments have borrowed heavily to fund major Chinese financed and built infrastructure projects”.79 The fact that the Chinese finance and built these infrastructural projects attest to the narrative that the China uses its nationals instead of involving the Nigerian labour—a fact that stalled the delivery of the Lagos-Ibadan rail project because the outbreak of COVID-19 prevented the Chinese government from allowing their nationals to return to work in Africa after the Chinese New Year holiday.80 74 See “The new scramble for Africa: This time, the winners could be Africans themselves”, The Economist, March 9th 2019, p. 9. 75 Loc. Cit. 76 Loc. Cit. 77 Loc. Cit. 78 See Chanel Monteine in “Macron’s Africa visit reveals determination to weaken China’s grip on the continent”, available at https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/16/macrons-africa-visit-reveals-determ ination-to-weaken-chinas-grip-on-the-continent.html (last visited on March 16, 2019). 79 See Onyekachi Wambu in “Masquerading Africa”, New African, February 2019, p. 74, op. cit. 80 See Ian Bremmer in “The coronavirus’ blow to globalization”, Time (New York), March 16–23, 2020, p. 19, op. Cit; see also Benjamin Alade in “COVID-19 hurts Nigeria’s auto, rail projects”,

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It is a bad testimonial to Nigeria that despite its sovereignty and the running of the railways system that the British built during and after independence that it did not preserve its national capacity on railways enough to run its own affairs instead of depending on the Chinese to build its railways in the twenty-first century. But apart from being burdened by the lack of national capacity, Nigeria, like many African countries, are increasingly unable to repay the Chinese loans; “and having signed contracts they are unable to deliver on, are on the verge of ceding control of major assets such as ports, airports (in the case of Zambia) to their Chinese creditors”.81 As has already been stated above, one of schemes in the Chinese new paradigm that has heightened not just Africa’s but also a global indebtedness to China is the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) or the “Silk Road”.82 Nigeria officially entered into the BRI through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) President Buhari signed at the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in September 2018; where the Chinese President Xi Jinping asserted that Nigeria becoming a member of BRI would further strengthen China-Nigeria bilateral relations.83 Nigeria’s membership of the BRI is understandable because it is an open initiative that any country can join.84 Indeed, Nigeria can join because the initiative is beyond a geostrategic formulation. The BRI as an economic and commercial formulation that is focused on trade and infrastructure seriously interrogates Nigeria’s membership because the country is faced with internal problems of governance that transcend the fact of being enarmoured of trade, finance and infrastructure.

The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 6, 2020, p. 28; and Joke Falaju in “I’m not aware of Peterside’s sacking, says Amechi: Coronavirus outbreak stalls Lagos-Ibadan rail project”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 6, 2020, p. 37. 81 See Onyekachi Wambu in “Masquerading Africa”, New African, February 2019, p. 74, op. cit. 82 See Ken Chendo and Oseloka H. Obaze in “Chinese Silk Road: Debt peonage for Nigeria?”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, November 13, 2018, p. 19. 83 In Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia were already poised to tap into the BRI opportunity. Unfortunately, Nigeria’s endorsement of the BRI initiative was said to be limited to a few sectors, either through ignorance or lack of information. The sectors were eight and included industrial promotion, infrastructural connectivity, trade facilitation, green development, capacity building, health care, people-to-people exchange, peace and security—all of which were to be implemented through deeper exchanges and discussions between Chinese and Nigerian government institutions, business communities, think-tanks, cultural circles and others. In Asia, the BRI created the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Development Bank (AIIB) with a capital base of $ 100 billion to finance infrastructure and other related projects from which South Africa and Egypt in Africa had been tapping from. In addition, Pakistan, through the BRI, was able to strike a deal of $ 62 billion in projects scheduled along China-Pakistan Economic corridor, which was an equivalent of 21% of Pakistani Gross Domestic Product (GDP); see Isaac Taiwo in “Nigeria, others embrace Belt and Road Initiative benefits”, The Guardian (Lagos), Tuesday, March 19, 2019, p. 24. 84 See Helen Gardiner in “Belt and Road: Recreating China’s historic Silk Road and maritime trading routes”, Newsweek partnered content in association with HSBC, p. 02, link available at http://www.gbm.hsbc.com/insights/technology/china-widens-the-silk-road (read more in newsweek.com/davos-worldview), op. cit.

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Nigeria faces more debilitating problems of insecurity (especially terrorism), inadequate governance, and human rights abuses, amongst other challenges—all problems that China is ambiguous about because of Beijing’s own questionable human rights records (especially to the minority populations), its so-called policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries,85 and the issue of its secret and unguarded loans that are bereft of those basic conditionalities that ensure the loans viable utilization for the benefit of the ordinary compatriot. These are African and Nigerian problems that China cannot solve in the BRI framework because Beijing itself can certainly not deal with these issues of global significance because of its own national peculiarities, and also because it is equally an emergent nation vis-à-vis the United States and many Western nations. But the greatest poser to be posed here is this: after Nigeria’s rejection of the asymmetrical European Union’s Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) because of its risk of perpetuating the country in neo-colonialism, what perceptual formulation or ideology got President Buhari to endorse China’s BRI after viscerally detesting both the EPA and the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), even when China in comparison to the EU and the fear of the rest of African is more developed and asymmetrically oppressive? Is the answer to this poser what the Nigerian Minister Ibe Kachikwu had declared as China’s “edge over the US and the UK in Africa because it was providing what Africa needed”—the provision of unguarded loans86 ? But as has been seen in Zambia, Sri Lanka, Djibouti and other nations that are highly indebted and under China’s economic hegemony, unguarded loans are also instruments of peonage and neo-colonialism. Thus, although in geophysical terms, Nigeria is not in China’s recreated historic Silk Road and maritime trading routes that connects Asia, Europe and Africa,87 but within the openness and the economic or commercial dimension of the BRI, Nigeria’s involvement is as destructive as the regional or geostrategic. In fact, the BRI has already been likened to as an instrument of hegemony by the French President Emmanuel Macron.88 Other critics of the BRI scheme have equally elaborately observed that: Undergirding the Belt and Road Initiative is a trillion-dollar loan subvention that seeks to connect countries across continents on a trade trajectory, with China at the core. The ambitious plan involves the building of railway and road infrastructure to connect China with Central and West Asia, the Middle East and Europe (the “Belt”) and creating a 6,000km sea-route connecting China to South East Asia, Oceania and North Africa (the ‘Road”). 85 See

Agwu (2009), National Interest, International Law …, pp. 497–508, op. cit. “Why China has an edge over UK, US in Africa—Kachikwu”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, September 4, 2018, p. 8, op. cit. 87 See Helen Gardiner in “Belt and Road: Recreating China’s historic Silk Road and maritime trading routes”, Newsweek partnered content in association with HSBC, p. 02, link available at http://www.gbm.hsbc.com/insights/technology/china-widens-the-silk-road (read more in newsweek.com/davos-worldview), op. cit. 88 See “Macron endorses China’s Silk Road but warns against Hegemony”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, January 9, 2018, p. 34. 86 See

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Beneficiaries of China’s goodwill are many. So too are the countries, mostly African nations, already defaulting on their Chinese loans. The trend is deeply alarming in 2017, with more than $1 billion in debt to China. Sri Lanka handed over one of its ports to companies owned by the Chinese government. Now, Djibouti, home to the U.S. military’s main base in Africa, seems set to cede control of another key port to a Beijing-linked company. China-Nigeria relation is paradoxical and defined by two contradicting aphorisms. While it’s commonsensical that “you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth”, it is equally pragmatic to “beware of strangers bearing Greek gifts”.89

The above critique may be neo-liberal in character; but, nevertheless, the gratuitous comment of the Nigerian Minister Ibe Kachikwu aforementioned is symptomatic of Africa’s false consciousness and oblivion of China’s long-term imperialist designs on the continent. In fact, a Nigerian critic has rightly remarked that “African leaders should clearly look their gift horse in the mouth, so as not to be sold the dummy of a Trojan horse by the Chinese government”.90 It is trite knowledge that a wave of African nations are already in trouble with Chinese loans and have begun seeking to restructure their debt with China; even though Beijing has reportedly pledged at the 2018 7th FOCAC under reference that African debts from “Chinese interest-free loans due by year-end would be written off for the poorest African nations”.91 But the truth of the matter is that, contrary to the United States’ reported warning that African countries that insisted on China’s loans risked “losing control of strategic assets [like Sri Lanka that handed over commercial activities in its main southern port in the town of Hambantota to a Chinese company in 2017 as part of a plan to convert $6 billion of loans it was owing China into equity] if they cannot repay the Chinese loans”,92 many African countries are already under China’s debt entrapment. Between 2000 and 2016, China had loaned around $125 billion to the African continent of which Djibouti is one of the beneficiaries93 ; and although Djibouti is seriously denying this prospect, but the United States’ officials have warned that its strategic port could face the fate of the Sri Lankan port in the town of Hambantota that was lost to the Chinese.94 Many of these countries (like Nigeria95 ) had earlier tried to exit the debt peonage in 2005 and 2006. 89 See Ken Chendo and Oseloka H. Obaze in “Chinese Silk Road: Debt peonage for Nigeria?”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, November 13, 2018, p. 19, op. cit. 90 See Henry Boyo in “Is China Africa’s Father Xmas?”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 10, 2018, p. 32. 91 See “At FOCAC, China dismisses debt criticism”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 05, 2018, p. 38. 92 See “Do not expect debt relief, U.S. warns Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 25, 2019, p. 37, op. cit. 93 Loc. Cit. 94 Loc. Cit. 95 See “Okonjo-Iweala got Nigeria out of debt, but we’re now back there—Amina Mohammed”, Vanguard online, September 13, 2018, available https://www.vanguardngr.com/2018/09/oko njo-iweala-got-nigeria-out-of-debt-but-were-now-back-there-amina-mohammed/ (last visited on September 13, 2018). It is on record that “before 2005, Nigeria had an external debt stock of $36 billion, which had been carried over from the military years, dating back to 1985. In October

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An ex-Minister in President Buhari’s government who later became the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Amina Mohammed, sounded a stern warning against this descent to new indebtedness, especially what the Abuja (Nigeria) based Daily Trust newspaper described in its editorial as “a very high risk of blundering Western neo-colonies to a Chinese version of neo-colonialism in the decades to come”.96 But the problem of Chinese version of neo-colonialism in Africa is no longer futuristic as the Daily Trust may make it seem. Chinese neo-colonialism is squarely here now, and it is rampaging the entire continent as the Nigerian Minister Ibe Kachikwu affirmed above to Blooberg. One of the most vulnerable victims of the Chinese neo-colonialism in Africa, according to Dr. Mumbi Seraki in a Youtube post is Zambia, which she now hilariously wondered whether it will now be labeled “ZamChina” on account of now being a full Chinese colony ever since it defaulted in a couple of China’s loans, enabling Beijing to now take full control of the country’s strategic assets, including its energy utility or electricity company and its media—the Zambian Broadcasting Corporation.97 The plight of Zambia graphically illustrates what is quintessentially sub-imperialism or the imperialist tyranny of China as an emerging economy.98 In this globalizing world of paradoxes that ironically fosters convergences and fragmentations at the same time,99 a world where the indulgence in new mercantilism and the relentless pursuit of strategic advantage, domination and exploitation, amongst other forms of subjugation, is the habitual stock in trade of the developed and emerging economies, irrespective of ideological orientations,100 these nations are never out there to freeload others. Thus, China’s much trumpeted win–win cooperation, its so-called sharing of development experiences and offering Africa opportunities for national rejuvenation and prosperity101 cannot but be a deliberate ideological gimmick or ruse; for there is no free lunch in Canada. As a country that is now “a warning for other African countries” that also received debt forgiveness in 2005 and 2006 but are today on the 2005, with Okonjo-Iweala as finance minister, Nigeria and the Paris Club announced a final agreement for debt relief worth $18 billion and an overall reduction of Nigeria’s external debt stock by $30 billion. The deal was completed on April 21, 2006 when Nigeria made its final payment and its books were cleared of any Paris Club debt, bringing Nigeria’s external debt profile to just $3 billion while domestic debt was only about #1 trillion”, see Okonjo-Iweala spent years getting Nigeria out of debt, we are back in it—Buhari’s ex-minister [video], Daily Post, available at http://dailypost.ng/ 2018/09/12/okonjo-iweala-spent-years-getting-nigeria-debt-back-buharis-ex-minister/ (forwarded to me on September 14, 2018); see also Fred Aja Agwu, “International Politics of Debt Relief for Nigeria”, Alli and Ogwu (2006, 119–134). 96 See “Stop the Slide Back into Debt”, Daily Trust (Abuja) page3 Comment, Sunday, September 16, 2018, p. 3. 97 See Dr. Mumbi Seraki in https://www.facebook.com/100002560661824/posts/183463630663 1707/ (forwarded to me on September 17, 2018). 98 See Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 787–799, op. cit. 99 See Agwu (2018), Armed Drones and Globalization …, p. 267, op. cit. 100 Loc. Cit. 101 See Henry Boyo in “Is China Africa’s Father Xmas?”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 10, 2018, p. 32, op. cit.

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verge of another debt crisis, Zambia’s vulnerability to China’s imperialism began as soon as the government began to “run up too much credit”.102 The Zambian government had “embarked on a spending splurge”—building roads, hospitals, airports, doubling the civil service wage bill, and such vanity projects as the expansion of “the number of districts from 72 to 115 so as to dole out more patronage”—all extra spending completely funded by borrowing; and “roughly two-thirds of that borrowing is denominated in foreign currency and owed to Chinese creditors or Western investors who bought its Eurobonds”, about “$3bn worth of dollar bonds issued in Europe”.103 Today, “paying back these debts is putting huge pressure on Zambia’s finances”; with education that used to be the biggest item in its budget now yielding place to debt servicing as “nearly a quarter of government spending going to pay back loans”.104 Meanwhile, the deals that yielded the loans, particularly from China, were opaque; and it was not as if the money was well spent, as much of it was reportedly spend “haphazardly—or in some cases, stolen”.105 And now that Zambia has defaulted in the repayment of some of the loans, Zambia has taken over its strategic assets like the media and ZESCO—the Zambian power company.106 Today, “many Zambians resent the Chinese influence” and complain that they are locked out of the best contracts in the face of their corrupt, weak and venal government.107 As a result of the over borrowing and subsequent default in the repayment of a couple of loans, some critic now hyperbolically claim that Zambia has become the first African country to be immersed in China’s neo-colonial or imperialist tentacles in such a way that the country is now allowing the Chinese unfettered immigration; with some Chinese now even selling handkerchief and roasting corn along the road.108 In the heat of this controversy that China was luring African countries into debt traps by lending them money for massive infrastructural projects, and the concern that many of these African countries risked defaulting on these Chinese loans, Sierra Leone “cancelled a $400 million Chinese-funded project to build a new airport outside the capital, Freetown”.109 The loan was negotiated by the former Sierra Leonean President Ernest Bai Koroma before he just the country’s election; but this was in the face of the World Bank and the IMF’s warning that the airport project was going to impose a heavy 102 See

“End of the road: An increasingly authoritarian regime is pushing Zambia towards a debt crisis”, The Economist, September 15th—21st, 2018, p. 31. 103 Loc. Cit. 104 Loc. Cit. 105 Ibid, pp. 31, 32. 106 Ibid, p. 32; see also Dr. Mumbi Seraki in https://www.facebook.com/100002560661824/posts/ 1834636306631707/ (forwarded to me on September 17, 2018), op. cit. 107 See “End of the road: An increasingly authoritarian regime is pushing Zambia towards a debt crisis”, The Economist, September 15th–21st, 2018, p. 32, op. cit. 108 See Dr. Mumbi Seraki in https://www.facebook.com/100002560661824/posts/183463630663 1707/ (forwarded to me on September 17, 2018), op. cit. 109 See “Sierra Leone cancels $400 m China-funded Mamamah airport”, The Guardian (Lagos), October 11, 2018, p. 40.

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debt on the country.110 Although the airport was due to be completed in 2022, the Sierra Leonean aviation minister, Kabineh Kallon, described the project as unnecessary, insisting that the country’s current President Julius Maada Boi was rather minded to renovate the existing international airport that also needed “a bridge from the capital to Lungi because, for now, passengers can only access it by boat or helicopter.111 Sierra Leone has, thus, illustrated that China is not only leading African nations to debt peonage, it is also encouraging them into vanity projects, having lured the Ernest Bai Koroma administration into building a grand new airport with a Chinese loan, when actually what the cash-strapped country needed was to renovate the existing one and face its urgent task of channeling its scarce resources for human development. What the Chinese had done in Sierra Leone was what some American Senators had described as “predatory Chinese infrastructural lending”.112 In successfully keeping African countries in the debt peonage through this “predatory Chinese infrastructural lending”, Beijing has since emerged as “the single largest bilateral financier of infrastructure in Africa, surpassing the African Development Bank (ADB), the European Commission, the European Investment Bank, the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank and the Group of eight (G8) countries combined”.113 But in China’s denial that it was leading Africa into a debt peonage, its special envoy to Africa, Xu Jinghu, has reportedly remarked that “if we take a closer look at these African countries that are heavily in debt, China is not their main creditor”.114 But Xu Jinghu’s above rebuttal and description of the allegation that China was leading the African continent into debt traps as “senseless and baseless”115 flies in the face of the Zambian current dilemma, the dilemma in China seizing some of the strategic sectors of its public companies in the face of default in loan repayment that the Zambian government has publicly denied.116 Again, concerning the place of Nigeria in this allegation and counter allegation of debt peonage; in an external debt stock that, at the end of June 2018, stood at about $22.083, the country’s Debt Management Office (DMO) had to explain that loans from China represented only 8.5 per cent of the country’s debt, and that they were taken under concessionary terms.117 But the disavowal of the debt trap by Xu Jinghu does not address the point that the $60 billion the Chinese twice offered Africa at the 6th and 7th FOCAC in

110 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 112 Loc. Cit. 113 Loc. Cit. 114 See “At FOCAC, China dismisses debt criticism”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 05, 2018, p. 38, op. cit. 115 See “Sierra Leone cancels $400 m China-funded Mamamah airport”, The Guardian (Lagos), October 11, 2018, p. 40, op. cit. 116 Loc. Cit. 117 See Emma Ujah and Michael Eboh in “Debt owed China only 8.5% of external debt—DMO”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 12, 2018, p. 8. 111 Loc.

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South Africa and Beijing respectively [now translating to $120 billion] contribute to the overall debt burden that builds up over a long time.118 Even the Nigerian Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi himself, hinted that the federal government had embarked in talks with China for a loan of $6 billion to fund the construction of the Ibadan-Kano rail line project.119 Africa is being led by the nose into the Chinese debt trap. Even if we are to concede the fact that China at the moment is not Africa’s main creditor; but the West that is the main African creditor did not give the loans in one day. The loans built up with time, just as the Chinese are building up theirs at the moment. Unless Africa ceases and desists from consumption and vanity projects, the loans would be a great burden to its present and future generations. China is ostensibly feeding African leaders’ prodigality because “some of these loans were never formally appropriated; and they were, therefore, not subject to legislative scrutiny”.120 For instance, in early March 2020, some Nigerian stakeholders expressed worries about the secrecy that becloud the Chinese loans and the manner of the execution of the projects attached to the loans—with the situation rife with allegations that massive corruption and the blatant violation of Nigerian laws and due process were practiced by the Chinese and the Buhari administration, so much so that the situation was poised to pit the National Assembly with the Executive arm of government as the matter was to be raised in the Senate.121 The stakeholders were concerned that “the terms of the contracts signed with Chinese firms and the agreements for most of the loans obtained are shrouded in secrecy”.122 This was as well as the fact that the Chinese “firms are the sole executors of most of the projects”, with materials and skills imported from China in such a way that the practice undermine local Nigerian industries and jobs.123 The cost of the projects in the Buhari administration’s contract agreements with China are also grossly inflated “because most of the projects allegedly did not follow extant regulations, particularly through the Public Procurement Bureau (PPB) and the Public Procurement Act, which enforce tendering or competitive bidding process”— an opacity that hindered monitoring and evaluation because the contracts were hidden

118 See

“At FOCAC, China dismisses debt criticism”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 05, 2018, p. 38, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 119 See Emma Ujah and Michael Eboh in “Debt owed China only 8.5% of external debt—DMO”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 12, 2018, p. 8, op. cit. 120 See Henry Boyo in “Is China Africa’s Father Xmas?”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 10, 2018, p. 32, op. cit, op. cit. 121 See Kingsley Jeremiah in “Stakeholders demand terms for $47b Chinese loan, projects execution: How they are shroulded in secrecy; FEC accused of taking over procurement process”, The Guardian (Lagos), Tuesday, March 3, 2020, p. 1, op. cit. 122 Loc. Cit. 123 Loc. Cit.

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or concealed.124 This was happening “at a time when the government made anticorruption fight its focus”; but the prevailing secrecy of the contracts indicated that the Nigerian government lacked transparency and accountability—a situation that was made worse by the passivity amongst Nigerians.125 It was feared that the situation was not only disregarding the Procurement Act, it was also fuelling a regime of secrecy that would affect the future of Nigeria because “all the contracts with the Chinese don’t go through public procurement law” and, therefore, difficult to monitor.126 In fact, the none involvement of the PPB was an evidence of the lack of public policy institutionalization process in Nigeria, which was unbecoming of a state or government that pressing it upon its agencies and parastatals to get serious about the public procurement processes and accountability. The import of the above was that the government was not practicing or leaving by its precepts. Although much of Nigeria’s loans from China remained secrete and unstreamlined; yet President Buhari boasted at the FOCAC in Beijing that the country had benefited from sinking China’s over $5bn loans into projects like the 180 km rail line that connects Abuja and Kaduna; the upgrading of airport terminals, the Lagos-Kano rail line; roads rehabilitation, water supplies, the Zungeru hydroelectric power project; and the fiber cables for internet and other infrastructures.127 Unfortunately, apart from the $500 million Abuja-Kaduna rail line that was commissioned in July 2018,128 many of these projects were illusory and only used for political deception. The Nigerian railways that the British built on a narrow gauge (depriving the country of fast trains because a ride from Lagos to Kano was taking a whole day or more) were areas that the Chinese would have helped Nigeria to transform; but that transformation was marred by the corruption in Nigeria.129 It was apparently because of corruption and the fact that some of the money vanishes in the pockets of bureaucrats that China, upon realizing that some of the loans go into non-existent projects or deployed for consumption that it once warned about vanity projects during the 2018 7th FOCAC in Beijing. But this notwithstanding, China has continued to unstintingly oblige and even spoon-feed many African governments, even when countries like Kenya were unraveling massive corruption in loans and contracts on a $3.2 billion standard gauge railway, a heavily inflated contract cost that was led by China.130 In addition, a civil society organization—the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI)—had alerted Africans 124 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 126 Loc. Cit. 127 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “FOCAC: Nigeria has benefited from over $5bn projects— Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 05, 2018, p. 9. 128 Loc. Cit. 129 Sanu (2016, pp. 317–318). 130 See Kingsley Jeremiah in “Stakeholders demand terms for $47b Chinese loan, projects execution: How they are shrouded in secrecy; FEC accused of taking over procurement process”, The Guardian (Lagos), Tuesday, March 3, 2020, pp. 1, 6, op. cit. 125 Loc.

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to the fact that resource-backed loans hovering around $164 billion with 77 per cent coming from two Chinese banks, China Development Bank (CDB) and the China Eximbank, were shrouded in secrecy and crippling debt levels in developing countries.131 Although this civil society revelation had put the Nigerian Ministry of transportation under tension, especially in the costing for most contracts for the railways in Nigeria,132 the Nigerian Minister Ibe Kachikwu still went into an overdrive in defence of Beijing’s African diplomacy. Kachikwu enthused during the 7th FOCAC in Beijing that the tension (trade war) between the United States and China would guarantee that oil prices continue to rise rather than diminish; reportedly gloating in addition, that Nigeria was going to “sign a $223 million financing package for the Mambilla power plant and some agreements for infrastructure investments in Kano, Lagos and Port Harcourt airports”.133 So, holding brief for China, this Nigerian Minister summed that “China is going to continue to grow”, insisting that its “population guarantees that, the economy guarantees that, the relationships they are building guarantees that; what is opening up in terms of small consumption nations in Africa also guarantees that”.134 This gratuitous display of zealotry is a real indication that in this West/East rivalry, China has suddenly become a force to be reckoned with, not only in its Asian neighbourhood but also in Africa. During the 7th FOCAC meeting in Beijing under reference, China offered another $60 billion in financing for Africa, even though it also warned against “vanity projects”,135 an indication that African countries had been indulging in vanity. Although China is reputedly not interfering in Africa’s internal affairs; although it asks its firms to respect the local people and the environment where they operate, and although it does not impose its own will on Africa but only allegedly glories in sharing development experiences and offering Africa opportunities for national rejuvenation and prosperity (unlike the West with their superior posturing in their transactions with people from the “dark continent”136 ); but for the first time, China was insisting on some kind of conditionalities for its assistance to Africa.137 There were also indications that Beijing was equally appearing to evince the determination to ensure sustainability by extending green technology and resisting 131 Ibid,

p. 6. Cit. 133 See Why China has an edge over UK, US in Africa—Kachikwu”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, September 4, 2018, p. 8, op. cit. 134 Loc. Cit. 135 See Vera Sam Anyagafu in “China offers another $60 bn to Africa; says no to vanity projects; trade volume now $116 bn—Xiaoliang”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, September 4, 2018, p. 45, op. cit. 136 See Henry Boyo in “Is China Africa’s Father Xmas?”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 10, 2018, p. 32, op. cit. 137 See Vera Sam Anyagafu in “China offers another $60 bn to Africa; says no to vanity projects; trade volume now $116 bn—Xiaoliang”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, September 4, 2018, p. 45, op. cit. 132 Loc.

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the prodigality of the continent’s leaders through the rejection of vanity projects.138 But the argument about China’s green technology here is not in synch with its practices in the BRI, particularly in Australia that has expressed some concern about the long-term national security implication of the Chinese infrastructural project.139 The WWF had equally produced a report that detailed the potential degradation of the ecosystems and biodiversity conservation by the BRI.140 In this emergent new geopolitical landscape in which China is an active participant, many African countries have endorsed or become parties to the BRI and its attendant lack of green technology.

6.2 Pompeo and Tillerson Alarmed and ‘Going in All Guns Blazing’ On the African continent, China’s “aspirations and conduct” have emerged from that of being “quiescence to open activism” because since its domestic reforms process that started in 1978, and now “backed by the world largest foreign exchange reserves and a desire to seek out long-term strategic positions in key resource markets”, its “Maoist faith and revolutionary altruism have given way to the consciously self-interested commercial entrepreneurs and advocates of forms of market capitalism”.141 China now has a serious and “specific geo-strategic” foreign policy rationale in Africa, characterized by a “dualist approach—multilateral through FOCAC and bilateral in terms of implementation of specific forms of cooperation and investment” and other concerns.142 A two-way China-Africa trade is now surging; and China is aggressively investing in key sectors like energy (in Angola, Sudan and Uganda) and mining (in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC) across the African continent.143 Even in telecommunications, the Chinese company, Huawei, has a very strong presence in Africa.144 But more importantly, with the agency of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations platform—a very significant organization of emerging powers/economies that, with a profound sense of entitlement, is in pursuit of development and global governance as well as seeking in what might result in the risk of the “Thucydides trap”, the reordering of the global power configurations in 138 Loc.

cit. Kumuda Simpson in “Just how green is the Belt and Road?”, the interpreter, available at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/how-green-belt-and-road (last visited on September 9, 2019), op. cit. 140 Loc. Cit. 141 Alden and Chichava (2014, p. xiii). 142 Ibid, p. xv. 143 Ibid, p. xiii. 144 Loc. Cit. 139 See

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ways and manner that would reflect global diversities—China’s inherent reformist impulse is a source of anxiety to the United States.145 Amid President Trump’s vulgar epithet for Africa, the United States on the contrary, had also begun discussing military cuts in Africa and the tightening of visa rules for Africans.146 The United States’reduction or adjustment of its military presence in Africa was even amid the concern that it was callously imperiling the fight against radical jihadists on the continent.147 Although it pretended that it was not walking away but still engaged, the first US troops change in Africa was to “see part of one infantry unit, around 800 troops, replaced with a similar number of military trainers and advisors to support local forces in spotlight African countries”.148 Washington also depended especially on the French (through the 4,500-strong Barkhane force in the Sahel149 ) and its various African partners in West Africa and the Sahel in field operations against terrorists.150 This was happening at a time the Pentagon was also wary of the vacuum it was creating for the Chinese—a vacuum that could give the Chinese “strategically valuable footholds” on the African continent.151 But more importantly, fervently reacting to the United States ‘concern about China in Africa, Kaj Larsen wrote in the National Review that: The second reason to keep ties in Africa strong is simple: China. Today, China is the elephant in the room in every conversation about Africa’s future. China’s public and private sectors have poured billions into the continent, the Chinese government has an incredible intelligence apparatus in the region, and the country now maintains a vise-like grip on mining interests, roads, and countless infrastructure projects continent-wide. If the U.S. takes itself out of Africa, the Chinese will fill the vacuum — and they will do so in ways that are harmful to both U.S. strategic interests and Africa’s long-term interests.152

It was against this background that during his first and only diplomatic trip to Africa not long before he was fired from the job by the mercurial President Trump,

145 Zondi

(2014, p. 5). “US Secretary of State Pompeo makes first trip to Africa”, vanguardngr.com, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/02/us-secretary-of-state-pompeo-makes-first-trip-to-africa/ (last visited on February 14, 2020). 147 See “US begins withdrawal of troops in Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, February 14, 2020, p. A3. 148 Loc. Cit. 149 See Christina Okello in “France, G5 Sahel leaders pledge to boost military cooperation at Pau Summit, RFI, available at https://amp.rfi.fr/en/africa/20200114-france-macron-g5-leaders-pledgeboost-military-cooperation-sahel-summit-terrorism (last visited on January 15, 2020). 150 See “US begins withdrawal of troops in Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, February 14, 2020, p. A3, op. cit. 151 Loc. Cit. 152 See Kaj Larsen in “The U.S. must remain in Africa’s fight against Boko Haram”, National Review, August 21, 2019, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-must-remain-africa-fight103021175.html (last visited on Friday, 23 August 2019). 146 See

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the United States Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, reportedly came, practically “going in all guns blazing” as he strongly criticized China’s role in Africa.153 Amid the prevailing notion that President Trump’s acerbic remarks about Africa were indicative of the United States’ government’s neglect of the African continent,154 Rex Tillerson warned that African countries were prone to forfeiting their sovereignty whenever they accepted loans from China of the Eastern bloc—which is incidentally the African continent’s biggest trading partner at the moment.155 Meanwhile, it was because of the obvious fact that Africa was increasingly turning to China that Tillerson came calling, reportedly “to bolster” his country’s economic and security alliance156 with African countries that his President, Trump, had grouped among “Shithole” countries whose citizens’ migration to the United States must be limited or even out rightly stopped. Apart from Tillerson’s visit that was viewed as a “compensation” for Trump’s negative attitude to the continent, the head of the US African command, General Thomas Waldhauser, had earlier on March 6, 2018, warned the House Armed Services Committee that the Chinese may have taken over the port of Djibouti, which also services US military operations.157 Meanwhile, although many countries—China, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the US—have bases in Djibouti, Djibouti is reputedly “China’s only overseas military base”; but the US was fretting that because China’s base in Djibouti has a strategic value (as it is at the apex of some key international trade routes), Beijing is also using the base to build up its capacity, using its base there as “a good opportunity for reconnaissance”.158 The fear of China was, therefore, strongly in the background when Secretary Tillerson warned that because China “encouraged dependency, utilize corrupt deals and endangered Africa’s natural resources” … it is important that African countries carefully consider the terms of those agreements and not forfeit their sovereignty”.159 He contented further that Chinese investments “do not bring significant job creation locally”; and that the Chinese loans are so structured in a way that African countries “get into trouble” because they can lose control by default of not only their resources but also their own infrastructure.160 The stigmatization of Chinese loans is 153 See

Stephen Chan in “China/Africa: New departures; both China and the United States are rethinking their long-term commitment to their partners in Africa, as the rhetorical and other rivalries between the two superpowers heat up”, The African Report, # 99, April 2018, p. 21, op. cit. 154 Loc. Cit. 155 See “Africa should avoid forfeiting sovereignty to China over loans—Tillerson”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 9, 2018, p. 40. 156 See “Be wary of Chinese loans, US warns Nigeria, others”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 9, 2018, p. 9. 157 See Stephen Chan in “China/Africa: New departures; both China and the United States are rethinking their long-term commitment to their partners in Africa, as the rhetorical and other rivalries between the two superpowers heat up”, The African Report, # 99, April 2018, p. 21, op. cit. 158 Loc. Cit. 159 See “Be wary of Chinese loans, US warns Nigeria, others”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 9, 2018, p. 9, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 160 Loc. Cit.

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a favourite pastime of the West, which also contends that although “China is one of the world’s largest providers of foreign aid; it has a reputation as a rogue donor” with abundant stories “of shoddy projects, low environmental standards and mistreatment of workers”.161 For the fear of China, Mike Pompeo, who immediately succeeded Rex Tellerson as Secretary of State, also embarked on a trip to three African countries—Senegal, Angola, and Ethiopia—countries that were reportedly chosen for the visit because of “their leaders’attachment to democratic values in a continent that had [allegedly] been backsliding in recent years”.162 It was Mike Pompeo’s first visit to sub-Sahara Africa, which was determined “to lay out a positive vision for US cooperation with the continent where China has been increasingly active”.163 Because of this, the “major theme” of Pompeo’s visit was “the growing role of China, which has poured money into the continent as part of its global blitz of infrastructure spending”.164 Meanwhile, granted that the US was trying to combat China, Russia and even Iran on the African continent it had technically disparaged with discriminatory visa rules and immigrant visa exclusion for even Nigeria that is the most populous black nation, critics thought that the Pompeo trip was devoid of ‘strategy’ in the face of Washington’s exponential reduction of its security and aid investments because “you can’t just check the box of having an Africa policy by stopping in a few countries on a big continent and then call that a strategy”.165 These critics insisted that the Trump administration was trying belatedly to set “a positive tone on the continent” and, therefore, risked “getting caught up in a sort of China-China-China dynamic”; even when it needed “to convey to African leaders that Africa is genuinely a priority for the United States”.166 At the end of the “whistle-stop tour” of the three African countries, the fact that the US was really enamoured of the in-road China had made on the continent was evident when Pompeo (like Tellerson) in a speech in Addis Ababa (and without mentioning China by name) sounded an alarm about what he described as “empty promises”—that African “countries should be wary of authoritarian regimes with empty promises” because “they breed corruption, dependency” and “run the risk that the prosperity and sovereignty and progress that Africa so needs and desperately wants won’t happen”.167 161 See “Rogue to vogue: A study of China’s foreign aid reassesses the country’s reputation as a bad

donor”, The Economist, October 14th–20th, 2017, p. 49. “US Secretary of State Pompeo makes first trip to Africa”, vanguardngr.com, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/02/us-secretary-of-state-pompeo-makes-first-trip-to-africa/ (last visited on February 14, 2020), op. cit. 163 Loc. Cit. 164 Loc. Cit. 165 Loc. Cit. 166 Loc. Cit. 167 See “Pompeo caps three-nation Africa tour with veiled swipe at China”, Aljazeera.com, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/pompeo-caps-nation-africa-tour-veiled-swipe-china200219142439604.html (last visited on Thursday, February 20, 2020); see also “Pompeo ends 162 See

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Before the trip, it was hoped that Mike Pompeo would be successful in promoting Africa as a US priority, particularly because when his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, visited Africa in March 2018, he was reportedly “unusually buoyant in Africa but the trip was not auspicious” as President Trump fired him on his return.168 Although Pompeo hailed the free market and urged Africa to liberalize (even though his boss, Trump was attacking liberalism and promoting America First), critics believed that he did not achieve much in undermining or upending China’s standing on the continent, more so because of President Trump’s disparaging comments and hostile policies (including travel ban and budget cuts on security deployments in the face of radical insurgents) toward Africa.169

6.3 Fear of the Political Culture of Authoritarian Politics There is also the criticism from the West that there is a huge risk of China infesting Africa with its political culture of authoritarian politics. China’s political reputation of being a security state—the political atmosphere in Beijing in which political stability takes precedence over political reforms and liberalization—is of utmost concern to the critics.170 This political culture of authoritarianism—embedded in the Chinese leaders’ crave for economic benefit in reforms associated with open societies without the political risks171 —is exemplified by President Xi Jinping’s socalled “new normal”,172 so-called because it is an aberration by liberal democratic standards. For the Western critic, apart from China’s “new normal” or concentration of power in Xi Jinping clearly putting succession and long-term stability in an open question, it also denies Chinese politics the necessary checks and balances; such that because almost all decisions will require the personal involvement or imprint of President Xi Jinping, any error by him will persist because Chinese officials will be afraid of “getting crosswise with their boss”.173 China’s disavowal of the open society while paradoxically seeking to reap its benefits is the type of political behaviour that critics of Sino-African relations fear Africa tour, warns about China’s empty promises”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, February 20, 2020, p. 42. 168 See “US Secretary of State Pompeo makes first trip to Africa”, vanguardngr.com, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/02/us-secretary-of-state-pompeo-makes-first-trip-to-africa/ (last visited on February 14, 2020), op. cit. 169 See “Pompeo caps three-nation Africa tour with veiled swipe at China”, Aljazeera.com, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/pompeo-caps-nation-africa-tour-veiled-swipe-china200219142439604.html (last visited on Thursday, February 20, 2020), op. Cit. 170 See Richard Haass in “Xi Jinping’s Dilemma, Time (New York), November 13, 2017, p. 21. 171 Loc. Cit. 172 See “The world most powerful man: Xi Jinping now has more clout than Donald Trump; the world should be wary”, The Economist, October 14th–20th 2017, p. 11, op. cit. 173 See Richard Haass in “Xi Jinping’s Dilemma, Time (New York), November 13, 2017, p. 21, op. cit.

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that African leaders risk getting from Beijing; and this political behaviour having been described as “a recipe for paralysis”,174 Africa clearly can ill-afford it. So, it is against this background that there is no doubt that although Africa’s liaison with China has its benefits, it also has its liabilities. Thus, between the United States and China, Africa is between the devil and the deep blue sea. If, with the Chinese loans Africa can lose its resources and infrastructure by default and ultimately their sovereignty, thereby fostering the continent’s dependency, the same logic also applies with respect to Africa’s relationship with the West because by imposing economic orthodoxy that undermines Africa’s institutions, the United States-led West is also fostering Africa’s dependency and loss of sovereignty. The economic orthodoxy that the West has continued to foist on Africa and the rest of the world is “the widely accepted neo-liberal view of economics [that is] based on classical market driven principles”.175 The United States is the dominant world power since the end of the Second World War and has been responsible for the promotion of this neo-liberal orthodoxy, so much so that the collapse of the Soviet Union and its state-centric Socialist system has made neo-liberalism and its freemarket liberalization tenet “the undisputed traditional or conventional approach to economic growth and development adopted by countries around the world”.176 The neo-liberal economic framework is particularly perilous for Africa because, as one of the conditionalities for Western aid or loans, it is usually attached to democratization, which creates a problem of Babel of voices in yet to be institutionally established African countries. In fact, the exceptional case of a successful neo-liberal economic experiment, the case where it transformed a Third World to a First World, was in Singapore; and this was due to the role of the Lee Kuan Yew leadership177 ; and even at that, that Island nation was not democratic.

6.4 China’s Post-Modernism Apes “Francafrique”, Not ‘Father Christmas’ The United States may be fussy about China’s relationship with Africa today; but there was, paradoxically, a time the West, particularly the United States, blocked China from the United Nations and all the associated gains of membership, like financial and technical assistance, thus, leading Beijing’s interest in Africa to peak, not just for the ideological reasons of trying to aid some African leaders like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah to realize their revolutionary ambitions on the continent, but also to court the African group and secure admission to the UN.178 Curiously, when 174 Loc.

Cit. (2006, p. 1), note 2. 176 Loc. Cit. 177 Ibid, p. 3. 178 Sanu (2016, pp. 310–311). 175 White

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China was eventually admitted to the United Nations and regained the embrace of the West, it turned its attention to America and even became fascinated by Japan, making African Ambassadors at the time in Peking to fill the chill as they were no longer receiving the enthusiastic support of the Chinese government that had hitherto courted them.179 It was then that China reignited or ignored the recrudescence of its racism toward the African, in which, “in their folklore, black is associated with evil or the devil, and anything black is supposed to portray a bad omen”.180 This situation devastated many Africans in China, especially the student population, some of which had to abandon their studies and return home because “they couldn’t cope with the hardship, particularly the deprivation and lack of social contact which foreign [African] students generally were subjected to”.181 Now, a rising China is courting Africa again with a massive infrastructural intervention because it is vying for space with the West, especially the United States, in a manner that might risk the “Thucydides trap”. It will not be surprising if, after attaining its objectives once again, Beijing ditches or turns its back on Africa again. Until then, it must not be assumed that China is evincing a post-modernist rather than a Morgenthau Plan towards Africa. The attribution of the post-modernist attitude to China in its relationship with African countries will be the natural proclivity of the romanticist analysts in that relationship, not that of pessimists and the cautiously optimistic, the latter being fully aware that there is no free lunch in Canada, as the saying goes. China has an estimated population of about 1.3 billion, meaning that it has many mouths to feed. This is one of the reasons that make Beijing to continuously lay claim to Third World status. Thus, a country that has so many mouths to feed cannot afford to be playing “a father Christmas” (an avuncular disposition) to African and indeed all countries, both in Asia and beyond. There must be something in it for Beijing that encourages it to embark on the massive infrastructural intervention in Africa. Of course, Africa has a surfeit of natural resources that China need to fuel and sustain its gigantic economic transformation. Beijing may be in routine denial of its Morgenthau/imperialist (or sub-imperialist182 ) policies in Africa and beyond, but there is no doubt that vis-à-vis the West, it is hunting with the hound and running with the hare; in fact, it is enjoying the better (if not the best) of two worlds—the First World and the Third World. With Africa’s unenviable position at the rung of the global developmental ladder, it has been at the butt of global and now Chinese exploitation, no thanks to the absence of post-modernist attitude and the prevalence of the Morgenthau policy with all its concomitant imperialist character. Like “Francafrique”, “Chinafrique” has become a neologism in Sino-African relations; a kind of metaphor for the exploitation and impoverishment of the continent. Unfortunately for France today, instead of abating

179 Ibid,

p. 311. Cit. 181 Ibid, pp. 312, 313, 314. 182 See Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 787–797, op. cit. 180 Loc.

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and assuming a post-modernist disposition, this “Janus-faced entity [Francafrique]— one African, the other French” has not only become “the ultimate symbol of a confiscated, perverted [African] sovereignty … “it is currently begetting little monsters … every now and then, such as Chinafrique and even Canadafrique”.183 Of the two little monsters aforementioned (Chinafrique and Canadafrique), Chinafrique is the most intriguing because it gives a lie to China’s diplomatic claim to co-prosperity, mutual respect, “win–win” and “common destiny” in its relationship, not just with its immediate neighbours in South Asia, but also with African countries,184 a claim trumpeted for the umpteenth time during the FOCAC meeting in South Africa.185

6.5 China’s Subversion of Democracy and Good Governance The Sino-African relations ought to be approached with a cautious optimism. It does not matter that China is into its so-called very aggressive infrastructural transformation of many African countries; after all, the West at the outset of colonialism also built infrastructure in Africa to enable the facilitation of their selfish objective of natural resources exploitation and transportation. In fact, because of the Uranium (ore) the United States was getting from the Congolese mine called Shinkolobwe, “a huge amount of money was pumped into building a processing plant near Shinkolobwe and the World Bank extended $70 m in loans to Belgium for the improvement of the Congolese transportation infrastructure to facilitate the export of the ore”.186 So, the Chinese have, of course, simply discovered that these colonial infrastructures are not only outdated, these infrastructure are also in a state of atrophy and needed reinvention; hence, Beijing’s decision to embark of the infrastructural transformation of the continent to achieve the same objective as their Western competitors. Even when many African countries were unable to finance these infrastructural projects, China turned to the oil-for-infrastructure deals. China may not be towing the part of the West’s Washington Consensus with all the throttling conditionalities; it may not be trying to fashion Africa after its own image as the West does; and it may not be imposing its lessons on democracy on the continent, but it is no less in neocolonial or imperialist design for the continent, especially with much of its generosities that are at times clearly subversive, like in giving unconditional loans that end up in the pockets of corrupt bureaucrats. 183 See Boubacar Boris Diop in “Francafrique: A brief history of a scandalous world”, New African,

October 2016, p. 43, op. cit. Parentheses mine. “A ham-fisted hegemon: Despite its economic and military might, China lacks the finesse to shape Asia to its liking”, The Economist, September 24th 2016, p. 50, op. cit. 185 See Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 322–333, op. cit. 186 See Susan Williams in “Congolese uranium and the Cold War”, New African, January 2017, p. 25. 184 See

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An example of these Chinese loans that are not accompanied by any strings or conditionalities was illustrated in 2007 by the $9 billion Beijing granted the Nigerian government to rebuild its entire train system with no strings like the requirement for reforms, thus, causing Nigeria to set aside, a $5 it was hitherto negotiating with the World Bank.187 By giving African countries loans without any control or conditionalities, Beijing is not helping these African countries to build institutional norms that will enable them engage effectively in international relations; not just with China, but also with the rest of the world. Meanwhile, African nations cannot even engage China with the development of the appropriate democratic and governance institutions that can enable them tackle China’s undemocratic tendencies and beneficially govern and protect their system and actor’ goals.188 The reason for this failure on the part of African states is because Africa borrowed Western democracy and, thus, has a dependent, dysfunctional and predatory democratic culture. For instance, according to a Nigerian critic: Mali, the third largest producer of gold in Africa, with huge deposits of uranium, bauxite, phosphates, manganese, iron ore, limestone, oil and gas, is a rich country with very poor, desperate people. Its last ten years of gold boom has translated to more poverty, infrastructural decay, homelessness and huge out-of-school children. These have been driven by a greedy political leadership, vulture-multinational corporations, rampaging terrorist groups and opportunistic foreign troops. The country with a small population of 14 million has over one million of its men, women and children slaving it out in gold mines for a minimum 12-hour daily labour and a wage reward barely enough to guarantee their continued survival.189

It is for this kind of predatory governmental situation that exists in Mali that Africa is reckoned to only comprise unaccountable “gatekeeper states” that prized loyalty over competence, controlled the poor with handouts and threats, controlled access to foreign aid, receipts from natural resource exports and taxes on trade (not income taxes)190 ; a continent that is notorious for “electoral authoritarianism”; and a continent where electoral authoritarianism is facilitated or promoted with the aid of patronage networks (patrimonialism) or the so-called “stomach infrastructure”.191 In fact, this “electoral authoritarianism” was the basis of a protest in Mali because, according to the Nigerian critic aforementioned: The masses in Mali are no longer ready to be governed the old way or be raped by their leaders in the name of democracy. They no longer want to see their children starve, their young ones killed, their votes discounted, elections rigged and victors imposed. Most importantly, the Malians are tired of a life of misery and want, and an economic system that stores their earnings in foreign banks, and their huge wealth looted by transnational corporations. … 187 See

Fareed Zakaria (2008), The Post-American World, England, AllenLane, p. 117. Agwu (2009), National Interest, International Law …, pp. 1–2, op. Cit. 189 See Owei Lakemfa in “Mali: African leaders leave leprosy to cure scabies”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 28, 2020, p. 17. 190 See “Democracy in Africa: Generation game; Across the continent, young protesters are standing up to aging autocrats”, The Economist, March 7th–13th 2020, p. 32, op. Cit. 191 Loc. cit; for more on “stomach infrastructure”, see Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, p. 70, op. cit. 188 See

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When an elected government subverts the will of the people, rig elections, is fraudulent, becomes a liability, rejects the sovereignty of the people and is manifestly incapable of governing the spaces of the country, it ceases to be a government. Democracy, even in its most grotesque form, is not supposed to be a criminal enterprise in which all that counts is not the essence, but the motions of elections, the pretence of a parliament, the presence of a judiciary that does not dispense justice and an executive that appropriates the will of the people and maintains power by state terror. Africa runs a Western-style democracy imposed on it by Europeans …192

Amongst others, the foregoing are the characteristics of “electoral authoritarianism” that is imposed in Africa; and, unfortunately, “China is the most influential” in this imposition, more so when “it lends more money and sells more arms to subSahara Africa than any other country”, while the Communist Party runs courses for Africa’s ruling parties.193 In fact, it has been argued that there are also concern in many African countries that the Chinese monumental projects are not translating into jobs for the teeming African population of young people; and that although the domestic governments in Africa should be held responsible for this problem; but the fact that the Chinese government is close to these governments, and has in most cases become their enablers, is increasingly alienating the Chinese from the people and popularly exacerbating the narrative of China as the new colonial master.194 It goes without saying that the Chinese are adapt in their apparent subversion of democracy and good governance in Africa for as long as (like the French in Francafrique aforementioned) they have their way with the complicit African leaders; although they are always pleading their policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other countries, even when being unwittingly complicit in human rights abuses in the Darfur region of Sudan,195 or when they are delivering arms to Zimbabwe’ Robert Mugabe amidst a heated 2008 post-election crisis.196 China’s inability to encourage good governance in Africa’s management of resources is worse when it is considered that many African countries like Nigeria still have huge infrastructural gaps; and that their trade with Beijing is still not just unbalanced but also shorn of any modest or “low-cost manufacturing”; and this is in relation to the Chinese’s “high-tech manufacturing” (that is, while China exports finished goods to Africa, African countries’ export to China are replete with primary commodities, mainly in oil and gas).197

192 See

Owei Lakemfa in “Mali: African leaders leave leprosy to cure scabies”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 28, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. 193 See “Democracy in Africa: Generation game; Across the continent, young protesters are standing up to aging autocrats”, The Economist, March 7th–13th 2020, p. 32, op. cit. 194 See Alaba Ogunsanwo (2019), “Nigeria and the BRICS under the Administration of President Muhammadu Buhari—2015–2019”, A paper presented at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs’ (NIIA) “One-Day Conference on Nigeria’ Foreign Policy under the Administration of President Muhammadu Buhari (2015–2019”, Thursday, January 31, 2019, pp. 43–44. Unpublished. 195 See Agwu (2009), National Interest, International Law …, pp. 497–508, op. cit. 196 Ibid, p. 43, note 147. 197 Sanu (2016, p. 318), op. cit.

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For Nigeria in particular, the above unequal situation exists, despite the fact that both countries (Nigeria and Ghana) have a long history of engagement in trade and infrastructural upgrade, especially concerning the infrastructural dimension or Nigeria’s talk with China about improving Nigeria’s railways that date back to Nigeria’s Second Republic198 ; yet, today, and irrespective of the 2007 $9 billion unconditional loan aforementioned, Nigeria’s railway system is still antediluvian, the rail lines having been “built on a narrow gauge” that “the British left behind”, making it impossible “to have fast trains operate on them”, and leaving Nigeria “in a situation where a ride from Lagos to Kano could take a whole day or more”.199 So, talking about governance, the question then is, what happened to the Chinese interventions in Nigeria’s railways over the years, especially the 2007 loans under reference? Of course, as expected, it will not be implausible that the money vanished into the pockets of the supervising Nigerian bureaucrat. The money vanished into the hands of bureaucrats because the Chinese contracts or agreements with the Nigerian governments do not enjoy any legislative oversight as they also buried in secrecy and do not follow extant regulations like the Public Procurement Act and all the requirements of transparency and accountability.200 Concerning the Buhari administration in particular, as reported by The Guardian newspaper: The Federal Government in 2016 signed a $5.1 billion Kano- Kaduna and Port HarcourtCalabar rail contracts; in 2018, the country signed a $6.7 billion for Ibadan – Kano rail; it signed in 2019, a deal worth $1.488 billion for Lagos – Ibadan rail and again in 2019 signed another loan for the construction of $3.9 billion Abuja – Warri rail.201

These contracts excluded Nigeria’s local contractors because, according to the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Chibuike Amechi, the Chinese were financing the projects through the CCECC and, therefore, the Chinese had a 100 per cent execution right on the projects in such a way that undermined local industries and jobs.202 Because the government’s borrowings “were fraudulent, reckless and irresponsible” as “the loans were devoid of prudent management”, the argument that was raised against the government was that “if there is a proposal from any part of the world that undermines accountability and transparency, [Nigeria] should not encourage it as a country”.203 The Federal Government was supposed to defy the culture of secrecy with the Chinese and “make details of contracts and loans available to show commitment to transparency and open data agreement” as “there is the need for the citizens to see the terms and conditions”.204 But the Nigerian government defied this 198 Ibid,

pp. 317–318. p. 317. 200 See Kingsley Jeremiah in “Stakeholders demand terms for $47b Chinese loan, projects execution: How they are shrouded in secrecy; FEC accused of taking over procurement process”, The Guardian (Lagos), Tuesday, March 3, 2020, pp. 1, 6, op. cit. 201 Ibid, p. 6. 202 Ibid, pp. 1, 6. 203 Ibid, p. 6. Parenthesis mine. 204 Loc. Cit. 199 Ibid,

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expectation when the Senate approved President Buhari’s $22.7b loan request for infrastructural development without a thorough debate on every item (including the exclusion of the South-East region from the infrastructural projects205 ) in the request in order to allow Nigerians the opportunity to know why the loan was approved.206 But more calamitously, the Jonathan government had on July 18, 2012, “approved a $1bn Chinese loan for the modernization of the entire [rail] project”, in which the then Minister of Transport, Idris Umar, revealed that the construction would be undertaken by China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation Ltd (CCECC)”.207 But in October 2016, “just 10 years after Nigeria famously concluded a debt deal with the Paris Club” (in 2005 “by paying off $12 billion so that $18 billion in debt could be wiped out”208 ), President Buhari again (with Nigeria’s debt profile already #16.29 trillion, representing a whopping “$61.7 billion at #283/$1 exchange rate”) began seeking about $30bn in new foreign loans (from the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Japan International Co-operation Agency, the Islamic Development Bank, and China Eximbank) principally for infrastructure development between 2016 and 2018, a three-year period.209 And, according to some critic, “rail talk [featured] highly in this plan, with $2.4bn being spent on the Lagos-Kano modernization project, $1.3bn on the Lagos-Ibadan segment and $1.1bn on the Kano-Kaduna”.210 To worsen the contradiction, the Minister of Transportation under the Buhari government, Chibuike Rotimi Amechi, “signed two contracts with the same CCECC worth $5.1bn for the construction and modernization of [the entire] rail lines in the country, with the Kano-Kaduna component worth $1.68bn”, another $1.1bn on the same project”.211 Meanwhile, “as part of a $3bn loan President Jonathan signed in Beijing in July 2013 [negotiated earlier in 2012 by Finance Minister OkonjoIweala and touted to be used to “complete some people-oriented projects”], CCECC was also supposed to build the Abuja light rail, now apparently renamed “Mass Rail 205 See

John Akubo, Azimazi Momoh Jimoh, Segun Olaniyi and Femi Adekoya in “Uproar as Senate approves Buhari’s $22.7b loan request: PDP, rights group, others, condemn approval; OPS expresses worry over nation’s ability to pay …”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 6, 2020, p, 6; see also Henry Umoru in “$22.7bn loan: S-East NASS Caucus kicks, bemoans exclusion of the zone; Meets Senate President, Speaker”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 13, 2020, p. 15, and Azimazi Momoh Jimoh in “Ekweremadu, others kick over South East’s exclusion from $22.7b loan”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 13, 2020, p. 3. 206 See John Akubo, Azimazi Momoh Jimoh, Segun Olaniyi and Femi Adekoya in “Uproar as Senate approves Buhari’s $22.7b loan request: PDP, rights group, others, condemn approval; OPS expresses worry over nation’s ability to pay …”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 6, 2020, pp. 1, 6, op. cit. 207 See Sonala Olumhense in “Mixed metaphors: Lest we forget”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, October 30, 2016, back page. Parenthesis mine. 208 See Jibrin Ibrahim in “Learning from Philip Asiodu: If plans were for implementation …”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Friday, November 4, 2016, back page. 209 See Sonala Olumhense in “Mixed metaphors: Lest we forget”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, October 30, 2016, back page, op. cit. 210 Loc. Cit. 211 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine.

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Transit” for $500 m”.212 For this situation, some critic of the Nigerian railway project, especially under the Buhari government urged that: Nigerians should ask their officials how a project to be completed at $500m has now become only “Phase I” of itself, while “Phase II” will cost over three times as much at $1.6bn: a total of $2.1b. In other words, where is the $500m that was supposed to have built the entire Abuja light rail just three years ago, and why is nobody in jail?213

Apart from decrying the thralldom in Nigeria’s debt peonage, what is also implicit in the foregoing is a caustic critique of not only President Buhari’s decision to take the loan itself; and the apparent overlapping or duplication of the funding for the country’s rail projects; some segments of which (like the Abuja light rail or Mass Rail Transit) had been initially earmarked to be finished with $500 m under the Jonathan administration, and the fund fully disbursed; but which is again earmarked for fresh funds under the Buhari regime at an escalated sum. With regard to the inherent corruption practices in all of this, the conclusion by some critic was that President Buhari’s “anti-corruption locomotive is proceeding like Goodluck Jonathan’s, like Olusegun Obasanjo’s, [and] like Sani Abacha’s”214 —meaning that nothing had changed in terms of political will and an honest commitment to seeing the railway projects come to fruition for the sake of national development and prosperity. Unfortunately, Nigeria was ambushed by a tanking economy in 2016. As reported, Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—the measure of market value for all goods and services produced in a country—unexpectedly suffered a steady decline in 2016, thus, precipitating an economic recession, “sending negative signals to investors and lowering Nigeria’s credit worthiness in the international financial market”.215 The consequence of this was that the Chinese government denied Nigeria a concession loan of $20b it had scheduled to release to the country in 2016.216 The withdrawal of the $20b concession loan was an ill omen for the $30 billion for infrastructural development aforementioned, which, in any case, the National Assembly was refusing to approve.217 Beijing withheld the $20b concession loan based on the advice of its team of experts (that also included experts from the China Exim Bank), which visited Nigeria for physical assessments, to exercise caution in granting the country loans, citing the shrinking economy and the falling value of the naira.218 This was about the only or few times (if there was even any precedent) that China did the needful in withholding a loan because an African country did not satisfy some necessary conditions.

212 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 214 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 215 See Chuka Odittah in “Why China withholds $20b concession loan to Nigeria: Presidency official negative economic growth”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, January 9, 2017, pp. 1, 6. 216 Ibid, p. 1. 217 Ibid, p. 6. 218 Loc. cit. 213 Loc.

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This was unlike China in its hitherto carte blanche “chequebook diplomacy” on the continent, which can be a subversive generosity.219 Apprehending the atmosphere of corruption in Nigeria, the Chinese team of experts, according to the report, also advised against the $20b concession loan for “fear of possible mismanagement of the funds and requested an overhaul of some of the priority areas presented by the federal government for closer study on their viability and sustainability”.220 In facts, the experts reportedly expressed “reservations about some areas the Federal Government was keen on investing the loan, saying they did not fall in line with the FOCAC vision”.221 China had broadly, at the 2015 summit of FOCAC in Johannesburg, South Africa, “pledged … $50 billion assistance to countries on the [African] continent, including Nigeria, to develop and grow their infrastructure and human development capacities”.222 It was ostensibly from this assistance package that Nigeria was trying to draw the withdrawn $20 billion concession loan. However, part of the blame for this situation goes back in time to Nigeria’s lack of the appropriate or honest institutions and/or a clear agenda in its relationship with China223 as well as its inability to provide the counterpart funding for some of the infrastructural projects agreed upon with the Chinese, a situation that President Muhammadu Buhari later promised to rectify in his expressed readiness “to provide counterpart funding for all agreements reached with the People’s Republic of China” in order “to fast-track ongoing efforts in closing infrastructural gaps”.224 Particularly when China withdrew the $20b concession loan under reference, part of the Federal Government’s effort to resuscitate the loan and create a prospect for getting part of Chinese bit of the $30 billion loan was to reportedly announce that it had “already appropriated large sums for payment of counterpart funds on key projects to enable us to commence work proper”.225 But the greater responsibility for this situation lies in what some Nigerian observers also recognize as the inherent inequality in Nigeria’s relationship with China,226 a relationship that is evidently devoid of any post-modernist consideration—the genuine willingness on the part of China to assist Nigeria’s effort at development, shorn of the stifling dominance in Beijing’s own self-interest.

219 See

Agwu (2013), Themes and Perspectives …, pp. 445–446, op. cit.

220 See Chuka Odittah in “Why China withholds $20b concession loan to Nigeria: Presidency official

negative economic growth”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, January 9, 2017, p, 6, op. cit. Cit. 222 Loc. Cit. 223 Sanu (2016, p. 316), op. cit. 224 See Terhemba Daka in “Presidency ‘committed to Nigeria-China ties’: Promises counterpart funding for development”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, October 19, 2016, p. 5. 225 See Chuka Odittah in “Why China withholds $20b concession loan to Nigeria: Presidency official negative economic growth”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, January 9, 2017, p, 6, op. cit. 226 See, for instance, Yakubu Mohammed in “Buhari’s China visit: A post-mortem”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, September 22, 2016, back page. 221 Loc.

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Recall, for instance, that in April 2016, President Buhari, in addition to his delegation making a strong case for the withdrawn concession loan,227 returned from the routine Nigerian successive leadership’s trips to China (what now seems like a pilgrimage) with a “truck load of investment agreements totaling more than $6 billion”, and believed to be the ultimate elixir to the problems in the key sectors of the Nigerian economy, including “housing, transportation, agriculture, solid mineral development and power”.228 These deals, unfortunately, did not deliver on those expectations as Nigeria slid into economic recession with the precipitous drop in oil prices, the country’s main source of revenue/foreign exchange earnings owing to its chronic inability to diversify its economic or develop an agricultural and industrial base for manufacturing.229 It was a recession in which the country was practically helpless and akimbo with no viable solution contemplated along the line of economic diversification and the development of an industrial base. On the contrary, the very oligarchic and oligopolistic Nigerian elite that will incestuously purchase the assets began touting the dangerous idea of selling off “all critical national assets … to source immediate funds to reflate the economy and implement capital projects in the 2016 budget”.230 Even prior to the formal setting in of the recession, the Governor of the Central Bank, Godwin Emefiele, had flown the kite immediately President Buhari came into office amidst the fuel subsidy and fuel scarcity crises, proposing the sale of the Federal Government’s share in the country’s oil industry.231 Meanwhile, critical to Nigeria’s establishment of an industrial base should be the ability of the various faculties of science and technology in it many Universities and Polytechnics to coalesce in order to muster the requisite capacity to begin to fabricate and design machines to that effect.232 But the Nigerian government being unable to embark on mechanization because of its lack of priority for Research and Development (R&D), and not even being urged along this industrial policy path by China that professes the so-called “win–win” and “co-prosperity” under FOCAC, this idea of fabrication and design of machineries became seized by Nigerian 227 See Chuka Odittah in “Why China withholds $20b concession loan to Nigeria: Presidency official

negative economic growth”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, January 9, 2017, p, 6, op. cit. Yakubu Mohammed in “Buhari’s China visit: A post-mortem”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, September 22, 2016, back page, op. cit. 229 See “Why recession may not end in 2017”, Vanguard (Lagos) Editorial, Monday, October 17, 2016, p. 18; see also Poju Akinyanju in “Recession: Farm settlements to the rescue (2)”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 17, 2016, loc. Cit. 230 See Francis Arinze Iloani in “ … why we want to sell assets—Udoma”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Monday, September 26, 2016, p. 6.; see also Mohammed Haruna in “To sell or not to sell?, The Nation (Lagos), Wednesday, September 28, 2016, back page; Terhemba Daka in “Govs okay sale of govt. assets, concessioning to tackle recession: Pass vote of confidence in Udoma, Adeosun”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, September 23, 2016, pp. 1, 6; and Ismail Mudashir & Hamisu Muhammad in “Recession: Sell refineries, airports, Saraki tells FG; Don’t sell assets to meet short term needs—RMAFC”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday, September 21, 2016, pp. 1, 5. 231 See Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 1022, 1024, op. cit. 232 See Poju Akinyanju in “Recession: Farm settlements to the rescue (2)”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 17, 2016, p. 18, op. cit. 228 See

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bootleggers who take it to their accomplices in China and have them produced in a most substandard manner.233 This bootlegging clearly takes place under the nose of willfully indulgent security agencies on both sides of the authority divide. It is in this way that China could be said to be clearly disobliging of Nigeria’s hope of industrialization and development. By concentrating on mineral exploitation and trade in primary commodities with Nigeria234 and other African countries instead of being true to skill and technology transfer to enable manufacturing and the addition of values to Nigerian and other African nations’ primary products; and by countenancing the flooding of Nigerian and other African countries’ markets with counterfeit products, Beijing is clearly, according to critics of this engagement, drowning “out hopes of industrialization, regardless of how many roads and railways Chinese [companies] lay”235 ; that is, regardless of their vaunted infrastructural transformation of the continent. This is what imperialism or neo-colonialism looks like.

6.6 The Question of the Sino-Nigeria Currency Swap It is also on this score that the Sino-Nigeria relations are often shrouded by opaqueness and lack of transparent processes. For instance, when President Buhari visited China in April 2016, one of his touted accomplishments with the Chinese President Xi Jinping in their engagement was a currency swap agreement between the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC).236 This arrangement promised the import or implication that trade transactions between both countries would no longer be conducted in dollars but the Chinese currency (the Yuan) in order to ease the pressure the Naira was subjected to because of the scarcity of the dollar at a time of low oil prices. In fact, part of the praises of the Naira/Yuan currency swap (confirmed to have actually taken place later on April 27, 2018) was that: The currency swap is a mutually beneficial arrangement between both countries, and mirrored China’s support for the Nigerian economic reform program. The arrangement would help both countries to boost trade relations, deepen bilateral relations and providing enabling business environment as well as making business transactions much easier. It would also complement a series of measures taken by Nigeria for unleashing the enormous potentials of 233 Loc.

Cit. according to reports, “is Nigeria’s second biggest trading partner after the U.S., with volumes between the two totaling $9.2 billion in 2017, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Nigeria runs a deficit, importing $7.6 billion of goods, including textiles and machinery from China and exporting just $1.6 billion, mainly oil and gas”; see Emma Ujah & Babajide Komolafe in “Nigeria, China seal $2.4bn currency-swap deal”, Vanguard (Nigeria), Friday, May 4, 2018, p. 19. 235 See Yakubu Mohammed in “Buhari’s China visit: A post-mortem”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, September 22, 2016, back page, op. cit. 236 Loc. Cit.; see also Simeon Ebulu in “Fed. Govt.’s Yuan’s pact with China ‘good for Nigeria”, The Nation (Lagos), Thursday, April 14, 2016, p. 12. 234 China,

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its economy and instill confidence by bolstering economic activities. Similarly, the Agreement would allow both Nigeria and Chinese banking institutions to exchange payments in their country’s original currency based on the agreed exchange control value. Therefore, this will further facilitate bilateral trade settlements and provide liquidity support to financial markets. Moreover, the Agreement came as Nigeria adopted some measures for economic reform to revive its ailing economy, varying from raising the subsidized fuel prices and floating the Nigerian naira.237

As was characteristic, the arrangement was marred by the problem of lack of transparency, “the un-clarity, secrecy and withholding of information that dogged the plan until its failure”.238 First, the currency swap was a subject of dissembling by the officials of the Federal Government, wavering between an outright denial of the arrangement itself and the parsing of words in differentiating between currency swap and currency internationalization; that is, preferring to say that it was the latter that took place, that the Yuan was internationalized as the Chinese economy grew stronger.239 But when the smoke raised by the dissembling settled, it was still seeming obvious that a currency swap did take place, now raising the second problem in the lack of transparency, the issue of modus operandi. It now became obvious to observers that the Chinese were not completely straight with Nigeria in the so-called swap; for as critics queried, was there nothing fishy with the currency swap being consummated with the ICBC (although the world’s biggest lender240 ) instead of the standard practice of doing so with the People’s Bank of China (PBoC); that is, China’s own apex bank (an equivalence of the CBN)?241 Eventually, it became obvious—as some observers also surmised—that the “Naira-Yuan deal” was an “unfinished” business, which apparently explained why Nigeria’s foreign exchange crisis (including in the country’s trade with China) persisted in the face of the scarcity of the dollar.242 It was pointedly insinuated that had the Chinese the post-modernist intention of truly assisting Nigeria with giving a practical dimension to their “win–win” slogan, the alleged Naira-Yuan swap deal would have not only yielded some investment opportunities either way in the relationship, it would have helped Nigeria out of the economic recession as it would not have only eased the pressure the dollar scarcity was giving the Naira, it would have also created jobs with capital investments in 237 See

Alaba Ogunsanwo (2019), Nigeria and the BRICS …, pp. 47–48, op. cit. Chijioke Nelson in “Two years after talks, Nigeria’s currency deal with China stalls”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, March 21, 2018, p. 6. 239 See Isiaka Wakili in “No currency swap deal with China—FG”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Thursday, April 21, 2016, p. 3; see also Jonathan Nda-Isaiah and Winifred Ogbebo in “No currency swap deal with China—FG: Says Dolla still in use …”, Leadership (Abuja), Thursday, April 21, 2016, pp. 1, 5, 6. 240 See Chijioke Nelson in “Two years after talks, Nigeria’s currency deal with China stalls”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, March 21, 2018, p. 1, op. cit. 241 See, for instance, Jideofor Adibe in “Yuanising the Nigerian economy”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Thursday, April 21, 2016, back page. 242 See Chijioke Nelson in “Forex crisis and unfinished Naira-Yuan swap deal”, The Guardian (Lagos), Sunday, September 25, 2016, p. 48. 238 See

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the economy, including the agricultural and solid mineral sectors.243 The so-called deal by whatever name it was called ultimately proved to be a ruse, not just because “its terms were not defined—particularly the exchange rate and timeline”—(as the Chinese evidently took advantage of Nigeria), but also because the Naira was not a convertible currency.244 Were it a real currency swap, the expectation (when the ICBC inked the deal with Nigeria’s Central Bank) was that the renminbi (Yuan) would be free to flow among different banks in Nigeria, including the Chinese currency being included in the foreign exchange reserves of Nigeria245 ; but this never materialized. But as some critics observed, “Nigeria wouldn’t have been better for it” because bilateral trade relations are better done with a country’s money, not a swap.246 But because the Naira was not a convertible currency in the international market and Nigeria’s oil earnings were in dollars, Nigeria was still in the same place with China: sell its crude oil in dollars and buy from China in dollars; unless it sells its crude oil to China and collect the Yuan.247 It was not until Thursday, May 3, 2018, that the Central Bank of Nigeria announced that the country had “sealed a $2.5 billion (Renminbi (RMB) 16 billion) currency swap deal” with China.248 As proclaimed, “the swap would provide local currency liquidity for both Nigerian and Chinese businessmen”; it would, “among other benefits, … provide Naira liquidity to Chinese businessmen and provide RMB liquidity to Nigerian businessmen …, thereby improving the speed, convenience and volume of transactions between the two countries—assist both countries in their foreign exchange reserve management, enhance financial stability and promote broader economic cooperation between the two countries”.249 Unfortunately, the critics of the swap deal were still doubtful that it would make any difference or significant impact “because the whole arrangement is still denominated in dollar and is more like buying the crude oil and paying through Nigeria’s imports”.250 It is within the above context that it was argued that, owing to the imbalance trade relations between Nigeria and China, “Nigeria may have much to settle at the end of the deal, which involves dollar”, thus, necessitating that Nigeria’s representatives

243 See

Yakubu Mohammed in “Buhari’s China visit: A post-mortem”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, September 22, 2016, back page, op. cit. 244 See Chijioke Nelson in “Two years after talks, Nigeria’s currency deal with China stalls”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, March 21, 2018, p. 6, op. cit. 245 Loc. Cit. 246 Loc. Cit. 247 Loc. Cit. 248 See Chijioke Nelson in “Nigeria, China seal $2.5b currency swap deal”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, May 4, 2018, pp. 1, 6; see also Emma Ujah & Babajide Komolafe in “Nigeria, China seal $2.4bn currency-swap deal”, Vanguard (Nigeria), Friday, May 4, 2018, p. 19, op. cit. 249 See Emma Ujah & Babajide Komolafe in “Nigeria, China seal $2.4bn currency-swap deal”, Vanguard (Nigeria), Friday, May 4, 2018, loc. Cit. 250 See Chijioke Nelson in “Nigeria, China seal $2.5b currency swap deal”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, May 4, 2018, p. 6, op. cit.

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needed to be smart about the conversion rate.251 However, when it rose from its 13th induction and 15th mandatory ceremony in Lagos, the Association of Economists and Statisticians of Nigeria (AESN) hailed the currency swap while “stressing that trade and investment between the two countries will improve and financial market stability maintained”.252 The AESN proceeded to name “employment and business opportunities, infrastructural development, industrialization, skill development, technical assistance and more as some of the benefits companies and businesses in Nigeria stand to gain” from the currency swap.253 The AESN also recommended that goods in the Bilateral Trade Agreement between the two countries to reflect importation reality; that part of Nigeria’s foreign reserve should be in Yuan as a commitment to the Naira; that Chinese companies should be encouraged to invest in Nigeria with Nigerians put in a better position to learn; and that Letters of Credit should be opened, etc. Like every other socioeconomic policy, the currency swap had become more significant at a rhetorical rather than objective consideration of Nigeria’s domestic situation. The absence of Nigeria’s domestic preparedness at institutional building, regulations and infrastructural levels as well as China’s transactional mindset, commerce-mindedness and lack of commitment to the transfer of technology, are all pragmatic issues that the AESN calculations appear not to have reckoned with.254 But on the whole, although generally praised by some Sino-Nigerian optimists as “a major step in Nigeria-China relations” (because it will enable “both countries bypass the internationally-dominant American dollars”255 ), one of the major weaknesses of the Naira-RMB currency swap lies in its paucity. At the value of $2.5 billion when between January and August 2017 alone, “the bilateral trade volume [between Nigeria and China] reached $8. 94 billion”,256 the swap is practical a drop of a tea cup of water in an ocean. The currency swap is abysmally so low for the volume of trade between the countries, which means that Nigeria would have no alternative but to restrict the economic sectors that can benefit from the deal to the essentials like manufacturing and agriculture. The paucity of the value of the swap was such that it was hardly capable of carrying the trade between Nigeria and China, meaning that the so-called win–win that China had made a sing-song in FOCAC would be unrealistic for Nigeria like other African countries in the asymmetric relations with Beijing. 251 Loc.

Cit. “AESN hails FG no Currency Swap Agreement with China”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 3, 2018, p. 14. 253 Loc. Cit. 254 See Agwu (2013); Themes and Perspectives …, pp. 433–470, op. cit; see also Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 320–336, 775–787, op. cit. 255 See Owei Lakemfa in “The African Road to China”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 24, 2018, p. 31. 256 See Prince Okafor in “China trade volume with Nigeria hits $8.94bn”, Vanguard (Lagos), available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/11/china-trade-volume-nigeria-hits-8-94bn/ (lasted visited on Sunday, August 26, 2018). 252 See

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References Achebe, C., & Fall, T. (1958). Apart: With introduction and notes by Aigboje Higo. Nairobi, Heinemann Educational Books, London. Agwu, F. A. (2009). National interest, International law and our shared destiny. Spectrum Books Limited, Ibadan. Agwu, F. A. (2013). Themes and perspectives on Africa’s international relations. University Press Plc., Ibadan. Agwu, F. A. (2016). Nations among nations: Uneven statehood, hegemony and instrumentalism in international relations. HEBN Publishers Plc, Ibadan. Agwu, F. A. (2018). Armed drones and globalization in the Asymmetric war on terror: challenges for the law of armed conflict and global political economy . London, Routledge, New York. Alden, C., & Chichava, S. (2014). China and Mozambique: From comrades to capitalists. Fanele, South Africa. Alli, W. O., & Ogwu, U. J. (Ed.). (2006). Debt relief and Nigeria’s diplomacy. Nigeria Institute of International Affairs, Lagos. Badr, G. M. (1984). State immunity: An analytical and prognostic view. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague. Sanu, O. O. (2016). Audacity on the bound: A diplomatic odyssey. Mosuro, Ibadan. White, L. (2006). Is there any economic orthodoxy? Growth and reform in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Jan Smut House, Johannesburg, South African Institute of International Affairs. Zondi, S. (2014). “Foreword”, in “BRICS and Africa: Partnership for Development, Integration and Industrialization”, Papers of the Fifth BRICS Forum (2014), Pretoria, The Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO).

Chapter 7

Globalization, Populism, Nationalism and the African Continental Free Trade Area

7.1 Nigeria’s Niamey Endorsement of the AfCFTA in Protectionism Within the context of the contradictions in globalization, populism and nationalism, one of the most unsettling features of Nigeria’s foreign policy in recent times is in its engagement of a protectionist posture in the African Union’s Continental Free Trade Area, even when the country was not making any deliberate effort in industrialization. When Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala became the Director-General of the WTO, it was clear, against the divisiveness that prevented the 164 member countries from successfully electing the leadership of the organization on time that the WTO was “facing a rise in nationalism and protectionism, including other structural issues that made it difficult to settle disputes among members, issues that compounded the problems of vital negotiations about sustainability that had gone unresolved for years, including also the COVID-19 pandemic emergency.1 Some African countries and Nigeria in particular were not spared from these populism and nationalism malaise. It was the reason Dr. Okonjo-Iweala’s first working visit after taking office was to Nigeria where she stressed the need for Nigeria to explore its share of trade in Africa through the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement (AfCFTA).2 In fact, it was not until the signing of the AfCFTA that the President of the Manufactures Association of Nigeria (MAN), Mansur Ahmed, reportedly began to urgently appeal to the Federal Government to begin its own bit of providing a conducive atmosphere for productive activities, particularly in the

1 See

Haley Ott in “New WTO boss on US ties and addressing the COVID crisis”, Yahoo!News, Friday, March 12, 2021, available at https://news.yahoo.com/wto-boss-u-ties-addressing-161532 831.html (last visited on March 14, 2021). 2 See Kayode Oyero in “Okonjo-Iweala arrives Nigeria on working visit”, Punchonline, March 13, 2021, available at https://punchng.com/okonjo-iweala-arrives-nigeria-on-working-visit/?amp=1 (last visited on March 14, 2021). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0_7

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erection of structures and processes that would put industrial productivity in place.3 Nigeria’s laxity to industrialization was irrespective of the fact that the precursor to the AfCFTA (that is, the treaty establishing the African Economic Community 1991) had stated in Article 1 that the objectives of the Community shall be as follows: (a) To promote economic, social and cultural development and the integration of African economies in order to increase economic self-reliance and promote an endogenous and self-sustained development; (b) To establish, on a continental scale, a framework for the development, mobilization and utilization of the human and material resources of Africa in order to achieve a self-reliant development; (c) To promote co-operation in all fields of human endeavour in order to raise the standard of living of African peoples, and maintain and enhance economic stability, foster close and peaceful relations among Member States and contribute to the progress, development and the economic integration of the Continent; and (d) To coordinate and harmonize policies among existing and future economic communities.4

But it was, however, in pursuit of this ideal that the African Union embarked on the AfCFTA. In fact, not since the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 has a free trade deal involved so many countries.5 Until November 16, 2020, when the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) became the largest trading bloc because it covers “nearly a third of the global economy”,6 the African Union estimated that the AfCFTA would be the largest free trade area since the formation of the World Trade Organization; and that it could create an African market of over 1.2 billion people with a GDP of 2.5 trillion U.S. dollars.7 The AfCFTA was also expected to improve the economic prosperity of the African nations, removing barriers to trade like tariffs and import quotas, and allowing the free flow of goods and services between its members.8 Before the onset and the consequent disruptions by COVID-19 that put the AfCFTA agreement and its entire benefits on ice, the deal (as an intra-Africa free 3 See

Nkiruka Nnorom in “AfCFTA: MAN urges member companies to brace up for competition”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 8, 2019, p. 35. 4 See Ebunoluwa Finda Tengbe in “Sierra Leone and the African Continental Free Trade Area”, available at https://sierralii.org/content/sierra-leone-and-african-continental-free-trade-area (last visited on Friday, October 26, 2018). 5 See Why Africa’s two biggest economies did not sign its landmark trade deal The Economist, Mar 29th 2018, available at https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/03/29/why-afr icas-two-biggest-economies-did-not-sign-its-landmark-trade-deal (last visited on Friday, October 26, 2018). 6 The RCEP, which excludes the United States that withdrew from a rival Asia–Pacific (the TransPacific Partnership, TPP) trade pact in 2017, was finally signed on Sunday, November 15, 2020 on the sidelines of a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ASEAN). Although regarded as an extension of China’s influence in the region, the RCEP is made up of 10 Southeat Asian countries, as well as South Korea, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand; see “RCEP: Asia–Pacific countries form world’s largest trading bloc”, BBC News, available at https://www. bbc.com/news/world-asia-54949260 (last visited on November 20, 2020). 7 See “49 African Countries Signed The Free Trade Pact… Except Nigeria”, available at http://www. konbini.com/ng/lifestyle/49-african-countries-signed-free-trade-pact-nigeria-not/ (last visited on October 18, 2018). 8 Loc. Cit.

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trade that was widely touted as an African economic saviour) was billed to be implemented or commenced on July 1, 2020.9 Yet, Nigeria was not ready for the AfCFTA, not even in terms of (as an assumed West African regional hegemon) the acquisition of the political will to improve the controversial question of the free movement of persons regime in its sub-continent as created by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS),10 the way that the two political leaders of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya had achieved “an agreement on free mobility” that stood the storms and trial of decades of a relationship in their sub-region that was buffeted by all kinds of conflicts and terrorism.11 Admittedly, Nigeria is still faced with very serious national capability problems that confront its ability to coalesce with other African countries for free market integrations. For instance, the intra-ECOWAS so-called Common External Tariff (CET) that is supposed to create a level playing field for imports in the sub-region and reduce smuggling is itself still constrained by the problem in the CET’s adopted categories of customs duties that adopt zero duty for “essential social commodities” like pharmaceuticals, books and newspapers, 5% for basic goods and raw materials, 10% for intermediate goods, and 20% for finished goods, etc.12 These adopted categories with zero duty for certain sectors like pharmaceuticals are a roseate scenario because it is very difficult to evaluate the appropriateness of these categories because of their fairly loose class definition.13 In Nigeria, the pharmaceutical sector with a zero tariff in the adopted categories may become utterly uncompetitive because of the drugs from the other West African countries with lower cost of funds and supportive infrastructure, those countries that may even have trade deals with European countries.14 Trade liberalization is, therefore, a huge problem that Nigeria has been facing because of its low national capacity. So, apart from Nigeria’s lack of preparedness for industrialization, it was still lacking the sufficient political determination to remove what Maheri Taddele described as political barriers that inhibit the free movement of people and goods at a level that can address or create the enabling environment for economic integration and development.15 In Kigali, the AfCFTA was presented for signature, along with the Kigali Declaration and the Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, Right to Residence, and Right to Establishment; but the implementation of the agreement was not immediate because 9 See

Yinka Kolawole in “AfCFTA implementation postponed due to coronavirus”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, April 29, 2020, p. 19. 10 See Agwu (2016, pp. 540–548), op. Cit. 11 See Mehari Taddele Maru in “Barriers to free movement in Africa: How to remove them”, available at https://meharitaddele.info/2019/08/barriers-to-free-movement-in-africa-howto-remove-them/ (last visited on August 7, 2019). 12 See Agwu (2016, pp. 417–418), op. Cit. 13 Loc. cit. 14 Loc. Cit. 15 See Mehari Taddele Maru in “Barriers to free movement in Africa: How to remove them”, available at https://meharitaddele.info/2019/08/barriers-to-free-movement-in-africa-howto-remove-them/ (last visited on August 7, 2019), op. Cit.

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of the need to obtain the required number of ratifications.16 There were twenty-two (22) ratifications that were needed for the deal to enter into force; but by March 2019, a year after the signing, the total number of ratifications (approved and deposited) stood at 21, just one country shy of the 22 countries required for its entry into force.17 But it was hopeful that since the effective number of countries required to ratify and ensure that the deal went into force remained only one after one year, its entry into force was assured. But by May 2019 when the AU and the Coalition for Dialogue in Africa (CoDA) organized the Stakeholders’ Dialogue on Continental Trade and Strengthening the Implementation of the AfCFTA, the agreement had achieved the number of countries needed to ratify it for implementation, which should be 22 in all.18 In fact, 24 African countries out of 54 had ratified the trade agreement even though Nigeria, the so-called Africa’s largest economy was yet to endorse it.19 But despite the requisite number of countries signing up and the agreement legally coming into a binding effect, the signatory countries still had up to July 2019 to work out in Niamey (Niger Republic) the details of how the trade agreement would work.20 What this means is that the legal binding nature of the AfCFTA is different from the operational (or implementation) phase that would be launched by the AU at the 12th Extraordinary Session of the Assembly on July 7, 2019 in Niamey (Niger).21 In other words, the legal operation of the trade deal is different from the implementation because the latter “is the penultimate step towards its aborted commencement on July 1, 2020 aforementioned,22 as the agreement was still subject to negotiations on a number of aspects and modalities”.23 Some of these aspects or modalities include the visa regime and the free movement of goods and services on the African continent— a situation that would prompt Benin Republic to, for instance, not import Dangote Cement from Nigeria but would rather import from China.24

16 See Femi Adekoya in “One Year after, AfCFTA seeks last ratification to kick off agreement”, The Guardian, Wednesday, March 27, 2019, p. 29. 17 Loc. Cit. 18 See “AfCTA’ll go on without Nigeria—Obasanjo”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, May 28, 2019, p. 8. 19 See “African continental free trade agreement comes into effect”, Daily Nation, available at https://mobile.nation.co.ke/news/Africa-free-trade-area-takes-effect/1950946-5138350-13i 7mnf/index.html (last visited on May 30, 2019). 20 Loc. Cit. 21 See Femi Adekoya in “AfCFTA implementation may drag despite becoming operational”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, May 31, 2019, p. 21; see also “African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Legal Texts and Policy Documents”, tralac, available at https://www.tralac.org/resour ces/our-resources/6730-continental-free-trade-area-cfta.html (last visited on May 28, 2019). 22 See Yinka Kolawole in “AfCFTA implementation postponed due to coronavirus”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, April 29, 2020, p. 19, op. cit. 23 See Femi Adekoya in “AfCFTA implementation may drag despite becoming operational”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, May 31, 2019, p. 21, op. cit. 24 Loc. Cit.

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So, it was in the July 2019 aforementioned negotiations of the AfCFTA that the barrier to intra-African trade was to be engaged—including other issues like tariff concessions and services commitment; rules of origin, investment, intellectual property, competition, and possible protocols on e-commerce.25 As a matter of fact, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was to call on Nigeria and the rest of Africa to give a serious attention to the issue of Rules of Origin (RoO) because they can “make or break” the AfCFTA”.26 The UNCTAD’s contention here is that the criteria had been used by many African countries to gain preferential treatment while trading with other blocs like the European Union and the United States27 ; perhaps, trading on goods from China. Meanwhile, according to UNCTAD, the African continent possesses about eight regional economic communities (RECs), each of which has its own RoO, with the problem that these existing RECs’ RoO vary a lot, creating an extremely complex situation across the continent.28 But then, it is the Rules of Origin that will determine whether preferential trade liberalization under the AfCFTA can be a game changer for Africa’s industrialization because, whereas the AfCFTA is expected to boost intra-African trade by 33%, many of these gains could be undermined if the Rules of Origin are not appropriately designed and enforced to support preferential trade liberalization.29 But in addition, national trade regimes must also be updated to reflect interstate agreements; more so because international trade agreements are not self-executing—they are implemented through domestic measures such as new customs procedures and domestic regulations for foreign services providers and investors.30 It was some of these unresolved issues that delayed South Africa’s endorsement of the trade deal. However, it is obvious that despite the 12th Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of July 2019 negotiations in Niamey (Niger) the implementation of the AfCFTA will be incremental.31 At the time of the AU and the CoDA implementation conference aforementioned, it was reported that it was only Nigeria, Benin and Eritrea that were yet to sign the AfCFTA agreement.32 Meanwhile, Nigeria was absent from the Addis Ababa Stakeholders’ Dialogue on Continental Trade and Strengthening the Implementation of the AfCFTA aforementioned; and this was in addition to its reluctance to sign the agreement after taking over the processes that led to it from Egypt.33 To Nigeria’s 25 Loc.

Cit. Femi Adekoya and Kingsley Jeremiah in “Rules of Origin may make, break AfCFTA, UNCTAD cautions”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, June 27, 2019, p. 21. 27 Loc. Cit. 28 Loc. Cit. 29 Loc. Cit. 30 See Femi Adekoya in “AfCFTA implementation may drag despite becoming operational”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, May 31, 2019, p. 21, op. cit. 31 Loc. Cit. 32 See AfCTA’ll go on without Nigeria—Obasanjo”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, May 28, 2019, p. 8. 33 Loc. Cit. 26 See

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absence from the AfCFTA, its former President Olusegun Obasanjo retorted that it should not bring an internal problem to the AU; and that the AfCFTA cannot be hindered by Nigeria’s reluctance to sign.34 But Nigeria ought to have been part of this process in order to underline and insist on the enforcement of its convictions at the July negotiations in Niamey aforementioned. The AfCFTA was a pact that would eliminate tariffs on 90% of products, liberalize services and reduce non-tariff barriers—involving investment, competition and intellectual property rights that its protagonists or enthusiasts said would join up Africa’s fragmented markets, ignite industrialization and create jobs.35 Perhaps, the only unfortunately thing that might be ascribed to the AfCFTA was the basic problem of the agreement being incomplete as the Negotiations only began in 2015.36 But after, right from Egypt—according Nigeria’s former President Obasanjo,37 Nigeria had been part of the negotiation38 of the African Union’s Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)—“a flagship project” of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, which aims to create “a continental geographic zone where goods and services move among member states of the African Union (AU) with no restrictions”.39 The AfCFTA was supposed to be a welcome development in a continent where intra-African trade had been minimal if not non-existent; and particularly because of the fact of the AfCFTA being a horizontal trade deal (unlike the vertical Economic Partnership Agreement, EPA, that was being negotiated with the EU); but surprisingly, and despite Nigeria’s avowed pan-Africanist credentials—Africa touted as the centerpiece of its foreign policy—Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari, developed cold feet with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs reportedly explaining that “the President would consult with stakeholders before a final decision is taken on the matter”.40 This was another instance of crookedness and lack of coherence in Nigeria’s African policy—a policy mediated far more by the socio-psychological disposition of the individual leader rather than institutional considerations. Although he was 34 Loc.

Cit.

35 See Why Africa’s two biggest economies did not sign its landmark trade deal The Economist, Mar

29th 2018, available at https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/03/29/why-afr icas-two-biggest-economies-did-not-sign-its-landmark-trade-deal (last visited on Friday, October 26, 2018), op. cit. 36 Loc. Cit. 37 See “AfCTA’ll go on without Nigeria—Obasanjo”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, May 28, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 38 In fact, Nigeria’s Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment, Okechukwu Enelamah, disclosed that the Nigerian Chief Negotiator in the CFTA deal, the Director-General of the Nigerian Office for Trade Negotiations, was even the Chairperson of the AU negotiating technical team; see Isiaka Wakili, Francis Arinze, Sunday Michael Ogwu and Abdulateef Aliyu in “Why Buhari put AU trade deal on hold”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Monday, March 19, 2018, p. 5. 39 See “The Continental Free Trade Area: A game changer for Africa”, New African, February 2018, p. 26. 40 See Isiaka Wakili, Francis Arinze, Sunday Michael Ogwu and Abdulateef Aliyu in “Why Buhari put AU trade deal on hold”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Monday, March 19, 2018, p. 1, op. cit.

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optimistic that Nigeria would sign the AfCFTA deal before its operational or implementation launch at the 12th Extraordinary Session of the Assembly on July 7, 2019 in Niamey,41 when he was at Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) during the opening session of the Stakeholders’ Dialogue on Continental Trade and Strengthening the Implementation of the AfCFTA, Nigeria’s former President Obasanjo remarked that Nigeria was always known to be on the driver’s seat of continental discussions, including in the AU, ECOWAS and in other agencies; but that the country’s non-ratification of the AfCFTA was the first time since 1976 that Nigeria was not at the table of a major continental process.42 President Obasanjo’s optimism in Nigeria’s endorsement of the AfCFTA deal was that Abuja would not be absent at the Niamey launch; and that there was no way the Buhari administration would be present at the Niamey launch if it had not signed the agreement—even when Eritrea, Niger Republic, and Benin Republic (the latter two being its immediate neighbours) had signed.43 True to former President Obasanjo’s optimism, Nigeria signed the AfCFTA trade deals in Niamey, Niger Republic, at the12th Extraordinary Session of the Assembly on July 7, 2019, even though it still expressed the protectionist reservation that “free trade must be fair”.44 One of the consequences of Nigeria being a late signatory and even non-quick (Nigeria ratified the AfCFTA on November 11, 2020) ratification of the AfCFTA45 was to be seen at the 33rd Summit of the AU in Addis Ababa (February 9 to 10) when it lost the Secretary-General post of the AfCFTA to South Africa.46 Although Nigeria made it to the final list of candidates (South Africa, Nigeria, and DR Congo) that went through the series of evaluations, it was roundly beaten by South Africa to clinch the post for the secretariat that had been domiciled in Accra, Ghana; and which was to become operational by March 31, 2020.47 As will be seen later, this is a huge cost to Nigeria’s dilatory foreign policy, particularly the 41 See Chijoke Nelson in “Nepotism is corruption, Obasanjo tells Presidency: Alleges poor consultation on AfCFTA …”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, June 21, 2019, p. 6. 42 See “AfCFTA’ll go on without Nigeria—Obasanjo”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, May 28, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 43 See Chijoke Nelson in “Nepotism is corruption, Obasanjo tells Presidency: Alleges poor consultation on AfCFTA …”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, June 21, 2019, p. 6, op. cit. 44 See Innocent Oweh in “Buhari signs AfCFTA, insists free trade must be fair”, Daily Independent (Lagos), Monday, July 8, 2019, p. 40; see also Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Buhari signs AfCFTA agreement, says free trade must be fair trade”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, July 8, 2019, p. 8. 45 The 23rd virtual meeting of the Nigerian Federal Executive Council (presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari) ratified the AfCFTA on November 11, 2020, just two months before the agreement (earliar scheduled to take of on July 2020 but was prevented from doing so by the COVID-19 pandemic) was to kick-off on January 1, 2021; see Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Nigeria ratifies membership of AfCFTA, as agreement kicks-off Jan. 1, 2021”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, November 12, 2020, p. 7. 46 See Owei Lakemfa in “Big Brother Nigeria still a toddler in African politics”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, February 14, 2020, p. 32. 47 See “South Africa’s Wamkele Mene voted as Secretary-General of AfCFTA Secretariat”, Citi Newsroom, CNR, available at https://citinewsroom.com/2020/02/south-africas-wamkele-menevoted-as-secretary-general-of-afcfta-secretariat/ (last visited on Friday, February 14, 2020).

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huge impact of domestic politics (including prolonged border closure), since Nigeria did not ratify the deal in time, even when the President should have easily done so because it did not need any Parliamentary approval. Nigeria’s Parliament or National Assembly only domesticates treaties rather than give approval to treaties before the President’s ratification of such treaties.48 It is because the National Assembly does not ratify treaties that the 23rd virtual meeting of the Federal Executive Council that sat on Wednesday, November 11, 2020, ratified the AfCFTA.49 Because Nigeria signed late, President Buhari maintained that “we fully understand the potential of the AfCFTA to transform trade in Africa and contribute towards solving some of the continent’s challenges, whether security, economic or corruption”; but that it is clear that for the “AfCFTA to succeed, we need the full support and buy-in of our private sector and civil society stakeholders and the public in general”.50 President Buhari reiterated that “overall, the implementation of the AfCFTA is going to be a long journey; … [and] that Africa achieves a free and fair trade environment governed by rules that are predictable, enforceable, and in line with the intent and objectives of our continent”.51 But before President Buhari signed the AfCFTA in Niamey, Niger Republic, the question could be posed as to how the African Union could be declaring the Nigerian President the organization’s anti-corruption champion,52 even at a time that Buhari had chickened out from a major continental process; and even when the latest international corruption index of Transparency International showed that Nigeria had “become more corrupt under the APC than it was under the PDP”.53 This was more so when “in 2014, Nigeria was ranked 136th most corrupt country out of 178 ranked countries”; but as at the time the AU was declaring Buhari as its anticorruption champion, Nigeria was “ranked 148th out of 180 countries surveyed”.54 Although Professor Bolaji Owasanoye (as the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, ICPC) had remarked in a Keynote Address at the Nigerian Society of International Law’s (NSIL) 42nd Annual Conference that the AU’s recognition of President Buhari as its anti-corruption champion was merely on account

48 See

Agwu (2009, pp. 362–364), op. Cit. Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Nigeria ratifies membership of AfCFTA, as agreement kicks-off Jan. 1, 2021”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, November 12, 2020, p. 7, op. cit. 50 See Innocent Oweh in “Buhari signs AfCFTA, insists free trade must be fair”, Daily Independent (Lagos), Monday, July 8, 2019, p. 40, op. cit. 51 See “The Quote” by President Muhammadu Buhari”, ThisDay, Tuesday, July 30, 2019, p. 23. 52 See Fikayo Olowolagba in “Buhari awarded African Union’s anti-corruption Champion”, available at http://dailypost.ng/2018/01/28/buhari-awarded-african-unions-anti-corruption-champion/ (last visited on July 4, 2018). 53 See Femi Aribisala in “The leadership Nigeria desperately needs”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, July 3, 2018, p. 40. 54 Loc. Cit.. 49 See

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of Nigeria’s activities in the recovery of its stolen funds and the proceeds of illicitly transferred funds,55 that AU’s recognition or declaration was also at a time that President Buhari’s vaunted anti-corruption policy was chastised as a case of the government fighting corruption with corruption as well as the malaise of corruption being seen as “the exclusive preserve of its political opponents”.56 Ostensibly, the AU was merely burnishing the individual ego of President Buhari and therein intervening in the internal affairs of Nigeria when it ought to have been the responsibility of Nigerians to pass that verdict on their government’s anti-corruption credential, not by the conclave of very distant or remote African leaders. Meanwhile, President Buhari was found wanting where it mattered most for Africa and the Nigerian citizenry in Nigeria’s so-called Africa policy. But at the end, the whole reason for Nigeria’s cold feet boiled down to inadequate involvement, in addition to stakeholders as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained, of the expertise of the country’s relevant stakeholders. The Nigerian Chief Negotiator at the AfCFTA trade deal—the Director-General of the Nigerian Office for Trade Negotiations—who incidentally was also the chairperson of the AU negotiating technical team, may be an expert in his or her own right; but this did not vitiate the fact that the federal government did not broadly involve experts from the epistemic community—the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs for one was never involved. The involvement of those with the relevant expertise on the matter would have enabled a rigorous debate from where the pros and cons would have been delicately sieved out and the government left with an enlightened position. Other stakeholders like the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) lamented what it reportedly described as “the sheer impunity or blatant lack of consultation in the process that has led to this”.57 The NLC had equally lamentably found it “surprising and unbelievable that at a time nations, including the United States, were resorting to protectionism in defence of their local businesses and protection of jobs, agents of neo-colonialism had the audacity to want to fling open Nigeria’s doors, windows and roof tops”.58 It is also a mark of the lack of synergy and inter-Ministerial coordination in Nigeria (both horizontally among federal establishments and vertically with State establishments) that the Director-General of the Nigerian Office for Trade Negotiations would be the country’s Chief Negotiator in the AfCFTA while his colleague at the Lagos State Chambers of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), would be flaying the deal as an attempt by the federal government to “expose the nation’s manufacturing sector to 55 See “Keynote Address by the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), Professor Bolaji Owasanoye”, at the opening ceremony of the 42nd NSIL Annual Conference, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) on November 13th 2019; unpublished. 56 See Femi Aribisala in “The leadership Nigeria desperately needs”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, July 3, 2018, p. 40, op. cit. 57 See Isiaka Wakili, Francis Arinze, Sunday Michael Ogwu and Abdulateef Aliyu in “Why Buhari put AU trade deal on hold”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Monday, March 19, 2018, p. 5, op. cit. 58 See Naomi Uzor in “CFTA dangerous for Nigeria’s industrial sector, LCCI warns”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, March 20, 2018, p. 10.

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vulnerability as it could worsen the precarious situation”, Nigeria being in a “weak competitive position regionally, continentally and globally”.59 In other words, “the various stakeholders in Nigeria were singing different tunes” in respect of the promise of the AfCFTA to the country—with the proponents citing the numerous benefits that the continent-wide trade bloc would offer Nigeria, while the opponents were citing the “dangers inherent in further opening up the Nigerian economy to the vagaries of institutionalized infiltration and domination by foreign business interests”.60 Unfortunately, the phobia and protectionist instinct of the opponents of the AfCFTA was hard to be appreciated given the fact that most of the signatories of the deals did not have viable manufacturing sectors that would sustain intra-African trade; even though some of these African countries “could be used as surrogates by giants of international trade” in the outstanding and controversial Rule of Origin debate.61 The Rule of Origin is a serious threat to the AfCFTA; but the inherent problems of the deal would have been more aggravated—that is, all the nationalist/populist talk about neo-colonialism and neoliberal dominance as well as Nigeria being competitively weak globally could have been more relevant in the AfCFTA discourse if the deal were a vertical trade deal like the EPA (with the EU); but the AfCFTA is a horizontal or intra-African trade or economic regionalism in which all that Nigeria needed to get right before or after its ratification was to ensure the enforceability of the Rule of Origin and the strengthening of its domestic capacity to compete with others. These were the fine points in the AfCFTA controversy that would have been teased out and the federal government advised aright after a broad consultation and debate, especially with experts in the epistemic community. However, this is a problem that Nigeria could still have fixed with time because the agreement that was signed in Kigali as well as the operational phase that was entered at the AU’s summit meeting in Niger Republic would all function as an umbrella to which Protocols and Annexes will be added—as negotiations had “continued in 2018 with phase II, including competition policy [and] Investment and Intellectual Property Rights”—and a final draft to be submitted in January 2020 to the AU Assembly.62 But those who argued that there were booby-traps in the AfCFTA that Nigeria shunned—but which was signed by 44 African countries in Kigali (Rwanda on Wednesday, March 21, 2018—had a cogent point because some critic had described the free trade deal as a disaster for Africa because it is a “giant marketplace with few local products”, more so when it allegedly had the surreptitious backing of the European Union.63

59 Loc.

Cit.

60 See “As AfCFTA kicks off”, A Daily Trust newspaper Editorial, Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday,

July 10, 2019, p. 45. 61 Loc. Cit. 62 Loc. Cit. 63 See Jacques Berthelot in “Giant marketplace with few local products: Why free trade will be a disaster for Africa”, The Guardian, Wednesday, March 21, 2018, p. 40.

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After the AfCFTA framework agreement had been signed at the Extraordinary Summit of the African Union on Wednesday, March 21, 2018 in Kigali (Rwanda),64 the South Africa that shunned the signing in Kigali later signed it at the 31st AU Summit that took place in Mauritania, after which President Cyril Ramaphosa urged President Buhari not to delay further in signing the treaty.65 South Africa did not sign in Rwanda because as at that time, the member countries had not yet decided which goods would be excluded; nor had they finalized the key annexes to the text.66 In the words of the South African trade minister—“the chapter on the rules of origin is an empty circuit board”.67 So, this had made “it hard for South Africa to sign just yet” because it needed “to run the text by two government departments, for legal reasons”; even though the new President at the time, Cyril Ramaphosa, had put his name to the Kigali Declaration—“a political statement to support the AfCFTA”.68 But President Buhari himself reportedly declared the day after the Kigali Summit that “his administration will not be in a hurry to enter into any agreement that would make the country a dumping ground and jeopardize the security of the nation”.69 But then, there appears to be some disconnect between the Nigerian leadership and the country’s foot soldiers that participated in the AfCFTA negotiations; otherwise, the President should have known that some of his fears had been taken care of. Listen to an un-redacted statement by Nigeria’s Chief Trade Negotiator and Director-General of the Nigerian Office for Trade Negotiations (NOTIN), Ambassador Chiedu Osakwe: Let me say this at the level of facts, in the agreement establishing the AfCFTA which Nigeria has not signed, we have a provision on trade remedies. We have a provision against dumping; we have a provision that is on the basis of which a party can apply for certain duties for products that have been sold below market price from a producer or importer into Nigeria. So, we have anti-dumping clause as a remedy in the AfCFTA. Second, we have a provision on countervailing measures on subsidies. If the importer from another country has used illegal and trade distorting subsidies like export grants; export subsidies, like loans that some countries give to their businesses which they never ask back, to give them an unfair advantage, these are examples of illegal subsidies. So, in the agreement, we have a clause on countervailing duties to products that have enjoyed or benefited from illegal trade distorting

64 See Isiaka Wakili, Francis Arinze, Sunday Michael Ogwu and Abdulateef Aliyu in “Why Buhari put AU trade deal on hold”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Monday, March 19, 2018, p. 5, op. cit. 65 See Chris Agabi in “Don’t delay signing Africa Free Trade Pact, SA President tells Nigeria”, Daily Trust (Abuja), July 12, 2018, available at https://www.pressreader.com/nigeria/daily-trust/ 20180712/281844349401400 (last visited on July 16, 2018). The fact that South Africa signed in Mauritania was declared by President Cyril Ramaphosa when he used his visit to Nigeria to urge President Buhari to also sign the treaty; reported on Channel Television (Lagos, Nigeria) on Sunday, July 15, 2018, at 10 pm news bulletin. 66 See Why Africa’s two biggest economies did not sign its landmark trade deal The Economist, Mar 29th 2018, available at https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2018/03/29/why-afr icas-two-biggest-economies-did-not-sign-its-landmark-trade-deal (last visited on Friday, October 26, 2018), op. cit. 67 Loc. Cit. 68 Loc. Cit. 69 See Yinka Kolawole, Johnbosco and Naomi Uzor in “CFTA: I won’t allow Nigeria to be dumping ground—Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), March 22, 2018, p. 8.

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subsidies. Three, as part of the troika of the trade remedies infrastructure clauses in the AfCFTA deal, we have the preferential safeguard.70

The fact is that the Presidency may either have been ignorant of the foregoing or it was playing the populist game; or still—to put it less odiously—unwittingly working at cross purposes with the country’s bureaucracy. If all the above safeguards, and presumably more, were in the AfCFTA that President Buhari spurned, what then was the sense in doing so? But again, these were the points that should have been made earlier if the federal government had been in the habit of approaching its foreign policy in a manner that was amenable to a reasoned input that emanated from well thought-out ideas from logical debates, especially from experts. As a matter of fact, it was Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo that reportedly lamented that there was no confusion on the ideal of the AfCFTA; rather, the Nigerian “private sector operators became disillusioned over the government’s alleged inaction and poor consultations after it had taken the lead in design and execution”.71 Although—in its characteristic manner of putting the cart before the horse— President Buhari later in October 2018 (after reportedly complaining that he needed further consultation with Nigeria’s various stakeholders72 ) inaugurated a Presidential Committee for Impact and Readiness Assessment on the AfCFTA (i.e. to address the risks related to signing the deal long after Rwanda and Mauritania Summits),73 but when the Committee submitted its report in June 2019, it alongside the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) and the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), recommended that President Buhari should sign the deal to enable Nigeria join the AfCFTA.74 Unfortunately, although he signed it, but in uttermost reluctance, President Buhari declared that the AfCFTA poses mixed fortunes for Nigeria; and reportedly stated that the deal or “pact that Nigeria envisions was one that would assist the nation to create wealth for investors and contribute to the job creation programme of his government”.75 He further warned that: For AfCFTA to succeed, we must develop policies that promote African production among other benefits” because “Africa … needs not only a trade policy but also a continental manufacturing agenda. Our vision for intra-African trade is for the free movement of madein-Africa goods … If we allow unbridled imports to continue, it will dominate our trade. 70 See Emma Ujah in AfCFTA: How we’ll protect Nigerian economy—Chief Negotiator”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, July 3, 2018, p. 41. 71 See Chijoke Nelson in “Nepotism is corruption, Obasanjo tells Presidency: Alleges poor consultation on AfCFTA …”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, June 21, 2019, pp. 1, 6, op. cit. 72 See “As AfCFTA kicks off”, A Daily Trust newspaper Editorial, Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday, July 10, 2019, p. 45, op. cit. 73 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “… charges c’ttee to address risks in AfCFTA”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, October 23, 2018, p. 4. 74 See Yinka Kolawole, Nkiru Nnorom, Johnbosco Agbakwuru and Naomi Uzor in “Presidential c’ttee, MAN, LCCI ask Buhari to sign AfCFTA”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, June 28, 2019, p. 9. 75 See Femi Adekoya, Terhemba Daka and Collins Olayinka in “Fears for African free trade pact, by Buhari: Eyes three per cent growth, stakeholders urge President to ratify AfCFTA”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, June 28, 2019, p. 3.

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The implication of this is that coastal importing nations will prosper while landlocked ones will continue to suffer and depend on aid.76

The implication of the foregoing is that whereas the above presidential committee that was headed by Desmond Goubadia, MAN, the LCCI and other stakeholders later urged President Buhari to endorse the AfCFTA, the President refused, citing his earlier conviction during the inauguration of the committee that “many of the challenges we face today—whether security, economic or corruption—are rooted in our inability over the years to domesticate the production of the most basic requirements and create jobs for our very vibrant, young and dynamic population”.77 What the President’s rejection of the committee’s report indicated was that the committee itself was a circus show. The Buhari administration never actually wanted to join the AfCFTA. Meanwhile, despite President Buhari’s expression of concern about the problem of lack of productive activities in the country, his administration was never intent on advancing a solution or even the amelioration of the problem—as the President of MAN (Ahmed Mansur—at a made-in-Nigeria event in Calabar) expressed concern in June 2019 that there was a dearth of manufacturing/industries in Nigeria.78 When President Buhari attended in Japan, the 7th Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD7), the opposition accused him of failing to seal any meaningful economic agreement, and for coming “home with an empty basket and packet full of promissory notes” because of his government’s “legitimacy burden and overt impunity”, a burden so grave that “no world leader or international investors wanted to do any real business with Nigeria”.79 Perhaps, President Buhari’s disinterest in signing the AfCFTA was probably why, from the outset, there was absolutely no reasoned input from experts in the making of the Nigerian government’s negotiation of the deal; which would have ordinarily put the Nigerian negotiation team in the AfCFTA on notice to be thorough about the issue of the rule of origin during the negotiations, knowing full well that if the rule of origin was not studiously taken care of, the AU’s AfCFTA would be a conduit for the EU to wreck the agricultural and industrial sectors of African countries’ economies.80 But, ostensibly, the Buhari Presidency did not set stock by ideas; which explained why, unlike his immediate predecessors—President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan—he never deigned to establish a Presidential Advisory Council

76 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 78 See “MAN raises concern over the dearth of industries”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, June 28, 2019, p. 7; see also Ike Uchechukwu in “MAN laments low level of industrialization in Nigeria: Wants law to patronize made-in-Nigerian goods”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, June 28, 2019, p. 12. 79 See “Anyone operating from PDP HQ is talking nonsense—Femi Adesina”, Vanguard (Lagos), September 3, 2019, p. 9. 80 See Jacques Berthelot in “Giant marketplace with few local products: Why free trade will be a disaster for Africa”, The Guardian, Wednesday, March 21, 2018, p. 40, op. cit. 77 Loc.

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(PAC), a committee of experienced elder statesmen in public service, academics, and retired diplomats, amongst others, that advised on foreign policy.81 A knowledge of these nuances, and guarding against them while negotiating the draft framework agreement, would have saved Nigeria from the diplomatic embarrassment of (after being actively involved in the AfCFTA negotiations, the Federal Executive Council, presided over by Vice-President, Yemi Osinbajo, approving that the country should sign the deal, and even a Presidential advance team being dispatched to Kigali in readiness for President Buhari’s arrival82 ) raising a red flag and pulling out at the last minute. Besides, the federal government itself ought to have known this, given that similar arguments had been made by the opponents of the admission of Morocco into the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the argument that Morocco was not only a more industrialized economy in relation to Nigeria, but that it had an open trade arrangement with the EU with which the latter could, from the back door, turn Nigeria into a dumping ground. And again, the ineptitude in the handling of Nigeria’s foreign policy presents itself here because it is difficult to reconcile Nigeria’s subliminal inclination (gleaned from the sympathetic presentation by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, at the House of Representatives public hearing on the prospects of admitting Morocco into the ECOWAS83 ) to the admission of Morocco into the ECOWAS with its retreat from the AfCFTA, granted that it was the same danger that Nigeria faced in Morocco joining the ECOWAS that it faced in the AfCFTA. Meanwhile, whereas it did not readily flinch from the former, it flinched from the latter. Tragically, it will now be historically bruited abroad that when on Wednesday, March 21, 2018, an Extraordinary Summit of the AU in Kigali signed the historic AfCFTA framework agreement, Nigeria, the “giant” of Africa, owing to its great disadvantage in comparison to many countries on the African “continent in terms infrastructure such as inadequate power, bad roads and inefficient rail services”,84 among other infrastructural failings, and owing to the unbelievable bungling of its foreign policy process, turned out to be a “giant” with clay feet. This “giant” of Africa refused to sign, mortally afraid of the “neo-colonialism” and “neo-liberalism” of fellow African countries. Yet, even if the allegation of neocolonialism and neo-liberalism were to be orchestrated through the back door by the EU, could this “giant” of Africa that readily touts its pan-Africanist credentials and Afrocentric foreign policy not have stood its ground at the level of the AfCFTA negotiations and corrected the anomalies with a strong pre-emptive position with the insertion of rule of origin clause in the framework agreement? The truth of the matter is that, apart from the country’s confused foreign policy establishment’s thrust 81 See

Agwu (2013, pp. 627–628), op. cit.

82 See Isiaka Wakili, Francis Arinze, Sunday Michael Ogwu and Abdulateef Aliyu in “Why Buhari

put AU trade deal on hold”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Monday, March 19, 2018, p. 5, op. cit. 83 The public hearing took place on Thursday, November 9, 2017, in Room 034 House of Representatives, New Wing, National Assembly, Abuja. 84 See Yinka Kolawole, Johnbosco and Naomi Uzor in “CFTA: I won’t allow Nigeria to be dumping ground—Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), March 22, 2018, p. 8, op. cit.

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in many matters of this nature, Nigeria is in a systemic socio-economic and industrial decline. In the AfCFTA in particular (and this is because Nigeria is totally bereft of viable or internationally competitive airlines or even a national carrier in the scale of Ethiopian airline, the Kenyan airline or the South African airline), Nigeria probably envisaged its chronic incapability in taking advantage of the single African air transport market—which is another African Union’s 2063 Agenda project that is tailored towards ending travelers’ misery and boosting economic growth.85 It is a fact that, “for many travelers, moving across the length and breadth of Africa can prove daunting”, for “not only are flights expensive but more often than not, there are no direct flights between African countries”.86 So, as “a flagship project of the African Union’s Agenda 2063”, what the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) aims to achieve is “to ensure intra-regional connectivity between the capital cities of Africa”, to “create a single unified air transport market in Africa”, a kind of “full liberalization of intra-African air transport services in terms of market access, the free exercise of first, second, third, fourth and fifth freedom traffic rights for scheduled and freight air services by eligible airlines”, the removal of restrictions on ownership and provision for the full liberalization of frequencies, tariffs and capacity; the provision of “eligibility criteria for African community carriers, safety and security standards, mechanisms for fair competition and dispute settlement as well as dispute settlement”.87 By March 2019, the SAATM’s creation of an open sky policy had allowed airlines free entry and free exit in twentythree (23) African countries that were members of the AfCFTA.88 But because of Nigeria’s clear lack of state capacity to compete in SAATM, the Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON) also came out to laud President Buhari for not signing the African Union’s AfCFTA; arguing that, with reference to the aviation sector, “signing treaties is one of our crimes in aviation”; for, as it were, “many bilateral air service agreements (BASA) the country signed were not mutually beneficial”.89 And they are not mutually beneficial because many countries deliberately put obstacles and unreasonable charges on Nigerian airlines in the face of the Nigerian government’s lack of capacity or courage to protect Nigerian domestic airlines that had the ability to embark on international operations.90 In West and Central Africa, Nigeria contributes more than 50% of the total passenger traffic, but (with SAATM), while other African countries that had ratified the AfCFTA were making money from these regional routes, the Nigerian domestic 85 See “Single Air Transport Market: Towards One African Sky”, New African, February 2018, p. 27. 86 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 88 See Chinedu Eze in “Nigerian Airlines lose lucrative West Coast routes”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, March 26, 2019, p. 1. 89 See Abdullateef Aliyu in “AFCTA: Treaties hurt Nigeria—Airline Operators”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Friday, March 23, 2018, p. 20. 90 See Lawani Mikairu in “Air Peace ready for int’l operations: Wants FG to protect Nigeria airlines from aero-politics”, Vanguard (Lagos), Saturday Vanguard, September 29, 2018, p. 6. 87 Loc.

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airlines were not because the Federal Government was not supportive of them in terms of imposing the type of charges (be it in retaliation or in reciprocity91 ) that other countries levy on Nigerian air operators.92 The implication was that Nigerian domestic Airlines like Medview, Dana and Arik had to seize or cut back operations; while Air Peace that was daring the situation disclosed that it was losing #500 million monthly in the routes because of the exorbitant charges it was enduring, but which Nigeria was not imposing on airlines from such countries.93 For instance, whereas Ghana and other countries in the sub-region charge Nigerian airlines for both inbound and outbound passengers, the Nigerian Federal Airport Authority (FAA) charges only for outbound passengers.94 Consequently, the Nigerian domestic airlines venturing internationally with these African sub-regions “incur losses because of high charges heaped on them by the countries they operate to”; whereas they are not supported by the Federal Government, which also does not put high charges on those African countries the same way that they charge the Nigerian operators.95 It was only after the 2019 xenophobia crisis that the South African government decided to grant Air Peace’s request to commence commercial flights to Johannesburg on a daily basis.96 This grant was not only done in the process of ascertaining the level of the Bilateral Air Service Agreement (BASA) between Nigeria and South Africa.97 Meanwhile, critics have warned that “for SAATM to work, every sub-region should operate like domestic service and the charges must be uniform” to enable all the airlines operate in a standardized and profitable way.98 Meanwhile, an attempt by the federal government to float a national carrier—Air Nigeria—was suspended midstream on the grounds, according to the federal government’s Economic Management Team (EMT), that the “government should not set up a national carrier with public funds”.99 This was after the Minister of State for Aviation at the time, Senator Hadi Sirika, had made the fanfare or flamboyant public show of unveiling on July 16, 2018, at the Farnborough International Air Show in the United Kingdom, giving an impression

91 For the difference between retaliation and reciprocity in international relations, see Fred Aja Agwu (2010) “Reciprocity and its Implications in International Relations”, in Eze (2010, ed., pp. 27–35). 92 See Chinedu Eze in “Nigerian Airlines lose lucrative West Coast routes”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, March 26, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 93 Loc. Cit. 94 Loc. Cit. 95 Loc. Cit. 96 See “South Africa grants Air Peace request to commence flight operations”, Channels Television, available at https://www.channelstv.com/2019/09/30/south-africa-grants-air-peace-request-to-com mence-flight-operations/ (last visited on September 30, 2019). 97 See Chinedu Eze in “Nigerian Airlines lose lucrative West Coast routes”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, March 26, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 98 Loc. Cit. 99 See “Minister announces suspension of Nigeria Air project”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, September 20, 2018, p. 8.

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that everything was already finalized.100 This suspension was to the fanatic approval of the private sector-based Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON), which reiterated the federal government’s narrative that the government had no business in business101 ; and as the government itself—after the cancelation—began a hunt for private sector partners and investors.102 Critics believed that the entire saga of Nigeria Air was a deliberate scam by a government that prided itself on its credential for fighting corruption, particularly because of “the #1.5 billion that was spent on consultation … [that] could have been used to purchase dialysis machines”; and as even the socalled consultants had banked the money for designing the Air Nigeria logo, amid others that got paid for the various services they rendered for an airline that was never a sincere priority.103 Interestingly, following the ballooning of the controversy, Mr. Hadi Sirika dismissively (some months later at the 5th Aviation Stakeholders Forum in Abuja) debunked the allegation that payment to consultants had been made, claiming that the Federal Government only spent #91 million in the suspended national carrier project as if the money too small to be an issue.104 But to another critic, “to announce and unveil Nigeria Air with a firm date that it would take off by December 2010, giving an impression that everything [was] already finalized and thereafter started looking for partners and investors, and now for the federal government to suspend the entire exercise” means that “we are ridiculing ourselves globally at a time we are supposed to be taken seriously as a developing country”.105 But more importantly, this kind of policy somersault and instability are hallmarks of lack of national capacity. The situation is also indicative of our lack of seriousness in our commitment to treaties. But more importantly, these treaties were not mutually beneficial to Nigeria because of either of these two reasons: the negotiations for the treaties were not perfused by, or infused with expert advice or the chronic lack of capacity by the Nigerian state. The truth, however, is that whether or not Nigeria signs the AfCFTA; that is, even if it eventually decides to go protectionism by avoiding the deal, the protectionist policy will not change its national circumstances as the problem of lack of state capacity (not the AfCFTA) will continue to dog its heels. Even when he received the National Council of Manufacturers Association of Nigeria in June 2019, President Muhammadu Buhari was frank enough to admit the momentum of national capacity when he reportedly observed “that Nigeria lacks the capacity to 100 See

“Nigeria Air fiasco: Foreign investors won’t take Nigeria serious again—Obi”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 24, 2018, p. 16. 101 See Abdullateef Aliyu in “National carrier will cost $8bn in 10 years—Airline operators”, Daily Trust, Friday, September 21, 2018, p. 17. 102 See “Nigeria Air fiasco: Foreign investors won’t take Nigeria serious again—Obi”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 24, 2018, p. 16, op. cit. 103 See “Nigerians react on suspended National Carrier project”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 21, 2018, p. 35. 104 See Favour Nnabugwu in “Nigeria Air: We spent #91 m for entire project—FG; denies paying foreign airlines $600,000”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, November 9, 2018, p. 12. 105 See “Nigeria Air fiasco: Foreign investors won’t take Nigeria serious again—Obi”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 24, 2018, p. 16, op. cit.

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stop countries within the African Union (AU) from dumping of goods [in Nigeria], which will be detrimental to industries in the country”.106 It is lack of state capacity that has continued to orchestrate Nigeria’s porous international borders and foster smuggling to the detriment of whatever little national productivity that thrives. A nation where a whole ship in the Gulf of Guinea region can just vanish in broad day light in this age of hi-tech and the Global Positioning Radio System (GPRS)107 ; a nation where onshore contradictions exacerbate this offshore contradiction of ship disappearance,108 Nigerian borders and littoral terrains proximate to the borders are a huge national burden. Little wonder in September 2018, some pirates kidnapped 12 crew members of a Swiss cargo vessel—MV Glarus at 45 nautical miles from Bonny Island in the Niger Delta/Gulf of Guinea region.109 Nigeria’s difficulty in attaining self-sufficiency in rice production, despite its policy of protectionism in that sector, has become a euphemism for the country’s futile efforts at protectionism in the face of porous borders. It will be recalled that President Muhammadu Buhari “turned to autarky” when he took office in 2015 at a time of worsening oil prices for the country’s un-diversified “economy that exports oil and imports almost everything else”.110 The autarky here was in the President stopping the Central Bank from “providing foreign exchange to importers bringing in 41 categories of goods, including rice, toothpicks and incense”, increasing customs duties on rice from 10 to 60% while, in addition to such increased tariffs, dolling out generous loans to rice farmers.111 But despite these incentives, Nigeria’s locally produced rice was not competitive with the Asian imports (especially from Thailand) because the yields from Nigeria’s local production did not improve; and the cost of producing the Nigerian rice had also not fallen as a 50 kg of the local Nigerian rice sold for 14,000 naira while the smuggled rice from Asia sold for 12,500 naira.112 The government’s statistics claiming an increased tariff and loans to local rice farmers (with a slump in the Asian—Thailand—export to Nigeria) was belied by the fact that Thailand’s export to Benin Republic (Nigeria’s neighbouring country) had, on the other hand, increased— Benin Republic being the place from where, owing to its poorly policed border with Nigeria, the smuggling of rice to Nigeria boomed.113 Before COVID-19 led to the total closure of international borders across the world, the federal government had in August 2019, effected what initially seemed to be a 106 See

Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “AfCFTA: We lack capacity to stop dumping of goods into Nigeria—Buhari; Says decision on AfCFTA’ll be guided by national interest; Economy still fragile—MAN”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, June 20, 2019), p. 8. Parenthesis mine. 107 See Fred Aja Agwu (2016, p. 675), op. cit. 108 Ibid, pp. 707–708. 109 See “Nigerian pirates kidnap 12 crew from Swiss ship: NIMASA indentifies nationality of Captives”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 24, 2018, p. 45. 110 See “Nigerian self-sufficiency; grow your rice and eat it: Government policies have pumped up rice prices to benefit farmers and millers”, The Economist, March 17–23rd 2018, p. 34. 111 Loc. Cit. 112 Loc. Cit. 113 Loc. Cit.

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partial closure of its borders; but it later extended it to a prolonged (extended before COVID-19 to January 2020) closure of the Nigerian border with Benin Republic because of the massive smuggling activities there, particularly the smuggling of rice.114 Many people in the sub-region were miffed by this closure. The former Ghanaian President, John Dramani Mahama, reportedly described the closure as “a clear indication of institutional failure on the part of Nigeria”.115 In other words, smuggling across the Nigerian borders would not have chronically persisted if the country’s security institutions were not compromised with graft. As far as the Nigerian borders are concerned, the institutional failure that former Ghanaian President Mahama spoke about manifested itself in the fact that despite the so-called closure of the border with Benin Republic (that also links Togo and Ghana, etc.), the cross-borders movement of rice, vegetable oil and other commodities still persisted in the country’s northern borders, a region that overall has “about 2000 illegal routes”.116 The closure of Nigerian borders had, therefore, shown regional partiality or institutional discrimination. Thus, the former Ghanaian President insisted that “the unilateral closure of the borders since August is a worrying development for the growth of free trade in the ECOWAS sub-region”,117 not to talk about the AfCFTA that Nigeria had just endorsed. In fact, it was because of Nigeria’s porous borders with Benin Republic that the Nigerian crude palm oil producers and processors called on the Federal Government to close those borders because Benin Republic was allegedly sabotaging Nigeria’s economic interest—by importing palm oil more than it needed from Malaysia and exporting the surplus to Nigeria at the expense of Nigeria’s socio-economic gains.118 But in a region where colonialism divided kin communities and, thus, facilitated indiscriminate movements through multiple illegal routes across the borders, the closure of the Nigeria/Benin border would be definitely meaningless because of the institutional failure that the former Ghanaian President Mohama adverted to above as the smuggling would still thrive through the multiple illegal routes that the security agencies had been compromised. Perhaps, what was required in the management of Nigeria’s borders in a subregion of this nature was institutional building and citizenship conscientization 114 See

Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Why we closed border with Benin—Buhari: Ramaphosa meets Buhari, condemns killing of Nigerians in S/Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), August 29, 2019, p. 8. 115 See Olayinka Ajayi in “Border closure: Ex-Ghana President, Mahama blasts FG; says institutional failure responsible for smuggling …”, Vanguard (Lagos), November 20, 2019, p. 8. 116 See Emma Ujah, Ben Agande and Bashir Bello in “Scandal: Border closure partial in the North— Residents: Says cross-borders movements of rice, vegetable oil, others persist; smuggling claims false—Customs; why Northern borders are porous; Customs lacks manpower to cover 2000 illegal routes”, Saturday Vanguard (Lagos), November 23, 2019, p. 9. 117 See Olayinka Ajayi in “Border closure: Ex-Ghana President, Mahama blasts FG; says institutional failure responsible for smuggling …”, Vanguard (Lagos), November 20, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 118 See Femi Ibirogba in “How Benin’s import policy threatens Nigeria’s economy: Local oil palm producers want border closure; Accuse foreign country of dumping in Nigeria surplus supply from Malaysia”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, July 1, 2019, pp. 1, 6.

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through a massive human development programme that would promote patriotism and discourage smuggling. But more importantly, this Nigeria/Benin Republic inherent tango in palm oil trade illustrates the calamities in the Rules of Origin when not properly harnessed or determined in trade deals like the AfCFTA. This is because in the allegation of the Nigerian crude palm oil producers and processors, Benin Republic is importing more than it needs from Malaysia and dumping (through smuggling though) the surplus in Nigeria. In fact, it is from the porous Nigeria/Benin border that smuggling thrives and one finds the futility of Nigeria not signing the EPA with the EU if Benin Republic and other West African countries had sign119 ; or if Nigeria had taken umbrage and withdrawn from the ECOWAS on account of the admission of Morocco that had an existing trade agreement with the EU because the former (because of illdetermined rules of origin policy) would have flooded the ECOWAS countries with goods from Europe, from where they would be smuggled into Nigeria. The federal government conceded the dangers in porous borders when the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, accused Nigeria’s neighbouring countries of Benin Republic and Cameroon of undermining “the country’s rice revolution” if the aforementioned efforts at rice subsistence production can pass as a revolution.120 As already indicated above, Lai Mohammed lamented that whereas “Nigeria’s rice import falls, Benin’s rice import increases” and that “most of the parboiled rice imported by Benin eventually lands in Nigeria through smuggling”.121 The implication is that “both Cameroon and Benin Republics have lowered tariff payable on rice to zero and five percent respectively, to encourage importation and subsequent smuggling of the product into Nigeria”.122 So, this argument, especially by the most vociferous NLC,123 that Nigeria should not sign the AfCFTA in the populist guise of protecting its agricultural and industrial undertakings could not have achieved much if Nigeria’s borders remained porous on account of lack of state capacity; or the country (as the foremost sub-regional power) continued to fail to make the ECOWAS strong and united by a common policy orientation towards the EU and the rest of the world.

119 See

Agwu (2016), pp. 415–418), op. cit. Emmanuel Aziken and Prince Okafor in “FG accuses Benin Republic, Cameroon of sabotaging local rice production: Tariff on rice is 0% in Cameroon, 5% in Benin”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, April 3, 2018, p. 9. 121 Loc. Cit. 122 Loc. Cit. 123 See Alexander Enumah in “NLC opposition puts African free trade deal in jeopardy: Blamed for cancellation of Buhari’s Rwanda trip, ThisDay (Lagos), Monday, March 19, 2018, p. 10. 120 See

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7.2 AfCFTA and the Absence of a Free Movement Regime Like the free movement of goods, the free movement of people (which is also tied to the free movement of services) is very critical to the success of the AfCFTA. This was why Rita Amukhobu of the Department of Political Affairs of the African Union Commission had to insist that it is only with the imperative of free movement of persons across the African continent that the AfCFTA can succeed.124 According to her: We cannot have a free trade area that cater for only free movement of goods and services and not of people and expect successful continental integration. In essence, the continental free trade area in Africa will have to go hand in glove with free movement of persons, right of residence and right of establishment. Impediment to mobility of business people across borders imposes real costs on economies, including reduced imports and exports, reduced productivity, reduced competitiveness and translates into trade transaction costs for business.125

The implication of the above is that “goods are accompanied by people because it is people that trade with the goods likewise services are accompanied are accompanied by people because it is people that provide the skills”.126 This was the explanation why the African Union elaborated the Protocol to the treaty establishing the African Economic Community Relating to Free Movement of Persons, Rights of Residence and Rights of Establishment in order to ensure that Chapter Six of the 1991 Abuja treaty is implemented.127 Unfortunately, when in Kigali, the AfCFTA was presented for signature; the Protocol on Free Movement of Persons; the Protocol on Right to Residence; and the Protocol on Right to Establishment were all conspicuously missing.128 As recalled by Mehari Taddele Maru (whose work is copiously cited here), even in Niamey (Niger Republic) where the operationalization of the AfCFTA began (a treaty that witnessed a rapid ratification in the sense of taking little more than one year to go into inception), it had become clear that the free movement of people regime had begun to lag behind.129 In Niamey (Niger Republic), the Free Movement of People Protocol (which was adopted by the AU in January 2018) was missing in the agenda even though it was obvious that the AfCFTA and free movement were supposed to be intertwined and be working hand in hand if they were to operate effectively.130 124 See Sunday Aikulola in “ÄU links AfCFTA’s success to free movement of persons”, The Guardian

(Lagos), Friday, August 16, 2019, p. 37. Cit. 126 Loc. Cit. 127 Loc. Cit. 128 See Femi Adekoya in “One Year after, AfCFTA seeks last ratification to kick off agreement”, The Guardian, Wednesday, March 27, 2019, p. 29, op. cit. 129 See Mehari Taddele Maru in “Barriers to free movement in Africa: How to remove them”, available at https://meharitaddele.info/2019/08/barriers-to-free-movement-in-africa-howto-remove-them/ (last visited on August 7, 2019), op cit. 130 Loc. Cit. 125 Loc.

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It was unfortunate too that as at the July 7, 2019 Niamey AU summit, it was only four African countries (Madagascar, Niger, Rwanda and Sao Tome and Principe) that had signed the Free Movement Protocol, with all the bigger countries (like Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Ethiopia) not touching it with even a barge-pole.131 Meanwhile, as stated by Mehari Taddele, it was reckoned by the African Development Bank’s 2018 Africa Visa Openness Report that: African citizens need a visa to travel to 51% of other African countries, 24% demand a visa on arrival and only 25% operate visa-free travel for fellow-Africans. Thus, 50 years after the establishment of the AU’s predecessor body, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and 30 years after the Abuja Treaty that established the African Economic Community, the continent is still far from achieving the eagerly awaited free movement regime.132

In other words, “While an expressed political will for free movement has existed since the OAU was founded in 1963, it has not been translated into a political determination that allocates the necessary leadership energies, time and finance to soften borders and allow Africans to move freely within the continent”.133 Although Africa suffers the worse loss of human resources to the developed nations due to the issue of migration, but from what Mehari Taddele has stated above, it is clear that African countries do not seem to understand the benefit of migration (enhancing national intellectual and other capacities) as espoused earlier in this book by the UK’s Tory Government’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Home Secretary Priti Patel.134 African countries are clearly without the capacity to differentiate the bad from good mobility, a problem that makes them vulnerable to threats and risks, ranging from terrorism to outbreaks of disease.135 But as exemplifies by Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, intra African migration requires “leadership energies, time and finance to soften borders and allow Africans to move freely within the continent”; and this is more so because “a free mobility regime requires better-resourced airports and border posts and significant work and investment in border governance” that will facilitate its successfully implementation.136 It is in the above context that Mehari Taddele itemized six major constraints (with some overlapping elements) to the free movement of person’s regime in Africa. The first is the political barriers that include historical factors, the ideas of sovereignty, security threats, trust deficit and the negative mindset of government officials” as well as the “lack of political will and determination” since states are usually in control of their borders and free movement

131 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 133 Loc. Cit. 134 See “Johnson plans to abolish visa caps for scientists, engineers”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 9, 2019, p. 45, op. cit. 135 See Mehari Taddele Maru in “Barriers to free movement in Africa: How to remove them”, available at https://meharitaddele.info/2019/08/barriers-to-free-movement-in-africa-howto-remove-them/ (last visited on August 7, 2019), op cit. 136 Loc. Cit. 132 Loc.

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of people impinges on sovereignty because it resists the predisposition of states to control traffic through their borders.137 The second obstacle, according to Taddele, concerns policy barriers at the level of current policies, laws, regulations and working procedures.138 Although many African countries (aided particularly by China) have now conceived the preoccupation of developing large infrastructural connectivity projects such as airlines, railways, roads and commercial and transportation corridors that bring surges in mobility not only of tradable goods and services but also of people, but the policies and laws related to immigration, labour, business and residence are extremely prohibitive.139 This constraint overlaps with the third constraint, which is the obstacle of physical barriers that arise from poor service infrastructure, including immigration, transportation and hospitality facilities.140 The fourth constraint is the socio-economic and cultural barriers that are associated with the risks of the dilution of culture and religion, demographic shifts, pressure on economic benefits, and the competition for jobs, especially amongst the youth.141 The fifth factor is the administrative and bureaucratic barriers that are operational and nonpolicy oriented; and these include cumbersome procedural requirements for travels, corruption and improperly exercised discretionary powers of officials, sometimes at a junior level.142 Finally, the sixth constraint is that capability barriers that mainly reflect a low allocation of the necessary finance, human resources and the skills sets necessary for managing the flow of people under a free movement regime.143 Unfortunately, according to Taddele, African countries overlook the reality that free movement of Africans is a reality on the ground in areas where colonial artificial borders had divided “kin communities”, prompting a situation of multiple illegal passages or free movements,144 and which need to be formalized.145 The non-movement of persons on the African continent was further aggravated by Nigeria when, after signing the AfCFTA, it proceeded to close its border for a very long time146 (in contravention of international law—the ECOWAS treaty and the 1982 Montego-Bay Convention on the Law of the Sea that grants landlocked states 137 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 139 Loc. Cit. 140 Loc. Cit. 141 Loc. Cit. 142 Loc. Cit. 143 Loc. Cit. 144 In the Nigerian borders, there are multiple illegal means of crossing borders that have facilitated the movement of armed Fulani herdsmen from other ECOWAS and even non-ECOWAS countries. These illegal movements have brought about the infiltration of Southern Nigeria by these herdsmen and the resultant clashes between farmers and the herdsmen; see Agwu (2018, pp. 34–35), op. Cit. 145 See Mehari Taddele Maru in “Barriers to free movement in Africa: How to remove them”, available at https://meharitaddele.info/2019/08/barriers-to-free-movement-in-africa-howto-remove-them/ (last visited on August 7, 2019), op cit. 146 See Yakubu Mohammed in “Anger of the Big Brother”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday, October 23, 2019, back page. 138 Loc.

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free access in littoral countries, for instance147 ). Even when the country’s Minister of Finance, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, argued that the IMF understood that the closure of the borders was not a punitive action and, thus supported it,148 a critic warned about her self-delusion, reminding that “an IMF for whom trade is an article of faith, a body that preaches trade liberalization and free flow of goods across borders” cannot support Nigeria’s closure of its borders, arguing that Nigerians “should be far more intelligent than spread such stories”, for if any IMF official actually told Mrs. Zainab Ahmed that, “she should know he was merely humouring her”.149 It is only a few African countries, including Sierra Leone, that have announced that all African nationals are entitled to a visa on arrival.150 In this context, Sierra Leone would grant visa-free entry for countries in the sub-regional ECOWAS bloc, while “citizens of the African Union member states will enjoy visa-free-on-arrival but will be required to pay a $25 fee”.151 This effort by the Sierra Leonean government was not only meant “to reinvigorate a spluttering economy through promoting tourism and attracting international investment [since people from across the world, including the citizens of the US, the UK, EU member states and the BRICS are also allowed visa-free but to pay $80 on arrival] … mirrors a continent-wide push to open up Africa’s borders within the remit of the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) and the AU’s Protocol on Free Movement”.152 It was not until the Aswan Forum for Sustainable Peace in Africa that took place in early December in Egypt that Nigeria’s President Buhari announced (in an unredacted statement of which is hereby reproduced) that “we in Nigeria have already taken the strategic decision to bring down barriers that have hindered the free movement of our people within the continent by introducing the issuance of visa at the point of entry into Nigeria to all persons holding passports of African countries with effect from January 2020”153 —the year that the President intended to re-open the country’s closed borders until an indefinite closure was announced.154 The irony 147 See

“Nigeria has taught Ghana how to defy ECOWAS protocols—GUTA”, GhanaWeb, available at https://mobile.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/business/Nigeria-has-taught-Hgana-howto-defy-ECOWAS-protocols-GUTA-790490# (last visited on October 18, 2019). 148 See “Why IMF ‘supported’ border closure, by minister”, The Guardian (Lagos), October 21, 2019, p. 4. 149 See Owei Lakemfa in “Obeisance to Customs, the new power house”, Vanguard (Lagos), November 11, 2019, p. 27. 150 See “Sierra Leone joins visa-on-arrival system”, Kaleidoscope, New African, October 2019, p. 7. 151 Loc. Cit. 152 Loc. Cit. 153 See “Nigeria’ll issue visa on arrival to all Africans from January—Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, December 13, 2019, p. 8. 154 See Simon Echewofun Sunday, Sunday Michael Ogwu, Eugene Agha, Ismail Adebayo, Itodo Daniel Sule, and Ibrahim Sawab in “Border closure to last beyond January 2020—FG … Mixed reactions trail extension”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Monday, November 4, 2019, p. 3; see also Victoria Ojeme and Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Shut borders: Uproar in ECOWAS Parliament; as Ministers disagree over effects of closure on inflation; Benin failed to implement agreements with Nigeria— FG; Ghana, The Gambia plead for immediate re-opening”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, November 28, 2019, pp. 1, 5, 41.

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in this statement was (although Nigeria had introduced visa on arrival for business travelers as part of its ease of doing business campaign) not only that such a monumental development was announced abroad when the ordinary citizenry had not been informed (a contradiction, as will be seen shortly below, in Nigeria’s foreign policy operation155 ), it was announced when Nigeria had (in defiance of the country’s obligations in international law) continued to close its borders indefinitely since August 2019.156 Nigeria’s borders remained closed for close to sixteen months—from August 2019 to December 2020, when President Buhari announced on December 16, 2020, the immediate reopening of four main borders across the country, while the rest of the borders were to reopen on or before December 31, 2020, with the ban on the importation of rice, poultry and other banned items to subsist.157 But despite Nigeria’s prolonged border closure in violation of international law, one of the major motivations for President Buhari’s government’s new policy of visas on arrival to all Africans from January 2020 was the bourgeoning tourism that had attracted Sierra Leone, the fact that “the average number of African tourists travelling within Africa rose from 19 to 30 m—accounting for almost half of all tourists on the continent”.158 Although President Buhari’s visa-free-on-arrival by persons holding passports of African countries has been severely criticized159 (the details of which is presented below in this book), the visa phenomenon throws up a “massive potential for growth if the continent is able to move towards the implementation of the recently-forged African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which all bar one of Africa’s 55 countries have signed up to, making it the largest free trade area since the WTO came into being”.160 In the face of the AfCFTA, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) has proclaimed that “Africa’s intra-regional trade is set to increase by $50 to $70bn by 2040 due to the removal of tariffs alone (a remarkable jump for such a short time-frame)”.161 Meanwhile, one of the consequences of the non-existence of

155 The ThisDay newspaper editorialised that the no visa policy was not debated anywhere in Nigeria,

not even in the National Assembly, before it was announced abroad in a cavalier manner; indicating that it was “very disrespectful of Nigerians, to put it mildly, that the President would just fly to a conference in Egypt and make such a serious announcement”; see “The Visa on Arrival Policy”, Sunday Comment, ThisDay, The Sunday Newspaper, December 15, 2019, p. 10. 156 See “Nigeria’ll issue visa on arrival to all Africans from January—Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, December 13, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 157 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Buhari orders reopening of Seme, Maigatari, Ilela, Mfun borders”, Vanguard (Lagos), December 17, 2020, p. 11. 158 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/January 2020, p. 55, op. cit. 159 See “The Visa on Arrival Policy”, Sunday Comment, ThisDay, The Sunday Newspaper, December 15, 2019, p. 10, op. cit. 160 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/ January 2020, p. 55, op. cit. 161 Loc. Cit.

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free movement in Africa is the increased spate of xenophobia on the continent, particularly in South Africa.162 Although African states formerly cooperate, the peopleto-people (citizen-to-citizen) relations in non-contiguous countries like Nigeria and South Africa where colonialism did not divide kin communities, and where there is no free movement of these divided kin communities on the ground, are still at their lowest ebb if not totally non-existent. To address the problem of insufficient free movement regime in Africa, Taddele has argued that the “most urgent task” for the AU “is to make a concerted effort to generate sufficient political will to remove political barriers and create an enabling environment to address all the other obstacles”.163 And to achieve this, there would be “a well thought out strategy of lobbying, advocacy, popularization and deliberation” that should lead to a greater understanding and the trust that can produce the political incentive to carry the ratification process forward.164 Thus, the AU needs to develop a process of deliberation and popularization that is supported by the traditional and the new media; all of which will be focused on building up an African constituency for promoting free movement.165 In this context, the local and national drivers of the integration must include the chambers of commerce and informal cross border traders, with which the universities and their likes would be the main targets of the major drivers of Africa’s free movement regime.166 In addition to the foregoing, the free movement of goods and persons can be started with the proposal by a Beninoise intellectual and statesman, Professor Albert Tevoedjre, some decades ago called un jour sans frontiers (a day without boundaries), in which he proposed that there should be allowed, a free movement of goods and persons across West Africa, to begin with, not just cattle and their murderous minders; but to be also subsequently raised to two days, a week, a month, and so on, until the borders literally collapse under their own contradictions.167 This is the kind of ECOWAS proposal that should be implemented, not just in the ECOWAS region, but also in the whole of Africa, not the African leaders integration at the expense of the African peoples integration, or the ECOWAS leaders’ perfidious plan in Mali to prop up “another member of their discredited club” of leaders at the peoples’ expense.168

162 See

Agwu (2016, pp. 98–1044), op. Cit. Mehari Taddele Maru in “Barriers to free movement in Africa: How to remove them”, available at https://meharitaddele.info/2019/08/barriers-to-free-movement-in-africa-howto-remove-them/ (last visited on August 7, 2019), op cit. 164 Loc. Cit. 165 Loc. Cit. 166 Loc. Cit. 167 See Olatunji Dare at Home Abroad in “The ECOWAS failed mission to Mali”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, August 25, 2020, back page, op. cit. 168 Loc. Cit. 163 See

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7.3 AfCFTA: The Failure of Nigeria’s Protectionism One of the reasons for the failure of Nigeria’s foreign policy is the absence of an alignment between its protectionism and liberalism. In the AfCFTA, for instance, Nigeria demonstrated a high degree of protectionism that made it to endorse the agreement very late; but the country reportedly uncritically became a member of the WTO in 1997 with the attendant massive lowering of tariffs through wholesale trade liberalization that led to the massive collapse of labour intensive industries in textiles due to unfair competition,169 including the promotion of its national, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as the Director-General of the WTO. This ideological confusion that Nigeria is facing—like the art of practicing neolibralism as well as being submissive to international labour standards with socialist ethos that are unknown to liberalism— is a serious problem in its foreign policy. It is incomprehensible the way that Nigeria is chasing foreign investments that worship only on the bars of capital and exploitative profit. Nigeria’s protectionist tendency and lack of capacity were to seriously raise problems for its implementation of the AfCFTA. Although the AfCFTA was a momentum in which Nigeria played very significant roles in its establishment for purposes of Africa’s search for development, Nigeria’s endorsement of the deal did not epitomize a hagiographical narrative.170 Consistent with its antecedent in an African-centered foreign policy of integrating the continent, Nigeria was very significant in the creation of the OAU (now AU)—hosting in 1980, the OAU summit that produced the Lagos Plan of Action for the economic development of Africa; and in 1991, hosting the OAU summit that created the treaty that established the African Economic Community (or the Abuja treaty) that laid the foundation for the establishment of the AfCFTA.171 Nigeria also successfully midwifed the negotiation of the AfCFTA—using Ambassador Chiedu Osakwe (its chief trade negotiator and Director-General of Nigeria’s Office for Trade Negotiations, NOTN) as the Chairman of the AfCFTA negotiating form, and Dr. Okechukwu Enelamah (the Minister of Trade in Buhari’s first term) as the leader of the negotiation at the ministerial level.172 The duo of Osakwe and Enelamah were the Nigerian government officials that superbly performed their roles in securing the draft of the AfCFTA agreement at the technical and ministerial levels that Nigeria balked from signing in Kigali and Mauritania until very late in Niamey (Niger Republic) on July 7, 2019 when President Buhari signed the deal.173 There are as many positive dimensions of the AfCFTA as there are its negative aspects. It was an ominous sign that Nigeria, the African continent’s largest

169 See

Victor Ahiuma-Young in “AfCFTA’ll kill textile industry, others, if … Labour warns; says Nigeria must learn from WTO’s mistakes”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, December 10, 2020, p. 29. 170 See Olu Fasan in “AfCFTA must spur radical reform and policy shift in Nigeria”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 1, 2019, p. 31. 171 Loc. Cit. 172 Loc. Cit. 173 Loc. Cit.

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economy when the AfCFTA was signed, headed “to the sideline in the continental economic diplomacy”.174 Unfortunately, Nigeria’s neighbour in the West African sub-region—Ghana—that signed the AfCFTA early enough was made to host the Secretariat of the AfCFTA.175 The fact is that Nigeria, ironically, made a bid for the AfCFTA Secretariat; and given the pivotal roles Abuja performed in the creation of the trade deal, many African countries would have readily acquiesced to its wish to host the AfCFTA Secretariat.176 But, again, in its foreign policy tergiversization and prevarication, Nigeria was not wholeheartedly committed to signing the deal, making it possible for Ghana—reputedly “a pro-trade and reformist country”—to unsurprisingly and “deservedly” win the bid to host the AfCFTA Secretariat, with all the diplomatic cachet and economic benefits that come with being the home of such a major international economic institution”, winning again where Nigeria had lost.177 Nigeria’s loss of admiration and respect because of its tardy ways came in its loss of the Secretary-General post of the AfCFTA in Addis Ababa during the 33rd AU Summit that took place between February 9 and 10, 2020. Apart from not signing the deal in time and promptly ratifying it, Nigeria had acted in ways that contradicted the spirit and letter of the AfCFTA. Referring to Nigeria’s ways, a critic remarked that: … the continent’s most populous country and acclaimed giant which after indefinitely shutting its borders against 15 African countries, asked Africa to vote it as head of the African Continental Free Trade Area, ACFTA, a body that is about open borders and free movement of goods and persons. How can a country which for four months now has shut its borders with no timeline for reopening aspire to lead free trade in the continent?178

Although Nigeria had tried to reach out to the rest of the continent in December 2019 by announcing a visa-on-arrival policy for those carrying African passports, it was a policy termed “too little too late” because other African countries like Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia and even Cote d’Ivoire had been on this visa policy.179 The biggest irony here was that the Nigeria that “claims to be opening its skies to all Africa [through this visa policy] has its land borders closed”.180 It was for Nigeria’s errant foreign policy ways that it garnered “clear opposition by most countries” in its ambition for the headship of the AfCFTA, leading to the emergence of a South African as the AfCFTA consensus candidate, even though “Nigeria insisted on throwing its 174 See

“ÄfCFTA: The good, the challenges”, Vanguard editorial comment, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, July 29, 2019, p. 18. 175 See “As AfCFTA kicks off”, A Daily Trust newspaper Editorial, Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday, July 10, 2019, p. 45, op. cit. 176 See Olu Fasan in “AfCFTA must spur radical reform and policy shift in Nigeria”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 1, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 177 Loc. Cit. 178 See Owei Lakemfa in “Big Brother Nigeria still a toddler in African politics”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, February 14, 2020, p. 32, op. cit. 179 Loc. Cit. 180 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine.

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weight around, forcing the AU to go into voting” that led to the election of Wamkele Mene, a young man estimated to be between 40 and 42 years of age.181 At the 33rd AU Summit, South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa even got elected as the AU Chairperson while the DR Congo’s President Felix Tshisekedi became elected as AU’s First Vice President—an indication that in 2021, Tshisekedi will become the organization’s Chairperson.182 It was this reality that led to the verdict that “Nigeria may be the big brother in Africa, but in the continent’s politics, it is playing like a toddler”.183 Nigeria’s loss of ground and even relevance in its hesitation to sign did not end in its loss of the Secretariat and the Secretary-General post of the AfCFTA; Nigeria’s lousy foreign policy under the Buhari administration also led Facebook in June 2015, to choose Johannesburg (South Africa) as its African headquarters that would oversee its 120 million subscribers on the continent—a decision that was followed by Twitter when its Chief Executive Officer, Jack Dorsey, announced Ghana as its headquarters in Africa.184 Twitter’s choice leveraged the fact that Ghana is among the nations that will define the future based on its support for free speech and online freedom, having harbored the AfCFTA headquarters; Twitter also did not leverage the fact that Nigeria is the so-called “giant of Africa”, its size and its commercial relevance.185 Rather than blame these Nigerian failures on President Buhari’s local and foreign policy incompetence, Nigeria’s Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, in an Orwenian-Newspeak,186 and in recognition that Twitter’s decision was “not based on commercial considerations in view of the large market available in Nigeria”, reportedly blamed Nigerians—“the unpatriotic attitude of some Nigerians, especially the media, who he said had always struggled to outdo one another in painting Nigeria as hell where no one could live”—for this decision by Twitter to locate its African headquarters in Ghana.187 But the fact is that Twitter’s action was all about national character, which is very deficit in Nigeria, a situation that requires that “Nigerian 181 Loc.

Cit.; see also “South Africa’s Wamkele Mene voted as Secretary-General of AfCFTA Secretariat”, Citi Newsroom, CNR, available at https://citinewsroom.com/2020/02/south-africaswamkele-mene-voted-as-secretary-general-of-afcfta-secretariat/ (last visited on Friday, February 14, 2020), op. cit. 182 See Owei Lakemfa in “Big Brother Nigeria still a toddler in African politics”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, February 14, 2020, p. 32, op. cit. 183 Loc. Cit. 184 See “Twitter chooses Ghana as Africa HQ”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, April 13, 2021, p. 27; see also “Twitter avoids Nigeria, goes to Ghana!”, Vanguard Comment, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, April 21, 2021, p. 18. 185 See Vanguard Comment, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, April 21, 2021, ibid, p. 18. 186 In George Orwell’s 1984, New-speak’s propagation of minitrue, (practised by the Ministry of Truth, just like Minipax, Miniluv and Miniplenty) is an inversion of reality in which “war is peace, freedom is slavery, [and] ignorance is trength”; see Geroge Orwell (1965–1983), Nineteen EightyFour, London, Heinemann Educational Books, pp. 3, 80. 187 See Emmanuel Elebeke & Omeiza Ajayi in “Lai Mohammed blames Nigerians for Twitter’s decision to locate African hqtrs in Ghana: It’s a non-issue, APC replies PDP”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, April 16, 2021, p. 9.

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lawmakers must do away with primitive laws that abnegate the citizenry and make government to loom too large” in Nigerians daily lives.188 In fact, in terms of its deficit in local and foreign policy, Nigeria’s delay in signing the AfCFTA also led to Ghana additionally taking the strategic African “continental aviation hub that should naturally have been for Nigeria—a country that carries three times the international air traffic volume of Ghana”.189 In fact, at the Japanese government’s TICAD7 unilateral multilateralism under reference, whereas Nigeria merely came home with “a mere pledge of $300,000 (#108 million) from the Japanese Prime Minister and a promissory note of 50 million euros from an EU Commissioner, his Ghanaian counterpart, Nana Akufo-Ado, had sealed a deal with automobile giant, Toyota, to immediately establish a Toyota and Suzuki manufacturing plant in Ghana with a determined timeline of August 2020 for production”.190 This Japanese multinational had also signed a deal to establish a similar plant in Nigeria’s neighbouring Ivory Coast with a Memorandum of Understanding to that effect already signed on Thursday, August 29, 2019.191 These were all dramatic mark of the lack of seriousness in Nigeria’s problematic domestic and foreign policy. Although Nigeria was the so-called “biggest economy on the continent”, it was still beset with bureaucratic, legal, administrative and many challenges that would fully prepare it to participate in the AfCFTA.192 As a country that was bedeviled by energy and so much corruption and bootlegging challenges, it has been suggested that erratic power supply was not a prerequisite for competitive production output; more so as “shoddy products that do not meet international standards cannot hope to do well in the market; meaning that there were expectations that the AfCFTA free trade policy in Nigeria would no doubt put pressure on policy makers and policy implementation to strive for excellence.193 The corruption, political policy somersault and problematic infrastructural problems in Nigeria were such that the Ethiopian Airlines had to choose Lome (Togo) as its hub in West Africa for its Houston (United States) flights.194 On this score, the airline had to make its inaugural flight from Lome to Houston in December 2019 when its previous efforts to get a landing right on its Lagos-Houston direct flight operations had proved abortive.195 According to the management of the 188 See

Vanguard Comment, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, April 21, 2021, p. 18, op. cit. “ÄfCTA: The good, the challenges”, Vanguard editorial comment, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, July 29, 2019, p. 18, op. cit. 190 See “Anyone operating from PDP HQ is talking nonsense—Femi Adesina”, Vanguard (Lagos), September 3, 2019, p. 9, op. cit. 191 Loc. Cit. 192 See “As AfCFTA kicks off”, A Daily Trust newspaper Editorial, Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday, July 10, 2019, p. 45, op. cit. 193 See Yakubu Mohammed in “AfCFTA: Better late than never”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, July 10, 2019, p. 9; Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday, July 10, 2019, back page. 194 See Funke Olaode in “Nigeria loses out as Ethiopian Airlines makes Lome hub for W’ Africa: FG, Ethiopia in talks to secure landing rights for ET”, ThisDay (Lagos), Sunday, December 22, 2019, p. 10. 195 Loc. Cit. 189 See

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Ethiopian Airlines, it needed a hub in West Africa because of the concentration of Africans in the Diaspora; and in all of this, Houston “is strategic as it has the largest concentration of Nigerians in the United States with a 250,000 population, making it a win–win situation for the airline and Nigerians in the United States through seamless and hassle-free connection”.196 With Lome now the hub for the Ethiopian Airlines in the Houston-West Africa flight operations, Nigerians would have to fly to Lome first to join the direct flight to Houston.197 This arrangement is certainly a short-shrift for Nigerian travelers through the Ethiopian Airlines on this route. It ought not to be like that for the so-called “giant of Africa”. For two weeks during the harmatan season in February 2020, many foreign airlines (Emirates, British Airways, Lufthansa, Air France, KLM, and Delta Airline198 ) diverted their Lagos bound flights to Accra (Ghana) on the ground of weather and poor visibility at the Murtala Muhammed international airport in Lagos because the visibility was less than the standard minima.199 It was reported that “the harmatan haze reduced visibility below 800 m minima”, compelling the airlines to need Instrument Landing System (ILS) to land; but the Category 3 ILS that enables aircraft to land at zero visibility, which was installed at the airport in 2018 was malfunctioning because the calibration had not been completed so that it could be used.200 Although, according to the Ministry of Aviation, “weather vagaries” are experienced everywhere in the world,201 but this crippled ILS was a hallmark of the dysfunction in Nigeria that had continued to cripple the country’s aviation sector and effective participation in AfCFTA. But the ominous fact in the foregoing is that Nigeria has clearly lost the West African air market to Ghana because as at the last week of January 2021, “no Nigerian airline is operating to destinations such as Accra, Abidjan, Dakar, Freetown, Monrovia and Gambia”—the routes that “used to be lucrative for Nigerian airlines, where they generate dollar revenue and were known as low hanging fruits”.202 These routes, since international flights started on September 5, 2020 after the COVID-19 196 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 198 See Chinedu Eze in “Emirates suspends flights to Lagos, hundreds of Nigerians stranded in Ghana, available at https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2020/02/15/emirates-suspends-flightsto-lagos-hundreds-of-nigerians-stranded-in-ghana/ (last visited on Saturday, February 15, 2020). 199 See Lawani Mikairu in “Foreign airlines commence landing at Lagos Airport”, vanguardngr.com, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/02/foreign-airlines-commence-landing-at-lagosairport/ (last visited on Sunday, February 16, 2020). 200 See Chinedu Eze in “Emirates suspends flights to Lagos, hundreds of Nigerians stranded in Ghana, available at https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2020/02/15/emirates-suspends-flightsto-lagos-hundreds-of-nigerians-stranded-in-ghana/ (last visited on Saturday, February 15, 2020), op. cit. 201 See Lawani Mikairu in “Foreign airlines commence landing at Lagos Airport”, vanguardngr.com, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/02/foreign-airlines-commence-landing-at-lagosairport/ (last visited on Sunday, February 16, 2020), op. cit. 202 See Chinedu Eze in “Nigeria loses W’Africa Air travel market to Ghana”, thisdaylive.com, January 29, 2021, available at https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2021/01/29/nigeria-loseswafrica-air-travel-market-to-ghana/ (last visited on January 31, 2021). 197 Loc.

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air travel lockdown, were dominated by the “Ghana-based African World Airlines (AWA), Asky, Air Senegal and others”.203 Alongside the loss of these air market, Nigeria had also lost businesses that it once dominated in the region because of the influx of the Chinese into retail trade and the entrance of South African investors.204 These are the results of Nigeria’s lack of national capacity, particularly with its dwindling economy and the loss of the value of its currency, the naira.205 These was happening at a time that the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria had revealed that manufacturing activities in the country had shrunk marginally in the second quarter of 2019, indicating a contraction from the point recorded in the first quarter.206 Tragically, Nigeria’s notion of the implementation of the AfCFTA lay in the creation of another bureaucracy—the National Action Committee (NAC) for the implementation of the trade deal.207 The NAC was planned to undertake a process of engagement with stakeholders to sensitize them on the opportunities and challenges of the AfCFTA, with preparedness plans for Nigerian economy”.208 This is a sheer bureaucratization that—like the Desmond Guobadia-headed AfCFTA impact and readiness committee—would result to nothing because after the Guobadia committee consultations that preceded President Buhari’s signing of the deal in Niamey (Niger Republic), “nothing came out of the consultations that wasn’t known a year” earlier in 2018.209 It is interesting to note, as an aside, that the implementation of Nigeria’s foreign policy is riddled with the crisis of merit and implementation, as amply illustrated also by the Federal Government’s visa-on-arrival policy for travelers of African countries.210 While at the Aswan Forum in Egypt, President Buhari announced that his government would commence the issuance of visas at the points of entry into Nigeria to all those holding passports of African countries.211 The merit in the policy was that it was in advancement of Africa’s inspiration for the economic and eventual political integration of the continent; and that apart from Rwanda, Ghana, Seychelles, Benin Republic and Senegal that had the best ‘visa-openness’, Nigeria alongside South Africa were not doing well on this visa score.212 On implementation, it was clear that although the Federal Government may have engaged Nigerians on the AfCFTA (with the NAC), but on this visa issue it 203 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 205 Loc. Cit. 206 See Yinka Kolawole in “Manufacturing activities shrunk marginally in q2’19”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 1, 2019, p. 12. 207 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in ÄfCFTA: Buhari approves establishment of National Action C’ttee”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, July 29, 2019, p. 8. 208 Loc. Cit. 209 See Olu Fasan in “AfCFTA must spur radical reform and policy shift in Nigeria”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 1, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 210 See “The Visa on Arrival Policy”, Sunday Comment, ThisDay, The Sunday Newspaper, December 15, 2019, p. 10, op. cit. 211 Loc. Cit. 212 Loc. Cit. 204 Loc.

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clearly disengaged the citizenry as the ThisDay Newspaper had argued in its editorial that the policy was cavalierly done with total disrespect for Nigerians, having been announced at the Aswan Forum (conference) in Egypt, even when it had not been debated anywhere at home in Nigeria.213 When the policy was announced in Egypt in December for its implementation to commence in January 2020, the paper queried: what is so urgent about the policy that there are only two weeks between announcement and implementation? Since we are neither a tourist destination nor an employment and labour attraction what skills do African visitors have to bring to our country?214 Perhaps, it may be against the background of the uncontrolled entrance of militant herdsmen to Nigeria as well as “the controversial ill-fated RUGA—the Rural Grazing Area—that the paper canvassed the challenges to national security that the sudden visa-on-arrival policy alignment may pose to Nigeria.215 It also argued that: Nigeria does not have the resources to support an influx of African immigrants at a period our country ranks very high on the global poverty index. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Protocol on Free Movement of Persons within [the] 15 countries in the sub-region has its challenges. It is an open secret that the Nigeria Immigration Service and the security agencies lack the capacity to track and trace those who are granted visas into the country to ensure they do not overstay. Without building such capacity, what this policy will ensure is that all manner of people will enter and varnish into the crowd in a country where locations, maps and addresses are fluid and far-flung, with the result that even legitimate residents are hard to trace … It may sound expedient to want to align policies and practices with other African nations. It is however foolhardy to dabble into such policies without subjecting them to rigorous analysis against the dismay backdrop of our economic and national security circumstances.216

Now, back to the AfCFTA sensitization and consultation in 2018 before Nigeria signed the deal, the country’s businesses listed a medley of well known supplyside and institutional issues like the cost of finance, poor transport infrastructure, and smuggling, amongst other issues that bedeviled the country’s synergy between trade liberalization, production capacity, and the embrace of economic openness.217 Despite these home truths that were not new all, Nigeria’s decision-making in signing the AfCFTA was still “dogged by analysis paralysis” that resulted in the indecision that delayed the signing.218 It is in this same way that the NAC’s engagement with the so-called stakeholders would not save the Nigerian economy that has neither a manufacturing sector nor an international competitiveness, an economy that is rather bedeviled by a “protectionist approach to industrialization”.219 213 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 215 Loc. Cit. 216 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 217 See Olu Fasan in “AfCFTA must spur radical reform and policy shift in Nigeria”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 1, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 218 Loc. Cit. 219 See “ÄfCTA: The good, the challenges”, Vanguard editorial comment, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, July 29, 2019, p. 18, op. cit. 214 Loc.

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The contradictions in the Nigerian economy are not even helped by the country’s private sector stakeholders. These stakeholders were aware of the lack of synergy in the country’s economy, its resultant non-competitiveness and the absence of the political will to improve it; yet, they dissuaded President Buhari from signing as well as the calamitous result of Nigeria losing grounds to Ghana in the critical aviation sector as well as the Secretariat of the AfCFTA. But had President Buhari signed the agreement without deferring to them as stakeholders, the President would have been deemed insensitivity in a democratic setting. It is in the involvement of stakeholders of this nature as well as individuals (as track II diplomats) that the idea that everybody is a foreign policy resource arises. Unfortunately, there is a huge democratic hiatus in Nigeria’s foreign policy in the sense that President Buhari’s deference to the citizenry on the AfCFTA according to democratic dictates was not replicated in his handling of the visa-on-arrival to people entering Nigeria with African countries’ passports.220 The Buhari administration’s disregard of the citizenry and a broad spectrum of democratic input in the visa policy clearly explained why the Senate moved against the January 1, 2020 free visa presidential directive, resultantly summoning the Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, to appear before it in company with the Comptroller General of the Nigerian Immigration Services (NIS)—Muhammad Babandele—and explain the logistics and legal implication of the directive.221 This was particularly within the context of the pervasive security worries within the country, especially the incidences of insecurity that were “coming from some elements outside the country”.222 In fact, the apex Igbo socio-cultural organization—the Ohaneze Ndigbo—condemned the policy and alleged that it was simply aimed at achieving the Buhari government’s Rural Grazing Area (RUGA) policy that was rejected by Nigerians through the back door.223 Some arguments from the Senate, therefore, suggested that the Presidential directive should be made consistent with the existing law; otherwise, the directive as given without national consultation and a permissive internal legal structure “would give room for anybody to just come into the country”.224 This was the same reason a PDP chieftain in Delta State (Chief Sunny Onuesoke) also opposed the visa policy, arguing that it was dumbfounding that not only that the policy was never discussed anywhere in Nigeria, there was a contradiction that President Buhari that had closed the nation’s borders on account of economic nationalism would now throw it open for everyone to come in, not minding that the country was already over populated (in view of 220 See

“The Visa on Arrival Policy”, Sunday Comment, ThisDay, The Sunday Newspaper, December 15, 2019, p. 10, op. cit. 221 See Samuel Ogidan in “Senate moves against January 1 free visa Presidential directive: summons Aregbesola, Babandele”, Daily Independent (Lagos), Wednesday, December 18, 2019, pp. 1, 4. 222 Loc. Cit. 223 See Lawrence Njoku and Ayodele Afolabi in “Visa on arrival aimed at achieving RUGA, Ohaneze alleges; Ekiti community kicks over alleged destruction of crops by herders”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, December 19, 2019, p. 3. 224 The argument was by Senator Ibikunle Amosun; see Samuel Ogidan in “Senate moves against January 1 free visa Presidential directive: summons Aregbesola, Babandele”, Daily Independent (Lagos), Wednesday, December 18, 2019, p. 4, op. cit.

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the GDP/population ration); and that the country was plagued by unemployment, insecurity and infrastructural challenges.225 But with respect to the AfCFTA, however, what is desired most in Nigeria’s endorsement of the agreement is, in addition to the first NAC and the second NAC he inaugurated on Friday, December 20, 2019 for the deal’s implementation,226 (all of which were bureaucratic institutional multiplications in engaging the citizenry), the utilization of the deal “as a trigger for reaching policy and institutional reforms to build Nigeria’s productive and trade capacities”.227 As it were, this multiplication of bureaucratic institutions appears necessary; particularly (as the President explained) when the bureaucratic institutions were an integral part of the necessary due diligence and rigorous impact and evaluation exercises to inform the people and protect the Nigerian economy from being hurt in the execution of the AfCFTA.228 The President also explained that the bureaucracies and the AfCFTA were part of the process of job creation for the youth and the increased production of local materials and the ultimate made-in-Africa goods in a continental integration exercise that must be rule-based with built-in safeguards against injurious practices.229 This was why the President urged all the bureaucracies to work together and block all the loopholes that could result in losses for the country; since the prevention of losses were the fundamental reasons for the creation of the bureaucracies themselves as instruments of due diligence.230 The ultimate aim of the AfCFTA was trade; and trade, according to President Buhari, was “pivotal to job creation, growth and the health of the economy”—“a key enabler for regional and global integration”.231 In other words, “Nigeria must develop its productive and trade capacities to produce quality goods and services, and export them competitively to other African countries”.232 So, the broadening of Nigeria’s capacity to trade in the AfCFTA (complementing the efforts of the Ministries and the MDAs in closing all existing gaps in productive activities in the Nigerian economy) was clearly the intention in

225 See

Sylvester Idowu in PDP Chieftain asks Buhari to suspend visa-on-arrival policy”, ThisDay (Lagos), Sunday, December 22, 2019, p. 10. 226 See “Buhari inaugurates fresh Committee on African Continental Free Trade”, available at https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2019/12/21/buhari-inaugurates-fresh-committee-on-afr ican-continental-free-trade/ (last visited on December 21, 2019); see also Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Buhari inaugurates AfCFTA implementation C’ttee: charges members to protect Nigeria’s economy against injuries”, Saturday Vanguard (Lagos), December 21, 2019, p. 6. 227 See Olu Fasan in “AfCFTA must spur radical reform and policy shift in Nigeria”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 1, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 228 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Buhari inaugurates AfCFTA implementation C’ttee: charges members to protect Nigeria’s economy against injuries”, Saturday Vanguard (Lagos), December 21, 2019, p. 6, op. cit. 229 Loc. Cit. 230 Loc. Cit. 231 Loc. Cit. 232 See Olu Fasan in “AfCFTA must spur radical reform and policy shift in Nigeria”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 1, 2019, p. 31, op. cit.

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the second NAC that was inaugurated on December 20, 2019 aforementioned.233 This was more so when “other AfCFTA countries would certainly be targeting Nigerian markets legitimately under AfCFTA”; and “if Nigeria can’t in turn, penetrate the African markets, it would be a big loser from AfCFTA”; which means “it must waste no time in the implementation of AfCFTA”.234 Before the Nigerian economy nosedived and became noticeable from 2016, the country controlled air travel in the West African sub-region.235 But with Nigeria’s lack of national capacity and very poor economy, it is doubtful that the country might play a major role in the AfCFTA that enables all African countries (except Eritrea) to trade under a single market.236 Concerning air travel and the AfCFTA, it is obvious that Africa’s strength and voice in the global market place “would be meaningless unless” the SAATM “framework is fully implemented”.237 Although Nigeria can still regain its place in air transport because this is a function of national capacity and the massive number of citizens traveling (as there is “no correlation between hosting the AfCFTA and having economic dominance”), Ghana’s hosting of the AfCFTA is currently irrelevant as long as it remains a growing economic hub that has not matched the number of Nigerian travelers and cargo; or Nigeria’s reputation as “the biggest economy in Africa”238 ; but the tragedy still remains that Nigeria has no observable and demonstrable national capacity. Despite Nigeria’s possession of a massive travelling public and cargo, the country does not have the enabling infrastructure, airports and navigation facilities.239 In other words, Nigeria’s implementation of the AfCFTA, according to the Africa Association of Professional Freight Forwarders and Logistics in Nigeria (APFFLON) would be disadvantageous because of its lack of national capacity and preparedness for the AfCFTA; and this portends the possibility of the AfCFTA faltering like the ECOWAS Trade Liberalization Scheme (ETLS), the Common External Tariff, and the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).240 Unfortunately, because Nigeria’s foreign policy had been divorced from the experts in the academia under the Buhari administration and severely subjected to bureaucrats and political office holders, there were still those, against Nigeria’s obvious lack of national capacity and a virile economy,

233 See

“Buhari inaugurates fresh Committee on African Continental Free Trade”, available at https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2019/12/21/buhari-inaugurates-fresh-committee-on-afr ican-continental-free-trade/ (last visited on December 21, 2019), op. cit. 234 See Olu Fasan in “AfCFTA must spur radical reform and policy shift in Nigeria”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 1, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 235 See Chinedu Eze in “Nigeria loses W’Africa Air travel market to Ghana”, thisdaylive.com, January 29, 2021, available at https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2021/01/29/nigeria-loseswafrica-air-travel-market-to-ghana/ (last visited on January 31, 2021). 236 Loc cit. 237 Loc. Cit. 238 Loc. Cit. 239 Loc. Cit. 240 See “Nigeria not ready for AfCFTA, says APFFLON boss”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, January 21, 2021, p. 14.

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that were touting the AfCFTA as having the ability of safeguarding Nigeria from becoming a dumping ground.241 Thus, Nigeria must not only build a state capacity to benefit from the AfCFTA, it must also swiftly institute the trade remedies regime to tackle injurious trade practices as well as a qualitative infrastructural outlay that will address the problem in the quality of its exports.242 But more importantly, because the other AfCFTA countries must be targeting the Nigerian markets, Nigeria must critically ensure the enforcement of the Rule of Origin because the “market intelligence concerning the agreement points to possible dominance by economies outside Africa” that will be “targeting markets such as Nigeria”.243 This is why it is heartwarming, though, that President Buhari reiterated (while receiving the report of the Guobadia Presidential Committee on the AfCFTA) that the agreement must carry with it a manufacturing agenda; including the fact that the goods to be traded must be made in Africa.244 It is sincerely hoped that Nigeria would achieve this grand strategy.

7.4 Populism and Epistemic Challenges in Foreign Policy It was in the heat of the controversy surrounding Nigeria’s protectionist attitude in the AfCFTA that some critiques of Nigeria’s foreign policy remarked that under President Donald Trump of the United States, the foreign policy of “America First” was visible to all; but for Nigeria, diplomats “just sit and listen to lobbyists from other countries” without “basic principles and objectives on which we should also lobby other countries”.245 Although foreign policy requires economic benefit, it is wrong to reduce it to the transactionalism of the United States’ President Trump who did not appreciate the benefit of KORUS outside the fact that America “had an $18 billion annual trade deficit with South Korea and was spending $3.5 billion a year to keep US troops there”, obviously ignorant of the intelligence and military benefits that were beyond the economic.246 Thus, the economic index should not be the overriding consideration in any country’s foreign policy. When the Ministry of Foreign Affairs advertised the position of the Director-General of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), one 241 This

was the position of Professor Mojisola Adeyeye, the Director-General of the National Agency for Food and Drug Admnistration and Control (NAFDAC); see Yinka Kolawole in “AfCFTA’ll safeguard Nigeria from becoming dumping ground—NAFDAC”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, February 3, 2021, p. 19. 242 See Olu Fasan in “AfCFTA must spur radical reform and policy shift in Nigeria”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 1, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 243 See “ÄfCTA: The good, the challenges”, Vanguard editorial comment, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, July 29, 2019, p. 18, op. cit. 244 Loc. Cit. 245 See Owei Lakemfa in “Nigeria, the giant of Africa needs foreign policy direction”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 5, 2019, p. 31. 246 See Woodward (2018, p. xviii), op. cit.

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of Ministry’s considerations was the economic consideration in somebody that would be “able to demonstrate track record in similar position(s) within or outside Nigeria as well as capacity to write research proposals with evidence of previous grants won locally and internationally”.247 This requirement was just being cognizant of the cost of foreign policy and oblivious of the fact that the NIIA is a national organization that should be conscious of the national interest, rather than the economic cost of policy; since some of the foreign grants enforce the traction, trajectory and the conclusion that the research must follow, oblivious of Nigeria’s national interest in intelligence and military terms. In the NIIA, the foreign funding of research projects becomes even more problematic when the disbursement of the funds is not cognizant of the civil service financial regulations as seen in the “Conference on Africa-China Cooperation in Information Technology and Digital Economy: Prospects and Challenges” that held in Abuja on Thursday, June 28, 2018. This transactionalist approach to foreign policy promotes corruption and is clearly destructive of the national interest because it submits the country to the wishes of the forum or research grant funders. It is because of China’s funding of research in Nigeria that when the Nigerian civil society and many academics are talking, they sound as if they are coming from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs or information. We have been overwhelmed by transactionalism; and this is not favourable to Nigeria’s national, especially the country’s security interests. We now appear to defend anything the Chinese do here with FOCAC and the BRI for just a pot of pottage. In addition, the advancement of the consciousness to project a protectionist “Nigeria First” foreign policy has led another critique of Nigeria’s foreign policy to purvey that: What we have today is a situation where Nigerians have stolen masses of Nigeria’s money, but foreigners are running the Shoprites, DSTVs and MTNs in Nigeria. We must not surrender the lucrative Nigerian market to foreigners. There is a new scramble going on for Africa among the European nations and China. This explains the new interest in Nigeria. It is not surprising that President Macron of France, Theresa May of Britain, and Angela Merkel of Germany also paid us a visit one after the other. But it is time for Nigeria to also say no to the classical requirements of trade liberalization that have hitherto been imposed on us. We can no longer afford to be a dumping ground for European goods. We have to build up our own productive capacities, if necessary behind high tariff walls. That also means we must be determined to transform ECOWAS from a peace-keeping and peace-enforcing organization to one truly devoted to the promotion of regional economic integration. We must fast-track West African regional integration, primarily by the lowering of tariffs.248

Although horizontal integration is preferable to vertical integration, the idea or philosophy expressed in the quote above is confusing because of its advocacy of protectionism (in Nigeria saying no to the “classical requirements of trade liberalization that have hitherto been imposed on us”) and at the same time advocating a 247 See “Ministry of Foreign Affairs Advertisement for Post of Director-General, Nigerian Institute

of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos, Nigeria, Internal and External Adverstiement”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, May 22, 2020, p. 11. 248 See Femi Aribisala in “Revamping Buhari’s shambolic foreign policy”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, July 16, 2019, p. 30.

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horizontal integration in West Africa despite the fact that, as already argued above, the CET has adopted categories of customs duties with zero duties for “essential social commodities” that have made it impossible for intra-ECOWAS trade to work for a country like Nigeria.249 All of the foregoing emphasizes the tragedy in Nigeria’s foreign policy, especially under President Buhari, which some critics described as existing “in the doldrums”, particularly because “our foreign ministry is currently comatose”.250 Although another critic argued that “it will be uncharitable to say that the foreign policy of Nigeria, the most populous black country on earth and the Giant of Africa, is rudderless”, that critic, nevertheless, maintained that “the Nigeria foreign ministry is paralyzed”, and that “it will be more accurate to say it (the foreign policy of Nigeria) is on autopilot”.251 Accordingly, this critic worried that, for Nigeria’s foreign policy, “there is none”; and that: Given this fogginess, our diplomats rely on directives and instructions from the headquarters while the headquarters reads the body language of the President. Our diplomats should not second guess the President; they should have a defined foreign policy within which they can take initiatives. On the international scene, we should not be like chaff blown around by the wind. On matters affecting humanity, we should not just sit and listen to lobbyists from other countries; we should have basic principles and objectives on which we should also lobby other countries.252

What follows from the foregoing is that, advertently or inadvertently, Nigeria is very disdainful of the culture of expertise in its foreign policy. And one of the greatest banes of this problem is the exclusion of the epistemic community—the intellectual sector (the academia) and the genuine (as opposed to pseudo expertise) intellectual expertise—from the country’s foreign policy decision-making network. As far as pseudo intellectualism goes, its incidence is encountered when it becomes the unenviable lot of the country’s foreign policy establishment to be sometimes dominated by bureaucrats who masquerade as intellectuals and aggressively exclude broad intellectual expertise and input. This is notwithstanding the fact that foreign policy, being a vital instrument of national development, requires a strong and composite input of expertise of varied shades, indeed, input from all informed sections of the polity. In international relations, mastering the specific nuances of other countries’ diplomatic moves, policies and programmes, “and knowing how to blunt [them requires] deep expertise”.253 It is only in dictatorships that expertise and broad consultations are excluded from foreign policy. North Korea under Kim II Sung was one of such dictatorships. When 249 See

Agwu (2016, pp. 417–418), op. Cit. Femi Aribisala in “Revamping Buhari’s shambolic foreign policy”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, July 16, 2019, p. 30, op. cit. 251 See Owei Lakemfa in “Nigeria, the giant of Africa needs foreign policy direction”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 5, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 252 Loc. Cit. 253 See “American foreign policy after Rexit: Rex Tillerson was not a good Secretary of State. What follows may be worse”, The Economist, March 17th–23rd 2018, p. 13, op. cit. 250 See

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she visited North Korea as the United States’ Secretary of State to discuss the possibility of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and a halt to that country’s nuclear programme under the Bill Clinton President, Madeleine Albright in a meeting with Kim intimated him that hers “had given his delegation a list of questions and that it would be helpful if his experts could provide at least some answers”; thereupon “Kim asked for the list and began answering the questions himself, not even consulting the experts by his side”.254 It is for the above chaotic Nigerian condition—the disconnect between expertise and policy as well as an absence of a broad-based input into foreign policy, among others—that (particularly because in foreign policy management, the bulk stops on the President’s table) it has been argued in Nigeria that a successful aspiration to Nigeria’s Presidency must be determined by the candidate’s capacity to handle foreign policy because it is integral to the welfare of the citizenry and national development.255 Unfortunately, there is hardly any conscious attempt to determine the foreign policy capability of Presidential aspirants in Nigeria. Although foreign policy is an executive and elite enterprise that also involves members of the academia— described as an “organic elite”—politicians campaigning for the Nigerian executive Presidency do not articulate foreign policy issues as they are linked to domestic politics.256 The capacity to link foreign policy with domestic politics is particularly compelling for a Nigerian Presidential aspirant because Nigeria is a country that is deeply fractured or divided between faiths (Christians and Muslims), regions (the North and the South), and class (the haves and the have-nots).257 When these fissions are not adeptly handled by the President as the chief driver of foreign policy at the executive arm of government, they affect the country’s domestic politics and, hence, national interest adversely—like in the lack of strategic coherence or unity among the three main regions that led to Nigeria’s loss of the Island of Fernando Po to Equatorial Guinea258 ; the rancorous United Nations-conducted plebiscite that led to Nigeria’s loss of the Anglophone South West Province of Cameroun because the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) in the North and the Action Group (AG) in the West while securing their own demographic advantages for electoral purposes, apparently ensured that the Eastern Region lost the southern province to Cameroun259 ; and, of course, the loss of the Bakassi Peninsula afterwards260 —all similar to what the 254 See

Albright (2003, p. 591), op. cit. is the position of Professor Ayo Dunmoye of the Department of Political Science and International Studies, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, in “Foreign Policy should determine who becomes President in 2019—Prof. Dunmoye”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, August 20, 2017, p. 38. 256 Loc. Cit. 257 See Ian Bremmer in “Will Nigeria’s ailing President name a successor”? Time (New York), September 4, 2017, p. 8. 258 See Agwu (2009, pp. 161–163), op. cit. 259 See Humphrey Orjiako (2016); Nigeria: The Forsaken Road to Nationhood and Development, Ibadan, Rasmed Publications Limited, pp. 18–19. 260 Ibid, p. 19; see also Agwu (2009, pp. 281–372), op. cit. 255 This

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Russian President Putin described as “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the (20th) century” when the Soviet Union crumbled.261 A “deepened strategic coherence” will not only make for unity among Nigeria’s heterogenic religious, regional and even class interests; it will also foster coherence and unity of vision and definition of common problems among the security agencies that attend to national security challenges.262 But the lack of strategic coherence is accentuated by the politicians’ inability to broaden the foreign policy resource base with extensive consultations and debates during electioneering campaigns. The result is that an inept leadership is thrown up at the foreign policy realm after the elections. Even beyond elections, serious debates are rarely periodically organized to enable the definition and articulation of “the organizing framework of Nigeria’s foreign policy as a way to mobilize political and popular support for its effective pursuit”.263 Nigeria pays dearly for these inadequacies in the sense that the country’s immediate post-independence immense diplomatic traction that led to many celebrated foreign policy accomplishments on the continent and around the world264 is now increasingly waning. Owing to numerous challenges, the country is now losing clouts, not only within its immediate West African neighbourhood, but also on the African continent and the global stage.265 Imagine the tragedy in the Lebanese Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Houssam Diab, walking out on the House of Representatives Committee on Diaspora Affairs.266 Mr. Diab was summoned by the Committee to respond to questions on the maltreatment of Nigerians in Lebanon, but while “the hearing was about to commence at about 10:52am, the Lebanese envoy walked out of the room and shut the House’s hearing room 348 door behind him”—a development that miffed the Chairman of the Committee who expressed the members of the Committee’s shock “that the Ambassador will just get up and walk out on us”.267 The irony in the whole matter—which demonstrated Nigeria’s apparent lack of self-respect and national clout—was that shortly after the Lebanese Ambassador walked out on the Committee, its Chairman, Tolulope Akande-Shadipe, excused the media from the room and called for an Executive session, after which she reportedly “recanted, saying the meeting was cordial and that the walk-out was a misunderstanding”—inexplicably declaring that: …it was an informal meeting because the Ambassador was nice enough to join us at the meeting. There is no law that says he has to be here today, but because he has an interest in the joint relationship between Nigeria and Lebanon, he came.268 261 Ibid,

p. 440. Otobo (2017). 263 Ibid, p. 270. 264 Ibid, pp. 250–260. 265 Ibid, pp. 260- 270. 266 See Tordue Salem in “Maltreatment of Nigerians: Lebanese Ambassador walks out on Reps”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 10, 2020, p. 8. 267 Loc. Cit. 268 Loc. Cit. 262 See

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The Committee Chairman’s remark above was absolutely a red herring, a calculated attempt to distract from its responsibility to recommend to the President through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that, for that national affront, that Lebanese Ambassador should be called to question—declared persona-non-grata and be expelled from Nigeria. This is the ultimate test of national power in the 1961 Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations. This development was emblematic of a weak Nigeria. It becomes more tragic when some analysts believe that, “for economic and security reasons, Africa needs a strong Nigeria; and to tackle its own economic and security problems, Nigeria needs a strong President” to drive its foreign policy,269 a President that has so far eluded the country, especially with the Buhari anti-climax, the dashed hope in the Buhari presidency. The optimism in Nigeria’s capacity to give leadership in Africa’s quest for socioeconomic and security accomplishments was starkly captured in the declaration that “the day that Nigeria works properly, the battle for Africa’s future will have been won”.270 Unfortunately, this decisive leadership that Nigeria had shown in the wake of its independence in 1960 through the 1970s to the early 1980s has been quashed and, in fact, receded. From being an active participant in United Nations’ peacekeeping operations, the quality of Nigeria’s participation dropped with the drop in the quality or battle readiness of its troops and equipment.271 In fact, Nigeria retreated from international peacekeeping in order to bolster its capacity to deal with the Boko Haram security nightmare at home—withdrawing “some of its soldiers from UN peacekeeping operations in Darfur and Mali to cope with Boko Haram insurgencies—so much so that “Chad, a country that Nigeria had led an OAU force to rescue in the 1980s …; this formerly rescued nation by Nigeria has become the rescuer of Nigeria”.272 As a matter of fact, Nigeria keeps on popping up in foreign security policy for the wrong reasons, like in being cited by Thomas Fraser Homer-Dixon as one of the countries habouring the danger of acquiring “hard regimes” owing to environmentally driven wars and other challenges.273 This is part of what is embodied in the attribution of the status of a failed state to Nigeria. And added to it is the profound disruption in the country’s national vision—the vision of a national identity that supersedes ethnicity274 ; a nation where governmental institutions function well enough to cater to the generality of the people through good governance.275 But Nigeria’s retreat from good governance has made the country to be increasingly vulnerable to all manner of insecurity, including the soft dimension of insecurity—the porous borders, 269 See

Ian Bremmer in “Will Nigeria’s ailing President name a successor”? Time (New York), September 4, 2017, p. 8, op. cit. 270 See Otobo (2017, pp. 259–260), op. cit. 271 See Agwu (2009, p. 194), op. cit; see Otobo (2017, p. 258), op. cit. 272 See Otobo (2017, ibid, pp. 258–259), op. cit. 273 See Kaplan (2000, p. 21). 274 See John Campbell (2011); Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink, New York, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., p. 5. 275 Ibid, p. 139.

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security regimes,276 hard regimes that flow from what Homer-Dixon described as the consequence of declining resources,277 and environmental threats that arose from such problems as the shrinking of the Lake Chad Basin and desertification that had led to the convergence of many people in little available economic spaces, which fueled the dispersal of Herdsmen to the Southern region and the intensification of terrorism in the country.278 The incapacity of Nigeria in reigning in the place of environmental challenges as far as the fuelling conflict and terrorism in the country was concerned made the Nigerian-born UN Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed, to emphasize an equitable government intervention in Stockholm in 2018 during the World Water Week event.279 Nigeria is increasingly tagged a failed state, not just on account of its failing institutions; but also because, like in all failed states, the government at a point in its insurgencies in the Niger Delta and the northeast region, had lost “control over a significant part of its territory”.280 It is for this loss of complete control that the federal government has continued to fail in using foreign policy to deliver on the national interest to which every other thing is subservient—the core vision of the state, defined in terms of territorial integrity, sovereignty, the economy or provision of basic socio-economic and security needs to its citizens.281 This inherent foreign policy failure is replicated across the board in many institutions in the country. The judiciary, for instance, is held to be dyspeptic, a scene where many in the Bench have been afflicted with “a tunnel vision and bureaucratic mindset that constricts rather than expand the very concept of law”—where there is a widespread failure “to bring sociological imagination to bear on the administration of justice”.282 It was this same tunnel vision that (because of over-bureaucratization and lack of sociological imagination) had also bedeviled Nigeria’s foreign policy. The country’s foreign policy has been so shackled by a tunnel vision, which is so denigrating of epistemic input that the nation’s diplomacy became degenerate, with everything apparently abandoned to the socio-psychology of the successive Presidents who themselves began to apprehend issues from the prism of the bureaucracy, especially from the viewpoint of the bureaucracy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The tunnel vision was dramatically illustrated by this subsumption of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; even when the Ministry itself was not well funded for the optimal performance of its traditional 276 See

Agwu (2018, pp. 32–35), op. cit. Kaplan (2000, p. 21). 278 See “Boko Haram fuelled by shrinking Lake Chad—UN”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, August 29, 2018, p. 4. 279 Loc. Cit. 280 See John Campbell (2011); Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink …, p. 139, op. cit. 281 Ibid, pp. 139–140; see also the definition of the national interest as articulated by Professor Ayo Dunmoye of the Department of Political Science and International Studies, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, in “Foreign Policy should determine who becomes President in 2019— Prof. Dunmoye”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, August 20, 2017, p. 38, op. cit. 282 See Olatunji Dare in “The judicial scene”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, February 14, 2017, back page. 277 See

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functions; thus, resulting in its inability to also provide a sufficient attention to the NIIA.283 In the Ministry’s 2019 budget defence at the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, it expressed fears that out of Nigeria’s present 110 missions around the world, it was contemplating focusing attention on 30 and the closure of no fewer than 80 missions over the bad state of the embassies due to poor funding.284 This was the basis of the suggestion for the establishment of ‘smart missions’—the retaining of highly skilled diplomats in the current number of missions; that is, the reduction to the barest minimum, the number of professional/career staff in these missions for cost saving. This was also the basis of the suggestion for the rationalization of Nigerian missions—the adoption of concurrent accreditation or posting of diplomats and consular staff that would serve in several countries in order to save the Nigerian government some money. In fact, it has been reported that Nigeria’s Ambassadors and High Commissioners “were unable to pay their children’s school fees, house rent, electricity [bills], medical and other utility bills—with the headquarters of the Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs [even] owing both volunteers and its staff over #4.9 billion entitlements”.285 The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, disclosed that although the government had earlier considered the closure of its embassies, the embassies were now to be rationalized rather than being closed because: What we have discovered is that the process is actually more expensive closing down an embassy than to actually keep it going. The cost is huge to close down; so, we had to revisit it. When you put into a balance our interest in having presence in countries around the world to promote our economy, security and other vital national interests and our budgetary realities and limitations, we are looking at just rationalizing those embassies rather than outright closure … we feel that would be more cost effective than outright closure.286

283 From

2011 to 2020, the NIIA was completely moribond. In fact, it suffered a gross leadership deficiency that, amongst others, even resulted in two Directors-General, Professors Bola A. Akinterinwa and Bukar Bukarambe not sending audited accounts to the Accountant-General of the Federation from 2011 to 2019, resulting in a probe by the House of Representatives (see Tony Akowe in “Reps to probe ex-NIIA boss over alleged reckless expenditure, abuse of office”, The Nation (Lagos), March 22, 2020, available at https://thenationonlineng.net/reps-to-probe-exniia-boss-over-alleged-reckless-expenditure-abuse-of-office/ (last visited on March 23, 2020). The neglect of the NIIA and the consequent rot even led in May/June 2020 to a Senior Research Fellow on CONRAISS 13 contesting for the leadership of the NIIA when there was a Professor; with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs neglecting the problem for a very long time; see Ishaya Ibrahim in “Exclusive: Confussion in NIIA as outgoing DG hands over to level 13 officer, ignores Onyeama’s directive”, The Niche, available at https://www.thenicheng.com/exclusive-confusion-in-niia-as-out going-dg-hands-over-to-level-13-officer-ignore-onyeamas-directive/ (last visited on June 1, 2020) see also Aidoghie Paulinus and Sunday Ani in “Succession crisis rocks NIIA over office of acting DG: We’ll ensure right thing is done, pledges FG”, Daily Sun (Lagos), Wednesday, June 3, 2020, p. 7. 284 See Henry Umoru in “Nigeria may close 80 missions over poor state of embassies”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, April 4, 2019, p. 14. 285 Loc. Cit. Parentheses mine. 286 See “FG to review size of embassies abroad, TAC scheme—Onyeama”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, July 9, 2020, p. 7.

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On the Technical Aid Corps (TAC), the Minister reportedly described the scheme as “a laudable sacrifice by the Nigerian government which will be sustained as much as possible”, more so because “the host countries also contribute through accommodation”.287 Nevertheless, he acknowledged the imperative of reviewing the TAC, stressing that Nigeria needed the review, the need to downsize it slightly because of budgetary reasons.288 But the fact is that, in addition to untoward diplomatic judgments and the deficient domestic infrastructure, this tight economic condition in Nigeria’s missions intensely contributed to the muddling up of issues and the regular failures in the country’s foreign policy in many aspects of its international relations.

7.5 Weak Epistemic Link: When the Town Influences the Gown The shortcomings of Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the country’s foreign policy are immense. These are shortcomings that are contrary to what happens in established foreign policy establishments in the United States and the United Kingdom and indeed many countries around the world. These countries aforementioned are places where foreign policy decisions are essentially informed by input from both the State Department (in the United States and the Foreign Office in the United Kingdom) and the epistemic community—the universities and research institutes (as illustrated by the US’s Study Group on Iraq).289 In these places under reference, members of the epistemic community also get involved in the executive arms of the governments’ international movements or visits to other countries. But in Nigeria, because the bureaucracy is domineering, the views of bureaucratic leadership are unchallenged, impeccable and, indeed, all-knowing and un-impeachable, even when such views are off the curve. This is why in Nigeria, sloganeering and vacuous phrases have largely supplanted substance; so much so that even the epistemic community itself has become infatuated and resorted to regurgitating the sloganeering and vacuous phrases from the bureaucracies and the not properly informed. In other words: As Nigeria degenerated and small minds replaced visionaries at the commanding heights of governance, and touts became new superstars in a country once destined for greatness, the country careened down the downhill path and every value failed. The first place to notice the effect was in the education sector at all levels; and in that very department, iconic institutions took a fall: from the primary to the tertiary level. The town and the gown began to look alike, sometimes with the latter sounding less informed than the former in a reversal of roles.290

287 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 289 See Agwu (2013, p. 666), op. cit. 290 See Tuesday with Reuben Abati in “Getting a VC for Ibadan Varsity: The Ugly Politics”, This Day (Lagos), Tuesday, March 16, 2021, back page. 288 Loc.

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Hence, it become “a new normal” in some instances in Nigeria to talk about economic diplomacy291 —as if the general purpose of diplomacy (be it cultural, consular or by whatever name called); is not ultimately to serve economic interests. This “new normal” in the meaning of citizen diplomacy abandoned the classical meaning of citizen or ‘track-two’ diplomacy (as exemplified when Dennis Rodman— being a United States private citizen and a mutual “friend” of US President Trump and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, played a critical role in linking and/or supporting the duo at their June 12, 2018 Singapore Summit292 ) and talked about citizen diplomacy literally in the most unconventional if not pedestrian and un-academic way293 as the protection of citizens—as if all forms of diplomacy do not ultimately serve the interest of the citizenry by way of protecting them. So, in Nigeria’s foreign policy—as in every aspect of the country’s national life now that policy-makers are inflicted with tunnel vision—it is the town that influences the gown and not the gown influencing the town. Accordingly: … the idea of the university [and research institutions were] trampled upon by an emergent anti-intellectual Nigerian elite that sought to dictate the processes and standards for the production of knowledge and ideas. When the rogue class wanted to destroy Nigeria, they started with the intellectual class or anything at all that they thought could stand in the way of the planned emergence of thugs, bandits, thieves and terrorists as the new elite. … And to think that there [sic] are actually persons within that system not knowing the difference between the town and the gown, or they probably do, but they really do not care that the rot in town has so infiltrated the university; it may no longer matter anyway.294

This epistemic shortcoming as an impediment manifested itself so starkly in the Mohammadu Buhari Presidency with its manifold controversies and general lackluster performance in foreign policy, some of which, like the AfCFTA controversy aforementioned, are fully explored in this book. In the sphere of policy (as in other policy spheres), although it is true that “often, the hardest decisions must be made without [the] benefit of time to examine every possible consequence”295 ; and that it is also true that “those … who have to deal with practical and pressing problems, are [sometimes] afforded little time for reflection and no precedents to guide them”— thus, making them “bound to slip up many times”296 —but this is hardly true when the decision-making goes beyond the personal level; that is, when it extends to the institutional policy or decision-making environment. 291 See

U. Joy Ogwu and Adebayo Olukoshi (1991, 2002, ed.); The Economic Diplomacy of the Nigerian State, Lagos, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. 292 See Ryan Gaydox in “Dennis Rodman heading to Singapore amid historic Trump-Kim summit”, available at http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/06/08/dennis-rodman-heading-to-sin gapore-amid-historic-trump-kim-summit.html (last visited on June 13, 2018). 293 See Akinterinwa (2010, pp 70–71). 294 See Tuesday with Reuben Abati in “Getting a VC for Ibadan Varsity: The Ugly Politics”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, March 16, 2021, back page, op. cit. 295 See John McCain with Mark Salter (2007); Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People who made them, New York, Twelve Hachette Book Group, p. xiv. 296 See Nelson Mandela (2010); Nelson Mandela: Conversations with Myself, London, Macmillan, p. 35.

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It is in this institutional policy level that part of the dyspepsia in Nigeria foreign policy can be linked to institutional failings, giving way to the socio-psychological, the individual’s tunnel vision or lack of sociological imagination that goes with over-bureaucratization. Because “the political elite tend to neglect the intellectuals because of some self-serving interests”, the consequence has been that “the relationship between politicians and intellectuals in the formulation of Nigeria’s foreign policy has not been as deep as … expected”.297 In every organized nation operating a foreign policy that seeks to transcend a tunnel policy vision, an institutionalized foreign policy decision-making is one that— though bureaucratized in terms of allowing for the requisite technical input—strikes a balance between the technical input of the bureaucracy and the input of the epistemic or intellectual community. The two inputs complement each other and tend to be ultimately very rewarding to the decision-makers. This is why, in the United States, people like George F. Kennan in the containment policy,298 Henry Kissinger, and Zbigniew Brzezinski have remained towering figures in the American diplomatic arena for different successful reasons; and they would historically and truly remain as such for a long time to come if not forever. Like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski has particularly stood out as a loadstar of diplomacy because of his intellectual orientation—a “Harvard-credentialed” diplomat that remained very imaginative and prophetic in his involvement in the United States’ foreign policy.299 It is in creating a synergy between the bureaucratic and epistemic communities—and in enlisting individuals that straddle the two communities—that the United States’ diplomacy produced the likes of George F. Kennan—the diplomat whose dispatches reputedly contained the policy of “firm and vigilant containment”—that famous containment policy that ultimately enabled the United States to prevail over the Soviet Union in the ideologically charged rivalry between the two nations, thus, pulling humanity away from the brink of a catastrophic nuclear war.300 It is this same intellectual ferment in policy that enabled Thomas Fraser HomerDixon to embark on integrating “two hitherto separate fields—military conflict studies and the study of the physical environment” in his postulation that “future 297 This

is the view of Professor Ayo Dunmoye of the Department of Political Science and International Studies, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, in “Foreign Policy should determine who becomes President in 2019—Prof. Dunmoye”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, August 20, 2017, p. 38, op. cit. 298 With his specialization in Russian affairs from the outset of his diplomatic career, George F. Kennan became a decisive influence on the United States’ policy on the Soviet Union immediately after the Second World War, contributing to the authoring of the Marshall Plan and singularly authoring the “Containment Policy” rather than confrontation that eventually helped the United States to prevail in the Cold War with the defunct Soviet Union; see Ralph Erskine in “George Kennan: American diplomat who established US policy on communism and argued that his country fought the wrong war”, The Times, Saturday, March 19, 2005, pp. 80–81. 299 See Zbigniew Brzezinski: Cold Warrior and presidential adviser”, Time (New York), June 12, 2017, p. 8; see also “Zbigniew Brzezinski feared Donald Trump would demolish valuable alliances”, The Economist, June 3rd 2017, p. 39. 300 See Kaplan (2000, pp. 20–21), op. cit.

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wars and civil violence will often arise from scarcities of resources” like water, cropland, forest, and fish.301 Like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, many of these diplomats that straddle the bureaucracy and the epistemic community are Ivy League-credentialed. Nigeria may have begun the pursuit of Ivy League credentials for its diplomats with its overseas training of the so-called 36+ ,302 but it is doubtful that the over-bureaucratization and instability in the country’s diplomatic environment, the tunnel vision, the dyspepsia and the clear absence of sociological imagination that chronically constricts the nation’s foreign policy will permit the 36+ to be effective. This is just as the epistemic community is not effective; neither does it possess any input at all in the country’s foreign policy—an apparent anti-intellectualism that was dramatically reflected in the five months delay in composing the country’s cabinet in President Buhari’s first term in office as well as the partisan quality of that cabinet303 ; and, indeed, the failure to deploy the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) that ought to be the platform for harnessing and reflecting the views of the academia in the country’s foreign policy through its conferences, seminars, policy papers and sundry publications.304 Apart from the NIIA that is government owned, other intellectually oriented and civil society-based Think Tanks like the Nigerian Society of International Affairs (NSIA) and the Society for International Relations Awareness (SIRA)305 do not have any ostensible influence or synergy with the Nigerian foreign policy establishment. Instability in Nigeria’s Foreign Ministry is worrisome. Described as an enabler, a lubricant or engine oil that makes sure that the engine or lever of the country’s diplomacy works as expected,306 the argument that funding of the Ministry, the number of Nigeria’s missions abroad, and the quality of staff of staff in the Ministry are not part of the structural challenges—like political stability, social cohesion, sustained economic growth, and technological prowess—that the country has to transcend to achieve an effective foreign policy307 is clearly contradictory. On the contrary, funding, the number of missions abroad, and the quality of staff are very critical to the maintenance of this lubricant that is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and this situation can only be realized by a quality, informed and stable leadership in the Ministry. 301 Ibid,

p. 21. Agwu (2016, pp. 569, 570), op. cit. 303 See “Nigeria’s Buhari finally names cabinet”, in AFP, Reuters, AP, dpa, available at https:// www.dw.com/en/nigerias-buhari-finally-names-cabinet/a-18843273 (last visited on November 26, 2019). 304 See Agwu (2013, pp. 671–689), op. cit. 305 The mission of SIRA has been enunciated by Professor Ayo Dunmoye of the Department of Political Science and International Studies, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, in “Foreign Policy should determine who becomes President in 2019—Prof. Dunmoye”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, August 20, 2017, p. 38, op. cit. 306 See Otobo (2017, p. 253), op. cit. 307 Loc. Cit. 302 See

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The high level of leadership mortality or atrophy in Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not make for a quantitative and qualitative leadership as hardly any Minister is retained for a full Presidential term—a fleeting condition that does not make them “reliable interlocutors” with their foreign colleagues.308 When this leadership instability in the Nigerian Foreign Ministry is added to the unfortunate situation in which no serious periodic debates takes place with a view to articulating a broad based input and mobilizing popular support309 ; and the situation in which “the political elite tend to neglect the intellectual because of some self-serving interests”,310 it becomes clearly understandable why Nigeria’s foreign policy has been adrift for some time now311 ; especially with the country’s apparent impotence in the face of the Kingdom of Morocco’s controversial bid to join the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The Kingdom of Morocco’s aspiration to ECOWAS’s membership was severed taken objection to by members of the Committee of Retired Diplomats, civil society organizations, and the leadership of the Nigerian Political Science Association (NPSA)—with all these groups indicating that Morocco’s move was a hallmark of foreign policy failure by Nigeria.312 The weighing in of these groups, especially the leadership of the NPSA, was a clear indication of the exclusion of the epistemic community and a lack of broad-based popular support for Nigeria’s foreign policy at that point in time. It was a far-cry from what obtained earlier on in Nigeria’s policy on the liberation struggle in Southern Africa and the dismantling of the apartheid regime in South Africa when not only the epistemic community was involved, the civil society and a substantial segment of the Nigerian population were all mobilized, given rise to a massive support for the federal government’s decision to extend a financial assistance to those southern African struggles with the establishment in December 1976 of the Southern African Relief Fund (SARF), “to which public servants contributed 2% of one month’s salary”.313

308 Ibid,

p. 278. pp. 270–271. 310 See Professor Ayo Dunmoye of the Department of Political Science and International Studies, Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, in “Foreign Policy should determine who becomes President in 2019—Prof. Dunmoye”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, August 20, 2017, p. 38, op. cit. 311 Loc. Cit. 312 See Cornelius Essen in “Ex-diplomats protest inclusion of Morocco in ECOWAS”, The Guardian (Lagos), Tuesday, August 29, 2017, p. 4. 313 See Otobo (2017, p. 250), op. cit. 309 Ibid,

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7.6 Nigerian/South African Populism as Threat to Continental Coalescence I found myself feeling a sense of déjà vu as I watched South African mobs on television looting and attacking shops owned by Nigerians and other Africans. We have been here before. Nigerians were among those hurt in the horrific xenophobic attacks of 2008 … The typical response to these attacks from South African officialdom—who themselves often fan the flames of Afrophobia—has been to engage in “xenophobia denialism”. … The prejudiced mayor of Johannesburg, Herman Mashaba, has often demonstrated a crass nativism in equating foreigners to crime, as if South Africa did not have its own home-grown criminals. Even the usually sensible Gauteng premier, David Makhura, has recently joined in this “dog whistle” populism of linking foreigners to crime. — (Adekeye Adebajo, Nigerian, and Director, University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation, South Africa).314

The foregoing epigram is not the only problem with Nigeria’s Africa policy. Populist tendencies and Nigeria’s non-institutionalized and de facto Africa policy are some of the reasons Nigeria’s Africa policy attracts little or no dividend, or is not fully rewarded in terms of a “beneficial” national interest.315 Populism and de facto approaches are very much illustrated in the failure of Nigeria’s policy (especially in the phenomenon of Afro-phobia in South Africa) where Nigerians are met with absolute negative responses, despite Nigeria’s risky contributions to the demise of the apartheid regime. The so-called xenophobia (better known as Afro-phobia316 ) in South Africa in which Nigerians have been a part of Africans particularly targeted is also one of the symptoms of Nigeria and South Africa’s policy failure.317 The policy failure on the part of Nigeria and South Africa does not, however, imply that the diplomatic relations between had been low since the fall of apartheid. Because of the tremendous assistance Nigeria gave to South Africa during the apartheid regime—assistance that also involved Nigerian musicians like Sonny Okosun, amongst others—the post-Apartheid “South African businesses sought for professionals to immigrate and a large number of Nigerians did so”, with the number of Nigerians that emigrated to South Africa estimated at about 24,000 in number.318 Unfortunately, this so-called good will that South Africa extended to Nigeria for supporting the demise of apartheid got contaminated and disappeared because of the alleged involvement of “Nigerian organized crime groups” in “illegal drug trafficking”.319

314 See Adekeye Adebajo in “The Nigeria/South Africa palaver”, The Guardian (Lagos), September

13, 2019, p. 18. Agwu (2013, pp. 544–555), op. Cit. 316 See Agwu (2016, pp. 989–1006). 317 Ibid. 989–1014. 318 See “Nigeria-South Africa relations”, WikipeDiA, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Nigeria%E2%80%93South-Africa-relations (last visited on September 15, 2019). 319 Loc. Cit. 315 See

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This was in addition to Nigeria and South Africa’s competition “for positions at multilateral organizations” like the AU.320 The situation at the AU actually got worse with the election of South Africa’s Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as the AU Commission chairperson as well as Nigeria’s opposition to South Africa in order to replace the incumbent Zuma with Jean Ping when the former’s tenure ended.321 The relations between Nigeria and South Africa also deteriorated further when South Africa backed the incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo of Cote d’Ivoire (over Allassane Ouatarra) for the Presidency of Cote d’Ivoire.322 There were also human rights differences between Nigeria and South Africa over Nigeria’s annulled presidential election of June 12, 1993 crisis that led to the General Sani Abacha’s arrest, detention and the death of Chief Moshood Abiola, the execution of the Ogoni leader, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigeria’s expulsion from the Commonwealth.323 There was also the problem in South Africa’s President Mandela’s criticism of the Royal Dutch Shell for going ahead with a US&4 billion gas projects in Nigeria despite Nigeria being a pariah state.324 In fact, when on March 29, 1995, the exiled Nigerian Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, attempted to hold a conference in South Africa; the South African government was reluctant to grant visas to those coming for the conference, with the ANC calling for the conference to be cancelled.325 By 2012, the relations between Nigeria and South Africa had so deteriorated that 125 Nigerian travelers to South Africa were expelled on account of not having valid Yellow Fever certificates, a situation that prompted Nigeria to also expel 56 South African business men.326 Both countries later eased their travel and visa restrictions after diplomatic negotiations.327 Earlier in 2009, South Africa had hosted the South Africa-Nigeria Bi-National Commission in Pretoria, a Commission that noted a Nigerian company— the Oando energy conglomerate—being listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and the Nigerian-based Dangote Group investing a record $378 million in the South African cement industry.328 Many problems had continued to task the Nigeria/South African diplomatic relations,329 culminating in a situation where, despite Nigeria’s contributions to the overthrow of apartheid, and “despite the huge volume of trade between Nigeria and South Africa”, the South African Department of Home Affairs added Ghana to a list

320 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 322 Loc. Cit. 323 Loc. Cit. 324 Loc. Cit. 325 Loc. Cit. 326 Loc. Cit. 327 Loc. Cit. 328 Lo. Cit. 329 See Abdullateef Salau in “Xenophobia: Nigeria won’t recall envoy from S/Africa—Official”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Thursday, March 2, 2017, p. 8. 321 Loc.

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of seven countries whose nationals would be permitted to enter South Africa visafree.330 This diplomatic row persisted to the extent that even when Nigeria decided to evacuate its citizens from South Africa because of the xenophobia, the South African authorities still continued to frustrate that effort by arresting some of the voluntary Nigerian returnees.331 The problem, is, however, a manifestation of not only Nigeria’s foreign policy dysfunction, it is also the consequence of the South African anti-apartheid liberation parties that lacked stable institutions that could transfer generational information. Unlike in Nigeria where every government handled policies in a de facto manner without due institutionalization and documentation for future references, the more functional racist elements in the government of the Republic of South Africa (RSA) that had survived and dominated the post-Apartheid era remained transcendent in the building of public and private consciousness in South Africa. These racist and transcendent post-Apartheid elements fought back in protection of Apartheid policies because the Apartheid regime was considered an integral part of Western imperialism in a current phase of neo-colonial domination of the African continent; and any struggle against it was considered a struggle against neo-colonialism and capitalism in all its forms.332 Now, because “Nigeria’s role in the struggle against the apartheid monstrosity did not please all South Africans”, this group became disaffected by the fall of apartheid; and this was a group that consisted of the “significant proportion in control of the media, the economy, political power structures, institution of state responsible for propaganda and psychological warfare”, which “happened to be not black in colour”, and which “considered itself the greatest beneficiary of the apartheid system and would have kept it on for a thousand more years”.333 Thus, just as Nigeria and Nigerians “considered apartheid the number one enemy of Africa, that portion of the South African population considered us their mortal enemy for fighting to end their privileges and a higher standard of living than those in advanced countries of Europe enjoyed”.334 So, it was in the interest of the apartheid-loving minority South Africans to make a scapegoat of Nigerians and other Africans by developing an “insulting language” against them.335 In their insults and propaganda, these transcendent racists that survived Apartheid tried: … to make our brothers and sisters in South Africa believe that what they had in South Africa under apartheid was by far preferable to what existed in Africa. Part of the propaganda was that the black people in South Africa were far better than those from the rest of Africa. Subtle ways in which feeling was encouraged included referring to all South Africans as having nothing to do with the backward people of Africa to be found outside the boundaries of RSA. 330 See

Victoria Ojeme in “Visa Free: S’ Africa picks Ghana ahead of Nigeria”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 12, 2019, p. 11. 331 See Wole Oyebade in “Diplomatic row looms as S’ Africa frustrates, arrests voluntary returnees”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 12, 2019, pp. 1, 6. 332 See Wilmot (1980, pp. 125, 146). 333 See Ogunsanwo (2019, p. 48), op. cit. 334 Ibid, pp. 48–49. 335 See Wilmot (1980, p. 149), op. Cit.

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313

Hence, an innocuous question from a not well informed brother who on meeting a black brother for the first time—[queries] am I right in believing that you are from Africa336 ?

The fact of creating discrimination between Africans themselves, as the purveyors of the above racist propaganda had done, was unnecessary because they were oblivious of the fact that whether white or black, Africans are one because the continent is something which inhabitants are defined more by the soil and not necessarily by the blood.337 The problem in the post-apartheid South African society of abandoning this continental diversity and clearly creating a distortion in the mindset of blacks—the inculcation in the conscience of black South Africans of the belief that they are more superior to Africans from other parts of the African continent is unacceptable. The social stratification in apartheid South Africa had put the Whites on top of the ladder, followed by the Indians, the miscegenated group (the mixed races or products of miscegenation) and then the black Africans at the last rung of the ladder. So, much as black South Africans can accept the assumed “superiority” of the Whites, the Indians and even the mixed race group, it has been practically impossible for them to accept any suggestion of the “superiority” of foreign black Africans—such as people from Nigerians that sometimes appear economically more well off than the native uneducated black South Africans. This was apparently the root of the afro-phobia (not real xenophobia) in South Africa. In other words, the Afro-phobia in South Africa can be located in the sociological dynamics of the South African society. Although it has been suggested that part of the problem was from the fact that South Africa had “witnessed historical episodes of wars and violence”; some of which included the Bantu pre-colonial wars, the Boer-Bantu wars, the Boer-English wars and the anti-apartheid struggles and wars that had created the culture of crime, hate and violence in the society,338 but the fact is that despite the murderous activities of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) of Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi during the apartheid era,339 or even the heightened hostilities between the Zulus, the Xhosas and other ethnic groups in South Africa in the pre-colonial era, blacks South Africans had generally opted for non-aggressive and diplomatic cooperation with white settlers in the region.340 Black South Africans had remained the victims in the repressive social order in the South African society, but they have equally remained the most hostile to foreign black Africans in their society, with the Zulus, especially the Zulu King, Goodwill Zwelithini, who had reportedly said that all foreigners in South Africa must pack 336 See

Ogunsanwo (2019, p. 49), op. cit. Parenthesis mine. Ali A. Mazrui, Seifudein Adem, and Abdul Samed Bemath (2008, ed.); The Politics of War and the Culture of Violence: North–South Essays, Trenton, NJ, Asmara, Eritrea, Africa World Press, Inc, p. 264. 338 See Udeh Maduka in “South African recurring xenophobia attacks: political and economic implications on Nigeria-South African relations” (first draft, unpublished), A paper presented at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) “Forum on the recent xenophobia attacks in South Africa”, Lagos, Wednesday, September 11, 2019. 339 See Agwu (2016, pp. 85–86), op. Cit. 340 Ibid, p. 999. 337 See

314

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their bags and go back to wherever they came from.341 This was the kind of populist declaration that had been reported below to have been made by a deputy minister of police (Bongai Mkongi) in 2017, and Cyril Ramaphosa in 2018 during his presidential elections campaigns. Even the Zulu Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi had (as the first minister of Home Affairs in the post-apartheid era) equally claimed that when he was struck by the number of “undocumented Africans within our borders, especially from Zimbabwe, the implications this had for our ability to create social and economic justice, for South Africans”; and pointed out that South Africa’s porous borders needed to be guarded, “some people actually accused me of xenophobia, saying it was because I didn’t go into exile”.342 The point of Afro-phobia in South Africa is that the country is an angry society that is dwelling in ignorance with so many people in total lack of adequate education.343 The anger in South Africa arises not only because of many black people’s lack of education, but also because they were so brutalized and isolated from the rest of Africa by the apartheid regime that, as already mentioned above, many of them never travelled. And because of the apartheid regime, they were not used to other Africans coming to live among them because of the liquidating, dehumanizing and obnoxious apartheid system.344 Even in the post-apartheid era, many have failed to realize that the government is now black and not white; and that their impoverishment was the handiwork of South African white monopoly capital, not the activities of the migrant African black population. But the fact is that “as apartheid lay on its constitutional death bed, the South African media controlled by the minority in the country began to raise the fears of the ordinary South Africans who had never had the opportunity of going abroad—and millions never had that opportunity—that an invading army of free loaders, crooks and vagabonds constituted a threat to the new South Africa”.345 In fact, South Africa became “a magnet for migrants from other parts of Africa”, and this was because it was a comparatively more industrialized and had become one of the continent’s biggest and most developed economies.346 But because of the rising unemployment in that country in which some of them believed that it was foreigners that were taking

341 Ibid,

pp. 989–990. Mangosuthu Buthelezi in “We are brothers in Africa”, an excerpt from his speech as South African Homeland Minister and leader of Zulus to a mob in Johannesburg on Sunday, September 8, 2019, Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday, September 11, 2019, back page, op. cit. 343 See Udeh Maduka in “South African recurring xenophobia attacks: political and economic implications on Nigeria-South African relations” (first draft, unpublished), A paper presented at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) “Forum on the recent xenophobia attacks in South Africa”, Lagos, Wednesday, September 11, 2019, op. Cit. 344 See Agwu (2016, p. 999), op. Cit. 345 See Ogunsanwo (2019, p. 49), op. cit. 346 See “S/Africans walk out of anti-Xenophobia speech”, Vanguard (Lagos), September 9, 2019, p. 48. 342 See

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their jobs,347 “hostility was, thus, nurtured and directed against these foreigners from Africa”.348 Indeed, this was the basis for the whipping up of xenophobia among the downtrodden South Africans349 —many of whom felt that although Africans from other African countries were not victims or active participants in the fight against apartheid (which was erroneous with respect to Nigeria and Nigerians), they were merely coming to a liberated post-apartheid South Africa to reap where they did not sow.350 Fortunately, this ugly mindset was disproved by Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, the Zulu leader and South Africa’s opposition Inkatha Freedom Party during the apartheid era (who came to become the post-apartheid government’s Homeland Minister) when he addressed a rampaging xenophobic mob in Johannesburg on Sunday, September 8, 2019. Buthelezi reminded the mob that although he did not go into exile: If anyone knows what our African brothers sacrificed for the sake of our struggle, it is I. Many of the countries whose citizens were coming to South Africa had given sanctuary to our political exiles during the struggle for freedom … Friends, this is our history. African countries like Lesotho, Swaziland, Nigeria, Zambia and Tanzania took huge risks on our behalf. Is this how we repay them? … Our struggle is tied to the struggle of these countries throughout Africa. They fought colonialism just as we did. And they sacrificed to see us liberated.351

Although the grapevines credited a saying to the late Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe that “it’s only in South Africa that an illiterate villager thinks a qualified medical doctor from another African country is the reason for his unemployment”, but it is obvious that these xenophobic attacks occur mainly wherever there is social proximity (or amongst equals) in the lower rung of the social ladder in the society with little or no education. Hence, commercial vehicle drivers attack one another. Although Mangosuthu Buthelezi (as the minister of homeland affairs) had recounted how he used immigration legislation to bring in medical doctors to South Africa352 ; but it is obvious that owing to the South African comparatively more industrialized economy and perception of being a representation of “an area of … “exceptionalism” on the continent”, these facts had led to a situation where “xenophobia is widespread in South African society from politics to business to academia”.353 This xenophobia explains: … the failure of so many of its citizens to embrace an African identity and of the government to attract more skilled Africans to its shores in order to create an America in Africa. 347 Loc.

Cit. Ogunsanwo (2019, p. 49), op. cit. 349 Loc. Cit. 350 See Agwu (2016, p. 999), op. Cit. 351 See Mangosuthu Buthelezi in “We are brothers in Africa”, an excerpt from his speech as South African Homeland Minister and leader of Zulus to a mob in Johannesburg on Sunday, September 8, 2019, Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday, September 11, 2019, back page, op. cit. 352 Loc. Cit. 353 See Adekeye Adebajo in “The Nigeria/South Africa palaver”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 13, 2019, p. 18, op. cit. 348 See

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America’s genius has, of course, been its ability to attract the best and brightest from the rest of the world—trained at huge expense by these countries—and to turn them into American citizens or green-card holders. The United States thus skims off the cream of the best entrepreneurs, engineers, and economists for its own direct benefit. South Africa—with Africa’s most industrialized economy—is the only country in Africa that could provide the same Western lifestyle to African professionals living abroad. The country has, however, lacked the vision over the last two and a half decades to convert this advantage to the development of its economy and society, while simultaneously inculcating a Pan-African identity into its population. The typical response to these attacks from South African officialdom— who themselves often fan the flames of Afro-phobia—has been to engage in xenophobia denialism.354

Some opinions in South Africa alleged that Nigerians were drug dealers, and that investments like MTN where President Ramaphosa had interests in are businesses that South Africans do not have interest in because “they are owned by the people who are making us hungry … [people who] fire black South Africans and employ our brothers and sisters from outside SA [like Nigerians] on starvation wages”.355 The point here is that there has been a “demonization and dehumanization of migrants as drug lords and pimps by opportunistic politicians”, which “makes it easier for self-hating pyromaniac mobs to attack them”—and “scape-goating foreigners also takes away attention from the failings of these politicians”.356 The allegation of drug peddling against Nigerians had also caused Mangosuthu Buthelezi to invoke the: … saying in Zulu that you cannot slaughter all the sheep because one sheep has transgressed. In a situation of conflict, it is dangerous to tar everyone with the same brush. Even where there are valid complaints against an individual, we cannot take the law into our own hands. Looting and destruction of property is a crime, full stop … I am not saying that anyone should be able to live in South Africa if they come here illegally, or if they are illegally running a business. If they are committing crime, they are criminals like any South Africa would be a criminal for doing the same thing. But we cannot adopt the attitude that Africans have no right to come here, and no right to be here, if they come through legitimate channels.357

The South African xenophobic persuasion did not give a damn that Nigerian anti-xenophobic protesters were going after the MTN—a South African investment in Nigeria. It rather argued that “these companies are responsible for the black on black violence you see” and that South Africans were “happy to see you taking action; go ahead, we are cool with that”.358 Thus, even if somebody should argue 354 Loc.

Cit. Andile Mngxitama in “Dear Nigerian brothers and sisters”, Black Opinion, Friday, 6th September 2019, available at https://blackopinion.co.za/2019/09/04/dear-nigerian-brothers-and-sis ters/ (last visited on September 6, 2019). 356 See Adekeye Adebajo in “The Nigeria/South Africa palaver”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 13, 2019, p. 18, op. cit. 357 See Mangosuthu Buthelezi in “We are brothers in Africa”, an excerpt from his speech as South African Homeland Minister and leader of Zulus to a mob in Johannesburg on Sunday, September 8, 2019, Daily Trust (Abuja), Wednesday, September 11, 2019, back page, op. cit. 358 See Andile Mngxitama in “Dear Nigerian brothers and sisters”, Black Opinion, Friday, 6th September 2019, available at https://blackopinion.co.za/2019/09/04/dear-nigerian-brothers-and-sis ters/ (last visited on September 6, 2019), op. cit. 355 See

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that the Nigerian government should nationalize the MTN or other South African investments in Nigeria the way it nationalized the British Petroleum (BP) during the anti-apartheid era, these ostensibly angry South Africans would not give a hoot. It was an ugly xenophobic persuasion that so intensely raged that when the Zulu leader, Mr. Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who, during the apartheid era, was the country’s opposition Inkatha Freedom Party, spoke to the rampaging crowd, urging them to desist because their xenophobic violence was tarnishing the image of South Africa, the crowd heckled at him, walked out of the meeting and argued that Buthelezi did not address their issues.359 The killing of Nigerians in South Africa had become so exacerbated that Presidents Buhari (of Nigeria) and Cyril Ramaphosa (of South Africa) planned to meet and talk about resolving the problem360 —for some sections of the Nigerian student’s population had equally become restive and began picketing and threatening to shut down all South African businesses in the Yola (Adamawa State of Nigeria) offices, including the Digital Satellite Television (DSTV, Stanbic Bank, and the Mobile Telephone Network (MTN).361 The two Presidents (Buhari and Ramaphosa) actually met on the margins of the TICAD7 in Yokohama (Japan) and expressed regrets over the frequent killing of Nigerians in South Africa.362 But President Ramaphosa’s condemnation of the killing of Nigerians is South Africa can hardly be appreciated if it is appreciated that this problem was also caused by the problem of populism that manifested in the failure of leadership in the two countries. It was in South Africa in 2017, that the country’s deputy minister of police, Bongai Mkongi, excused in a very populist manner, the killing of foreign nationals in South Africa, claiming that South Africans were fighting for their entitlements because “you will not find South Africans in other countries dominating a city up to 80%” and that “we cannot surrender South Africa to foreign nationals”.363 Nobody rebuked the policeman for making such an unguarded and repugnant pronunciation. It was also in South Africa in 2018 (when Cyril Ramaphosa was campaigning for the country’s Presidency) that candidate Cyril Ramaphosa reportedly “vocalized the deep but obvious xenophobic intentions of his administration” by declaring in an unbridled manner that “foreign nationals would be hounded and their businesses shut down … no matter where they come from”—a declaration that sent many hordes of 359 See

“S/ Africans walk out of anti-Xenophobia speech”, Vanguard (Lagos), September 9, 2019, p. 48, op. cit. 360 See Elisha Bala-Gbogbo in “Nigerian, South African President to meet in October for talks”, Bloomberg, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/nigerian-south-african-presidents-meet-100 435181.html (last visited on August 12, 2019). 361 See Elizabeth Adegbesan and Juliet Umeh in “Again, students picket DSTV, StanbicIBTC Bank, over xenophobic attacks in S/Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 9, 2019, p. 13. 362 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Why we closed border with Benin—Buhari: Ramaphosa meets Buhari, condemns killing of Nigerians in S/Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), August 29, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 363 See Fredrick Nwabufo in “Has South Africa cursed Nigeria”, PM News, available at https://www. pmnewsnigeria.com/2019/09/04/has-south-africa-cursed-nigeria/amp/ (last visited on September 4, 2019).

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xenophobes into a frenzy.364 Indeed, the South African Defence Minister, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, was also reported to have said that there was nothing South Africa would “do about the xenophobic attacks because South Africa is an angry nation”.365 The South Africa police deputy minister may not understand the depth of his obnoxious declaration, but that cannot be said of Cyril Ramaphosa, a presidential candidate that has now become President and clearly reaping the wild wind he had sowed as a presidential candidate. President Ramaphosa was reaping a wild wind because owing to the attacks on Africans from the rest of the continent, the Rwandan President, Paul Kagame; the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Felix Tshisekedi; the President of Malawi, Peter Mutharika; and, indeed, Nigeria’s representative, Vice-President Osinbajo, all withdrew from the 28th World Economic Forum on Africa that was slated to begin in Cape Town (South Africa) on September 4, 2019 because of the attack and murder of their citizens in the xenophobia.366 The South African elite/leadership complicity in xenophobia in this problem manifested in itself Nigeria when the attack on Nigerians in South Africa escalated again in late August and early September 2019, with several Nigerians stabbed to death, some got mysteriously missing, others tortured to death while some had their businesses looted.367 Coincidentally, the National Assembly was on recess at the time; but the leadership of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, in a show of populism, excoriated the attacks as sad and barbaric while the House Leader, Alhassan Doguwa, reportedly vowed that the Parliament “must rise to take action”368 as the Senate’s Chief Whip, Orji Uzor Kalu, also vowed in a textbook populist remark that: If the South African government does not do more to protect the lives of Nigerians, there should be no reason to allow them operate freely in Nigeria. All their enterprises deserve to be closed down, including MTN, DSTV, Shoprite among others. In the spirit of brotherhood,

364 Loc.

Cit. Reuben Abati in “Nigeria, Xenophobia and Ramaphosa’s Apology”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, September 17, 2019, back page. 366 See Xenophobia attacks: Rwanda, Congo DR, Malawi’s Presidents withdraw from WEFAfrica in S’Africa; police arrest over 100, five killed”, ThisDay (Lagos), September 4, 2019, p. 48; see also Igho Akeregha, Terhemba Daka, Bridget Chiedu Onochie, Wole Oyebade, Sunday Odita, Muyiwa Adeyemi, Torimi Agboluaje, Ayodele Afolabi, Murtala Adewale and Osiberoha Osibe in “Anyaoku seeks Commission as Nigeria recalls S’Africa envoy: Abuja, Congo, Rwanda, Malawi boycott economic forum; Airline may commence evacuation of citizens tomorrow”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 5, 2019, pp. 1, 6. 367 See Ismail Mudashir, Abdulateef Salau, Latifat Opoola, Zakariyya Adaramola, Sunday Michael Ogwu, Christiana T. Alabi, Peter Moses and Jeremiah Oke in “Xenophobic attacks: Buhari sends envoy to South Africa; Ramaphosa condemns ‘anti-foreigner violence’ as FG seeks police deployment to S/Africa”, Daily Trust (Abuja), September 4, 2019, pp. 1, 5. 368 See Henry Umoru, Evelyn Usman, Johnbosco Agbakwuru, Olasunkanmi Akoni, Demola Akinyemi, Henry Ojelu, Levinus Nwabughiogu, Victoria Ojeme, Omeiza Ajayi and Dirisu Yakubu in “One killed in Lagos as Buhari sends envoy to S-Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), September 4, 2019, pp. 5, 40–41. 365 See

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we have supported them. Our doors have always been opened but it’s time we retaliate by shutting our doors.369

Even the chairman of President Buhari’s ruling All Progressive Congress (APC), Adams Oshiomhole, reportedly “urged the Federal Government and the citizens to take strong measures against telecommunications giant, MTN, and other firms owned by South Africans in Nigeria”370 —to “go on the offensive now against SAfrica”.371 The above statements that were credited to Senator Kalu and Adams Oshiomhole were completely undiplomatic and an intemperate language that ought not to be spoken by such elite and political personalities at such a highly tension-filled moment; even when the Presidents of Nigeria and South Africa were making efforts to resolve the problem bilaterally—including the need of a bi-national commission that the former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, His Excellency, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, recommended to the two countries.372 The Nigeria-South Africa Bi-National Commission was started as a Joint Commission for the purpose of promoting the relations between both in 1999; but it was later upgraded to a Bi-National Commission (BNC) in 2001.373 However, as noted by Nigeria’s former President Goodluck Jonathan who attended the BNC as Vice-President, it had fallen into abeyance,374 even though it was supposed to be meeting annually (or every year) to harmonize and realign the two countries mutual interests.375 In other words, the Bi-National Commission was first established as a 369 See

a statement issued by Orji Uzor Kalu’s Media Team, “Xenophobic attacks: Kalu calls for retaliation on South Africans; says perpetrators arrest not enough”, Vanguard (Lagos), September 4, 2019, p. 11. 370 See Mathias Okwe, Adamu Abuh, Oludare Richards, Kehinde Olatunji and Ayodele Afolabi in “Boycott S’ African businesses, Oshiomhole urges Nigerians: We’ve not recalled high commissioner, presidency clarifies; fraudsters target Nigerians evacuating from South Africa”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 6, 2019, p. 1. 371 See Soni Daniel, Johnbosco Agbakwuru, Omeiza Ajayi and Onozure Dania in “S-Africa dares Nigeria, says no compensation for victims: … Go on the offensive now against S-Africa, APC tells Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), September 6, 2019, pp. 1, 5. 372 The former Secretary-General to the Commonwealth, His Excellency, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, advised the Nigerian and South African governments to tackle the problem through the establishment of a bi-national commission that would enable them to protect their joint national interests very closely; see Igho Akeregha, Terhemba Daka, Bridget Chiedu Onochie, Wole Oyebade, Sunday Odita, Muyiwa Adeyemi, Torimi Agboluaje, Ayodele Afolabi, Murtala Adewale and Osiberoha Osibe in “Anyaoku seeks Commission as Nigeria recalls S’ Africa envoy: Abuja, Congo, Rwanda, Malawi boycott economic forum; Airline may commence evacuation of citizens tomorrow”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 5, 2019, pp. 1, 6, op. cit. 373 See “South Africa grants Air Peace rights to operate daily flights”, The Nation (Lagos), NAN Agency report, available at https://thenationonlineng.net/south-africa-grants-air-peace-rights-tooperate-daily-flights/ (last visited on October 1, 2019). 374 See “Nigeria-South Africa bi-national commission to be resuscitated”, Channels Television, available at https://www.channelstv.com/2012/03/15/nigeria-south-africa-bi-national-commissionto-be-resuscitated/ (last visited on September 15, 2019). 375 See Friday Olokor, Adelani Adepegba, Maureen Ihua-Maduenyi and Tobi Aworinde in “Buhari’s South African trip to determine further evacuation”, Punch, available at https://punchng.com/buh aris-south-african-trip-to-determine-further-evacuation/ (last visited on October 3, 2019).

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Joint Commission but later upgraded to the vice-presidential level; and now, it has been elevated to the presidential level since 2016 but never met for six years because of the presidential elections in both Nigeria and South Africa earlier in 2019 that had “taken up much of the political energy”.376 The continued “frosty” relations between both countries were such that “neither president attended the other’s presidential inauguration”.377 It was only in the wake of the xenophobia crisis that President Buhari left for South Africa to honour an invitation by President Cyril Ramaphosa for a summit discussion at the BNC level of “the welfare of Nigerians and find common grounds for building harmonious relations”.378 Unfortunately, the Nigerian National Assembly members’ statements coincided with an anti-xenophobic protest in Nigeria that targeted South African businesses like Shoprite (that Senator Kalu and Adams Oshiomhole also mentioned above), and MTN offices in parts of Nigeria.379 Fortunately, against the reports that Nigeria had recalled its High Commissioner to South Africa,380 the Federal Government clarified that it had not recalled its High Commissioner from South Africa.381 Nigeria certainly could not have recalled its High Commissioner to South Africa because it was its citizens that were in danger. A country cannot withdraw its ambassador from a country where its citizens were in danger because it is the duty of the embassy and the consul to protect the interest of such citizens. When an ambassador goes, a diplomatic officer of a lower capacity may not have the reach or access that the ambassador would have in the host state. It was for this reason that Nigeria would have erred in diplomatic practice if it had withdrawn its High Commissioner from South Africa where its citizens were being chastened. But all these had added more stresses to Nigeria’s Africa and global foreign policy—a country whose Ambassador was forcefully ejected by the Congolese government382 ; and a country with 119 missions across the world; but was forced by 376 See Adekeye Adebajo in “The Nigeria/South Africa palaver”, The Guardian (Lagos), September

13, 2019, p. 18, op. cit. Cit. 378 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru and Victoria Ojeme (with agency report) in “S-Africa grants Air Peace rights to operate daily flights: As Buhari leaves for S-Africa over xenophobia attacks”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 2, 2019, p. 8. 379 See Emeka Anaeto, Peter Egwuatu, Yinka Kolawole and Princewill Ekwujuru in “Nigerians launch attack on S-Africa’s #6.5trn businesses”, Vanguard (Lagos), September 4, 2019, p. 2. 380 See Igho Akeregha, Terhemba Daka, Bridget Chiedu Onochie, Wole Oyebade, Sunday Odita, Muyiwa Adeyemi, Torimi Agboluaje, Ayodele Afolabi, Murtala Adewale and Osiberoha Osibe in “Anyaoku seeks Commission as Nigeria recalls S’ Africa envoy: Abuja, Congo, Rwanda, Malawi boycott economic forum; Airline may commence evacuation of citizens tomorrow”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 5, 2019, pp. 1, 6, op. cit. 381 See Mathias Okwe, Adamu Abuh, Oludare Richards, Kehinde Olatunji and Ayodele Afolabi in “Boycott S’ African businesses, Oshiomhole urges Nigerians: We’ve not recalled high commissioner, presidency clarifies; fraudsters target Nigerians evacuating from South Africa”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 6, 2019, p. 1, 6, op. cit. 382 See “Nigeria speaks after Congolese govt ejects ambassador from residence”, Premium Times, available at https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news/headlines/345903-nigeria-speaks-after-con golese-govt-ejects-ambassador-from-residence.html (last visited on August 10, 2019). 377 Loc.

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striated-circumstances (insufficient funds383 ) to draw down the staff of its mission in Ukraine and shut its Missions in the Czech Republic, Sri Lanka and the Republic of Serbia.384 In its conclusion about the Nigeria/South African relations, The Guardian newspaper editorialized that: In sum, the real African tragedy now is that the continent’s two largest economies that should give hope to the Black Race and spearhead its advancement not only shamelessly advertise poor governance in all its ingloriousness, both are now like demented hens that violently consume and find their own offspring a wholesome diet.385

But it is for the inefficiency of Nigeria’s foreign policy that in the international scene, Nigeria is now totally not reckoned with—like in its neighbours, Ghana, that treats “Nigerians like dirt” and with their prisons full of Nigerians—a situation that is comparable to South Africa where Nigerians are randomly under criminal investigation and killed386 ; in Asia where Nigerians are singled out and harassed; and in the African Union where Nigeria made itself a laughing stock in the organization’s elections in 2017 where Abuja “brought a neophyte, Ms. Fatima Kyari Mohammed, to contest as head of the Peace and Security Commission, … the most powerful Commission in the continental body; a professional heavyweight class in which” Nigeria “presented an amateur catch weight”.387 In fact, President Muhammadu Buhari was even said to have gone abroad and told the world that Nigerian youths were lazy and irresponsible; and when the British Prime Minister David Cameron told Queen Elizabeth that Nigeria was fantastically corrupt, the same President Buhari allegedly agreed, saying that Cameron must have known what he was talking about.388 But as it concerned the resolution of the xenophobia crisis in South Africa, the President was seemingly more serious as he approved of the decision of Air Peace airline to evacuate those Nigerians that were stranded in South Africa.389 Although there was dissonance on how 383 When

President Buhari was speaking at a farewell audience with the outgoing High Commissioner of the Democratic Republic of Sri Lanka, His Excellency, Thambiraja Raveenthiran, he was reported to have hinted that Nigeria was looking at the possibility of re-opening the Nigerian embassy that was shut down in Colombo (Sri Lanka) in 2017 “due to financial challenges which confronted the country at the time as a rationalization measure”; see Omololu Ogunmade in “Nigeria considers reopening Embassy in Sri Lanka”, ThisDay (Lagos), September 4, 2019, p. 9. 384 See “FG shuts its missions in Czech, Sri Lanka, Serbia”, TheCable, available at https://www.the cable.ng/fg-shuts-three-foreign-missions (last visited on May 22, 2019). 385 See Editorial, “From South Africa, a slap on Africa’s face”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 6, 2019, p. 16. 386 It was Nigeria’s High Commissioner to South Africa, Ambassador Kabir Bala, that said in August 2019 that over 6,000 Nigerians were being investigated for various crimes in that country; see “Over 6,000 Nigerians under crime investigation in S/Africa—Envoy”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 15, 2019, p. 9. 387 See Owei Lakemfa in “Nigeria, the giant of Africa needs foreign policy direction”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 5, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 388 See Femi Aribisala in “Revamping Buhari’s shambolic foreign policy”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, July 16, 2019, p. 30, op. cit. 389 See Clifford Ndujihe in ‘’Our evacuation of Nigerians may end xenophobia attacks in S/Africa— Allen Onyema”, Saturday Vanguard, September 21, 2019, p. 9.

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to resolve Nigeria’s differences with South Africa over the xenophobia—with some combatively wanting the case at the ICJ,390 while others urged caution and compensation391 as the federal government weighed options392 —the matter was, nevertheless, resolved after the airlifting of about five hundred and twelve (512) Nigerians from South Africa—187 on September 11, 2019, and 315 on September 18, 2019.393 It was indeed in the wake of the 2019 xenophobia in South Africa that the two countries began to take their relationship very seriously. Apart from the BNC taking place at the presidential level, the two Presidents equally directed their Foreign Affairs Ministers to give a practical expression to an early warning mechanism for monitoring and the prevention of problems.394 In addition to the discussion of “a wide range of bilateral, regional, continental and global issues of common interest”,395 the visibility in the media (locally and internationally) of the relations between Nigeria and South Africa was adequately noticed. It was this kind of visibility that the Nigerian High Commissioner in South Africa should have ensured in order to bring Nigeria very close to the generation of South Africans that were not aware of Nigeria’s contribution to the death of the apartheid system. But the resolution of the 2019 incident of xenophobia was after the South African President Ramaphosa apologized to the rest of the African continent during the late Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s funeral, and equally apologized to Nigeria through the South African envoy that came to Abuja when Nigeria exchanged envoys on the xenophobic attacks.396 These were also followed by a meeting of the Nigeria-South Africa BNC at the presidential level397 —the 9th Summit of the BNC meeting between the Nigerian and South African Presidents in Pretoria398 for the same purpose of resolving the xenophobia crisis.399 One of the tell-tale signs of a 390 See Marcel Mbamalu in “Pressure on Buhari to sue S’ Africa over attacks: Akinyemi wants case

at ICJ”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 16, 2019, pp. 1, 6. “Anyaoku urges caution, seeks compensation”, op. Cit. 392 … “We’re weighing options, won’t rule out anything for now, says govt., op. Cit. 393 See Friday Olokor, Adelani Adepegba, Maureen Ihua-Maduenyi and Tobi Aworinde in “Buhari’s South African trip to determine further evacuation”, Punch, available at https://punchng.com/buh aris-south-african-trip-to-determine-further-evacuation/ (last visited on October 3, 2019), op. cit. 394 See Garba Shehu in “Key takeaways from President Buhari’s visit to South Africa”, PM News, available at https://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2019/10/05/key-takeaways-from-president-buharisvisit-to-south-africa/ (last visited on October 5, 2019). 395 Loc. Cit. 396 See Reuben Abati in “Nigeria, Xenophobia and Ramaphosa’s Apology”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, September 17, 2019, back page, op. Cit. 397 See Friday Olokor, Adelani Adepegba, Maureen Ihua-Maduenyi and Tobi Aworinde in “Buhari’s South African trip to determine further evacuation”, Punch, available at https://punchng.com/buh aris-south-african-trip-to-determine-further-evacuation/ (last visited on October 3, 2019), op. cit. 398 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Buhari tasks S/ Africa to open economy for Nigerian businesses”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 4, 2019, p. 40. 399 See “South Africa grants Air Peace rights to operate daily flights”, The Nation (Lagos), NAN Agency report, available at https://thenationonlineng.net/south-africa-grants-air-peace-rights-tooperate-daily-flights/ (last visited on October 1, 2019), op. Cit; see also Johnbosco Agbakwuru and Victoria Ojeme (with agency report) in “S-Africa grants Air Peace rights to operate daily 391 …

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successful resolution of the crisis was the decision of the South African government to grant Air Peace’s request to commence commercial flights to Johannesburg on a daily basis.400 This grant was not only done in the process of ascertaining the level of the Bilateral Air Service Agreement (BASA) between Nigeria and South Africa,401 it was also a good gesture after the xenophobia crisis.402 However, the Nigerian chapter of the African Union Economic, Social and Cultural Council (AU-ECOSOCC) reportedly said that the apology was not enough because South Africa was a party to the AU’s African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights that guarantees Africans the right to live and do business anywhere on the continent.403 But although the xenophobic attacks in South Africa were provocative, the problem was, indeed, resolved diplomatically without the aggressive resort to the ICJ (or the insistence on the rights bestowed by the AU Charter as recounted by the AU-ECOSOCC) because, as the former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, stated, “the two countries have large mutual interests to protect for themselves and for Africa”.404 But this was not to discount the fact that the pan-Africa policy in both Nigeria and South Africa had been greatly messed up by both countries. This mess also affected the Africa policy itself in the AU because not only were Nigeria and South Africa unable to form the requisite coalescence to defend the African cause globally, the whole African continent itself was increasing unable to get its act together in the AU. The latter point was illustrated by the debacle over Nigeria’s nomination of its citizen, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as a candidate for the WTO’s Director-General post (to substitute Yono Frederick Agah, Nigeria’s Permanent Representative to the WTO405 ) that was to be vacated on August 31, 2020 by Mr. Roberto Azevedo, Egypt’s objection to Nigeria’s nomination because, according to Cairo (which had its own candidate in its citizen, Mr. Abdel-Hamid Mamdouh), the period of nomination (November 30, 2019) that the AU’s executive had set, had elapsed.406 Although the flights: As Buhari leaves for S-Africa over xenophobia attacks”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 2, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 400 See “South Africa grants Air Peace request to commence flight operations”, Channels Television, available at https://www.channelstv.com/2019/09/30/south-africa-grants-air-peace-request-to-com mence-flight-operations/ (last visited on September 30, 2019), op. cit. 401 Loc. Cit. 402 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru and Victoria Ojeme (with agency report) in “S-Africa grants Air Peace rights to operate daily flights: As Buhari leaves for S-Africa over xenophobia attacks”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 2, 2019, p. 8, op. Cit. 403 See Joke Falaju, John Akubo, Isa Abdulsalami Ahovi in “South Africa’s apology over xenophobic attacks not enough, AU insists”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 20, 2019, p. 7. 404 See Marcel Mbamalu in “Pressure on Buhari to sue S’ Africa over attacks: Akinyemi wants case at ICJ”, The Guardian (Lagos), September 16, 2019, p. 6, op. cit. 405 See John Owen Nwachukwu in “WTO: South Korea challenges Okonjo-Iweala’s bid for DirectorGeneral”, Daily Post, June 25, 2020, available at https://dailypost.ng/2020/06/25/wto-south-koreachallenges-okonjo-iwealas-bid-for-director-general/ (Last visited on June 25, 2020). 406 See Chika Olisah in “WTO accepts nomination of Okonjo-Iweala as DG despite opposition from Egypt”, Nairametrics, June 10, 2020, available at https://nairametrics.com/2020/06/10/wto-acceptsnomination-of-okonjo-iweala-as-dg-despite-opposition-from-egypt/ (last visited on June 11, 2020).

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WTO later accepted Nigeria’s nomination on the basis that the nomination process actually opened on June 8, 2020 and would end on July 8, 2020 (contrary to Egypt’s believe407 ), the entire contradiction had dashed the collective consciousness that was expected in pan-Africanism. The WTO’s contradiction of Egypt’s position on this matter was not only a minus for Egypt; it was once again, a minus for the AU in its continental bid to form a coalescence that ought to have existed between African countries on the management of African affairs in the world. But Nigeria in particular bungled its foreign policy here when the legal counsel of the AU delinked from Abuja by stating that the nomination of Okonjo-Iweala as Nigeria’s candidate violated the rules of procedure and the AU’s Executive Council’s decision.408 A document from the AU’s legal counsel indicated that the AU’s Executive Council had endorsed the nominations of Nigeria’s Yonov Frederick Agah, Eloi Laourou (of Benin Republic), and Abdulhameed Mamdouh (of Egypt) before Nigeria decided to substitute its nomination of Frederick Agah with Okonjo-Iweala in violation of Rule (11), 1, 2 and 3, Rule 12 and Rule 15(3) of the rules of procedure of the committee on candidatures within the international system of the AU as well as the Council’s Decisions EX CI 1072 (XXXV), Ec CI Dec 1090 (XXXVI) and Assembly Dec 795 (XXXIII).409 Although Nigeria insisted on Okonjo-Iweala’s candidacy, the AU’s repudiation of her nomination was essentially a practical disqualification of that candidacy.410 It was also an indication that Nigeria was not acting according to the rule of law in the AU. Nigeria’s not acting according to the rule of law in the AU was significative of its domestic reality. Nigeria is a country that has the reputation of considering ethnicity, nepotism and corrupt practices, which accounts for its persistent inability to field the best materials locally and internationally; in fact, this had also prompted some Nigerian statesmen to sue President Buhari for discrimination and lopsided appointments.411 It was this practice that may have informed the initial nomination of Ambassador Yonov Frederick Agah before the after thought that became Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala because of her ostensibly weighty credentials and antecedent. Because Nigeria comprises a hybrid of religious cultures412 that promotes ethnicity, nepotism and discrimination in appointment, the lopsidedness in appointments was to become unimaginably high under the Buhari administration in a manner that was highlighted in the 1991 Orkar coup that some northern states constitute a clique 407 Loc.

Cit.

408 See Editor in “Okonjo-Iweala’s nomination for WTO DG violates rules, says AU legal counsel”,

ThisDaylive.com, available at https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2020/06/18/okonjo-iwealasnomination-for-wto-dg-violates-rules-says-au-legal-counsel/ (last visited on June 19, 2020). 409 Loc. Cit. 410 Report on Aljazeera news, monitored in Lagos, Nigeria on Saturday, June 20, 2020, between 7 and 8 am local time. 411 See Ikechukwu Nnochiri in “Clark, Adebanjo, Nwodo, others sue Buhari for #50bn over alleged discrimination: Plaintiffs decry lopsided appointments, allege marginalization of region”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 23, 2020, pp. 1, 3. 412 See Agwu (2013, pp. 262–263), op. cit.

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that has unabated penchant for domination, rivalry and the fostering of mediocrity, impunity and unaccountability in the country.413 Although since the creation of the WTO on January 1, 1995 (as a successor to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariff, GATT), no African has been chosen to be the DG of the organization,414 the WTO, such as international institutions as the United Nations that are not democratic, would still have the United States resolving who to succeed Roberto Azevedo. If Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala succeeds in the venture, that success would certainly be on account of her own personal merit, not by her so-called nomination by Nigeria and endorsement by the ECOWAS.415 Nigeria’s substitution of its nomination with Okonjo-Iweala was a classical confusion that it was embedding in its foreign policy at the AU. In fact, Abuja’s delink from the AU’s procedure was totally an indication of the weaknesses of its domestic and foreign policy—weaknesses that largely account for the absence of post-policy dividends in Nigeria’s foreign policy.416 It was, thus, that the AU’s lack of coalescence was really compounded by the weaknesses in Nigeria’s foreign policy, despite being the so-called sub-regional if not a continental giant. Regarding Nigeria’s substitution of Okonjo-Iweala, a critic of Nigeria’s foreign policy averred as follows: The shambolic manner in which President Buhari nominated Dr. Okonjo-Iweala for the WTO DG job by unceremoniously withdrawing his government’s support for Yonov Fred Agah … played into the narrative of Nigeria being a perfidious country; and has caused consternation among other African countries. What’s more, it does Dr. Okonjo-Iweala no favours that she became a candidate only after President Buhari had second thoughts and following the public humiliation of another Nigerian. … What’s more, the way Agah was dropped in favour of Okonjo-Iweala reportedly caused some consternation in Geneva. … But the manner of her nomination, which is a reflection of the dysfunctionality of the Buhari government, is deeply embarrassing and takes the shine out of her remarkable candidature. Yet, that said, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala can and should become the WTO’s next DG, but only if her global personality can overshadow Nigeria’s poor reputation. Truth is, she can only win in spite of, not because of Nigeria.417

Although a self-acclaimed regional cum continental giant, it was on account of the failings in Nigeria’s foreign policy and the dimunition of its reckoning in the international system and the West African sub-region in particular418 that, in stark 413 See

Tolofari (2004, pp. 95–96); see also Ochereome Nnnanna in “Orkar’s coup and agenda, a prophesy?”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, April 21, 2021, p. 16. 414 See Obinna Chima in “ECOWAS endorses Okonjo-Iweala’s nomination as WTO DirectorGeneral: Rallies support for ex-Minister’s candidature”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, June 23, 2020, p. 5. 415 In fact, a critic had argued that Nigeria had few friends and that “the manner of Okonjo-Iweala’s nomination is deeply embarrassing and takes the shine out of her remarkable candidature”; see Olu Fasan in “WTO’s DG race: Okonjo-Iweala should win, but Nigeria has few friends”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 6, 2020, p. 16. 416 See Agwu (2013, pp. 544–555), op. Cit. 417 See Olu Fasan in “WTO’s DG race: Okonjo-Iweala should win, but Nigeria has few friends”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 6, 2020, p. 16, op. cit. 418 Reacting to the demolition of Nigeria’s High Commissioner’s residence in Ghana, the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) reportedly said that the incident “was a pointer to how President

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violation of the long-established customary international law rule that was clarified in Article 30 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations,419 a Ghanaian businessman possessed the effrontery to openly bulldoze and demolish the Nigerian High Commissioner’s residence in Accra, Ghana, with armed men without the Ghanaian security agencies batting an eyelid.420 And although the Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo apologized and ordered an investigation into the attack, it was a mark of the warped and bungling contributions to Nigeria’s foreign policy that come from the bureaucracy and the legislature that the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, pushed for a retaliation, deploying the word ‘reciprocity’,421 even when in international law, reciprocity does not mean retaliation but a lawful response to a hurt by another nation.422 It is axiomatic that there “is a sibling rivalry” between Nigeria and Ghana and that this had “become a perennial problem”; it is also axiomatic that the attack on the residence of the Nigerian High Commissioner could not have happened without the prior knowledge of the Ghanaian authorities, granted that the security outpost that was nearby reportedly never bated an eyelid; but in the light of the Ghanaian President’s “sincere apologies”, it was diplomatically weak and uncalled for, for the Speaker of Nigeria’s House of Representatives to call for retaliation, positing that the Ghanaian President’s apologies, investigation into the matter and commitment to restore to its original state, the residential building of the Nigerian High Commissioner,423 would not suffice.424 Muhammadu Buhari and the All Peoples Progressive Congress (APC) have destroyed the nation’s respect and honour; … highlighted the poor rating of the Buhari Presidency by other nations, exposed its lack of capacity to exude our nation’s pride as well as its failure to meaningfully engage other world leaders on diplomatic issues”; see Dirisu Yakubu in “FG summons Ghana’s envoy over attack at High Commission: Bury your heads in shame, PDP tells Buhari, APC over embassy demolition”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, June 23, 2020, p. 3. It is instructive to also know that the Buhari Presidency equally distorted the African Union’s Executive Council values in failing to meaningfully engage the organization in the nomination of Okonjo-Iweala as a candidate in the WTO Secretary General elections. 419 See Denza (1976, p. 142). 420 See Joseph Onyekwere in “Ghana apologises as Nigeria deplores attacks on its embassy: FG seeks immediate arrest of perpetrators”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, June 22, 2020, p. 3; see also Victoria Ojeme in “FG demands urgent action from Ghana over attack at High Commission”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, June 22, 2020, p. 8. 421 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru and Tordue Salem in “Embassy demolition: Reps push for retaliation against Ghana: As Presidency mulls foreign policy review; Ghanaian President, Akufo-Addo apologizes to Nigeria over demolition; orders investigation”, Vanguard (Nigeria), Wednesday, June 24, 2020, p. 7. 422 See Fred Aja Agwu (2010), “Reciprocity and its Implication …”, in Eze (2010, ed, pp. 27–35), op. Cit. 423 See “Ghana pledges to restore Nigeria’s diplomatic property to original state”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, June 26, 2020, p. 8. 424 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru and Tordue Salem in “Embassy demolition: Reps push for retaliation against Ghana: As Presidency mulls foreign policy review; Ghanaian President, Akufo-Addo apologizes to Nigeria over demolition; orders investigation”, Vanguard (Nigeria), Wednesday, June 24, 2020, p. 7, op. cit.

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Graciously, President Buhari, against the background of the Ghanaian President’s apologies and willingness to investigate the matter and restore the destroyed property, never confronted Ghana the same way he confronted the AU by insisting on Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s candidacy with the so-called ECOWAS endorsement.425 This was not even when South Korea and Kenya had reportedly (even if unwittingly) challenged Okonjo-Iweala’s candidacy with a gender card by nominating, for South Korea, a female candidate, Ms Yoo Myung-Hee (who had been a negotiator, strategist and pioneer in her 25-year career in the trade sector, and had taken charge of the WTO affairs as a strategist in the Korean Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy426 ; and for Kenya, another female candidate, Mrs. Amina Mohammed (an ex-trade Minister, a former WTO ambassador, and a former Chair of the WTO ministerial conference, fluent in the WTO’s procedures, legal texts and who helped to negotiate the organization’s most recent package of multilateral agreements) who emerged a stronger contender to OkonjoIweala in the first phase of the selection process.427 Because of the competing strengths of these two women from sub-Sahara Africa that were gunning for the Director-General of this organization in a highly political process, exacerbated by the epic trade war between the United States and China, a trade war that could have easily paved way for middle powers from Africa to achieve the headship of the WTO,428 Nigeria never even bordered to actively campaign for Okonjo-Iweala, especially by using its NIIA think-tank to do so. It was this trade rivalry between the US and China that, in addition to COVID-19, made the emergence of an interim WTO Director-General from the four deputy Directors-General (one of whom was a Nigerian—Yonov Frederick Agah) impossible429 because the incumbent at the time, Roberto Azevedo of Brazil decided to step down earlier in August, one year before his second WTO four-year term was to expire. The fragile trade tension between the United States and China was so strong that President Trump caviled the candidacy of Okonjo-Iweala when the race became strictly between Okonji-Iweala and the South Korean opponent, Yoo Myung-Hee; but the defeat of President Trump in the 2020 Presidential election led to the emergence of President Biden who persuaded the Trump-backed South Korean to withdraw her candidacy—not because of Okonjo-Iweala the Nigerian citizen, but because 425 See

Obinna Chima in “ECOWAS endorses Okonjo-Iweala’s nomination as WTO DirectorGeneral: Rallies support for ex-Minister’s candidature”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, June 23, 2020, p. 5, op. cit. 426 See John Owen Nwachukwu in “WTO: South Korea challenges Okonjo-Iweala’s bid for DirectorGeneral”, Daily Post, June 25, 2020, available at https://dailypost.ng/2020/06/25/wto-south-koreachallenges-okonjo-iwealas-bid-for-director-general/ (Last visited on June 25, 2020), op. cit. 427 See Chike Olisah in “Kenyan candidate emerges as strong contender to Iweala for WTO”, Nairametrics, July 21, 2020, available at https://nairametrics.com/2020/07/21/kenya-candidate-leads-oko nkwo-iweala-in-race-for-wto-dg/ (last visited on July 21, 2020). 428 See J. P. Singh in “Two women from Africa are among the leading candidates to head the WTO”, The Washington Post, July 20, 2020, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/ 07/20/two-women-africa-are-among-leading-candidates-head-wto/ (last visited on July 26, 2020). 429 See “WTO members fail to pick interim head”, Punchng.com, July 31, 2020, available at https:// punchng.com/wto-members-fail-to-pick-interim-hesd/ (last visited on August 7, 2020).

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of Okonjo-Iweala with the dual Nigerian and American citizenship; since Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala had become a United States citizen in 2019 in the full knowledge that she lost the position of headship of the World Bank in 2012 when President Obama appointed a Korean-American.430 So, it was strictly not because of Nigerian citizenship that Ngozi Okonji-Iweala became the DG of the WTO; it was because of her American citizenship and international exposure and connections, having remarked in her acceptance speech that “without the recent swift action by the BidenHarris Administration to join the consensus of the membership on my candidacy, we would not be here today”.431 But on the destruction of the residential property of the Nigerian High Commission in Ghana, President Buhari submitted that Nigeria would not retaliate or “engage in a street fight with Ghana”.432 But the weaknesses of Nigeria’s foreign policy under President Buhari were worse because although the Buhari administration was assumed to be supposedly democratic, it was, neverthelsss, actually a regime that was peremptorily autocratic, a regime that inexonerably blacklisted its critics and created an atmosphere of fear that made critics unable to address the weaknesses in the government’s foreign policy; not when his government refused to see reason that the admission of Morocco into the ECOWAS would make the West African sub-region a magnetic space for the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, just because Morocco in the ECOWAS would create an avenue for his government to solidify his “human settlement policy”433 otherwise called the Rural Grazing Area (RUGA)434 project that would effectively infiltrate southern Nigeria with the militant Fulani herdsmen.435

430 See Olu Fasan in “WTO: Kudos to Okonjo-Iweala and Agah for making Africa proud”, Vanguard

(Lagos), Thursday, February 25, 2021, p. 16. Cit. 432 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Embassy incident: Why Nigeria won’t fight Ghana—Presidency”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, June 25, 2020, p. 8. 433 The rugga is a Fulani word for human settlement, which is colloquially interpreted as similar to the Rural Grazing Area (RUGA), President Buhari’s contentious policy (developed by the National Livestock Transformation Plan under the Nigerian Economic Council in settlement of the conflict between farmers and Fulani herdsmen) for the settlement of Fulanis (in abandonment of ranching) all over the country, including the South that feared that hostile herdsmen, deemed to be members of the Boko Haram, would therein infiltrate the South; see “Ruga policy”, Wikipedia?, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruga-policy (last visited on Tuesday, September 1, 2020). 434 The RUGA plan was later allegedly substituted with the Water Resources bill (a bill that was rejected by the Senator Saraki-led 8th National Assembly in 2008 but later resuscitated by the Senator Ahmed Lawan-led 9th National Assembly and was allegedly poised to be passed through the back door) with which the Buhari-led Federal Government planned to control Nigeria’s waterways and extend them each to about three kilometres radius in order to use them for the grazing of cattle all over the country, including southern Nigeria; see Victor Ahiua-Young & Peter Duru in “Water Resources bill: I’ll sue FG, NASS—Gov. Ortom; Labour, Soyinka urge Nigerians to resist Water Bill”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, September 1, 2020, p. 5. 435 See Agwu (2018, pp. 34–35), op. Cit. 431 Loc.

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As a military Head of State, General Muhammadu Buhari elevated mediocrity to a mythical level in his effort to enforce federal character436 ; but as the President of the country, he metamorphosed in this brinkmanship into value distortions (demonstrated by his government’s breach of the AU’s Executive Council’s decision on appointments in the WTO) that eventually added up to the confusion and the weaknesses in Nigeria’s foreign policy. Although some of the weaknesses were historical and exemplified by, for instance, Nigeria’s bloated and non-frugal delegations to multilateral organizations,437 but under the Buhari administration, these weaknesses manifested themselves to, amongst others, Nigeria’s late endorsement of the AfCFTA, its loss of the Secretary-General of the AfCFTA to South Africa, and Nigeria being constantly ridden rough-shod over by Ghana. Part of Ghana’s rough ride over Nigeria was, amongst others, the attack on Nigerians’ businesses that failed to pay the $1 million registration fee that the Ghana Investment Promotion Commission (GIPC) demanded; even though Nigeria and ECOWAS’s policy inconsistencies contributed to that menace.438 But Ghana’s responses to the harassment of Nigerians were full of inconsistencies, admitting and

436 See

Fafowora (2013, pp. 468–469, 481–483). instance, in Nigeria’s delegation to the United Nations General Assembly that holds from September to December in New York every year, the country’s permanent delegation at the United Nations is often complemented by officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, other Ministries, Agencies and Parastatals who assist the country’s permanent delegation with their competences. Unfortunately, these officials that complement the permanent delegation, some of whom are also politicians, are usually large in number; they arrive at the Nigerian Mission in New York and hardly ever attend any of the meetings they are supposed to attend. Thus, they contribute little or nothing to the proceedings of the UN, despite the daily briefings by the Nigerian Mission; see Oladapo Olusola Fafowora (2013, ibid, pp. 448–449). 438 In August 2020, a report emerged that the Ghanaian authorities had clamped-down on Nigerians’ businesses for their owners failure to pay the $1 million registration fees and taxes that the Ghana Investment Promotion Council imposed on foreigners; see “Obi condemns clampdown on Nigerian businesses in Ghana: Urges FG to intervene immediately”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 20, 2020, p. 15. The Nigerian government and the ECOWAS’ contributions to this malaise that the former Governor to Anambra State, Peter Obi, described as unfair and undiplomatic, arose from the fact that Nigeria had closed down its borders for a long time (that extended even to the COVID-19 pandemic), blocking economic activities in the West African sub-region and, thus, causing Ghana to react. On the part of the ECOWAS, the Ghanaian foreign investment law, a domestic law that required foreigners to pay $1 million business registration fees and taxes, might have exploited a loophole in the ECOWAS treaty that did not clarify that citizens of ECOWAS countries cannot be classified as foreigners in the West African sub-region. This was a failing on the part of the ECOWAS, even though Ghana cannot plead that its domestic legislation overrides the ECOWAS treaty—the 1986 supplementary Protocol relating to the right of residence and establishment, and the 1990 Protocol on the protection of capital investment (international law); see Agwu (2016, pp. 541–542), op. Cit. 437 For

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denying the harassment in the same breath.439 In its responses, the Ghanaian government was, at best, appealing to Ghanaians nationalist sentiments. If, according to Nigeria’s former Ambassador to Ghana, Mr. Musliu Obanikoro,440 the two main Ghanaian political parties, the CDC and the opposition, would not make any significant concession to Nigerian residents in Ghana before the country’s December 7, 2020 elections, an allegation that was supported by Dele Momodu, a Nigerian businessman that was resident in Ghana,441 what it implied was that the politicians were pandering to the nationalist forces of the citizenry. Ostensibly for Ghana, it is anti-globalism, nationalism and protectionism galore, despite today’s increasing globalization. The Ghanaian nationalist sentiments and protectionism were aptly captured by the Nigerian Vanguard newspaper editorial thus: Nigeria has traditionally reacted to other African countries with the mindset of the continental Big Brother. Unfortunately, Nigerian leaders have failed to realize that most African countries have abandoned the “brotherhood” template. They seek to put the interest of their citizens first. They are under great pressure from their citizens to do so. Politicians, like Ghana’s Nana Akufo-Addo, have leveraged the growing anti-foreigner sentiments within their populace to promote their electoral chances. Ghana now means serious business. It is serious about protecting indigenous retail traders from foreign competition dominated by Nigerians. That is why it is using trade laws to incessantly harass Nigerian traders out of their country. … Ghana’s Investment Promotion Centre, GIPC, Act 478 was enacted in 1994. The $300,000 foreigners needed in their account to trade in Ghana was recently raised to $1 million. This law has been used for years to shut down Nigerian businesses. So, the claim by Ghana that the harassment of Nigerian traders was because of our border closure is a non-sequitor. … Ghana, in particular, must be mindful that if Nigeria, the Big Apple of the region, adopts a similar pugnacious attitude to its people and interests in our country, it will also be badly hurt.442

The foregoing underlines the fact that has been made in this book—that is, that African (including the ECOWAS) leaders are well integrated, but the African peoples are still unintegrated,443 which is why here in Ghana, the Ghanaian people are raising nationalist sentiments. The reason why Nigeria and Ghana have problems in the treatment of their immigrant nationals is in the contradiction between the system 439 According to the President of the Nigerian traders association in Ghana, the Ghanaian government

was deliberately inconsistent about this matter, with its Minister of Information, Kojo Nkrumah, sometimes asserting that “no Nigerian-owned shops are currently closed” by the Ghana Investment Promotion Council (GIPC); see Victoria Ojeme in “Ghanaian authorities inconsistent on closure of shops—Nnaji”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, September 1, 2020, p. 7. 440 Obanikoro made this statement at the Sunrise Daily at Channels television programme, Lagos, on Tuesday, September 1, 2020, between 8 and 9 am local time. 441 See also Tunde Ajala in “Buhari’s foreign policy weak, he should be tougher on Ghana, others— Dele Momodu”, punchng.com, September 6, 2020, available at https://punchng.com/buharisforeign-policy-weak-he-should-be-tougher-on-ghana-others-dele-momodu/?amp=1 (last visited on September 6, 2020). 442 See “Resolving the Nigeria—Ghana trade feud”, Vanguard Comment, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 4, 2020, p. 18. 443 See Olatunji Dare at Home Abroad in “The ECOWAS failed mission to Mali”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, August 25, 2020, back page, op. cit.

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(ECOWAS) goals and the actors (Nigeria and Ghana) goals in the West African sub-region.444 At the level of system goals, the ECOWAS was supposed to solve the problem of nationalism in the sub-region by integrating the peoples so that the citizenry of the ECOWAS community would not be seen as foreigners and asked to pay registration fees as the Ghana Investment Promotion Council (GIPC) law has forced foreigners to do in respect of business registration.445 The foregoing is the benefit that the ECOWAS should have definitively provided the West African sub-region in its treaty and protocols (the ECOWAS 1986 supplementary Protocol relating to the right of residence and establishment, and the 1990 Protocol on the protection of capital investment, which did not provide that ECOWAS citizens are not foreigners) beyond just the application of its principles. As the Speaker of Nigeria’s House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila, observed in reaction to the harassment of Nigerian traders while on a ‘Legislative Diplomacy’ bilateral meeting with Ghanaian lawmakers and some top government officials in Accra, Ghana: … one of the things we are all proud about and the common surname that we all bear is ‘ECOWAS’. As you know, by virtue of being ECOWAS countries, our nations and our citizens should be able to live, work and thrive in any of our nations without any form of hindrance or discrimination. It is in this light we would encourage that we explore how the principles and the application of ECOWAS protocol—which we are all signatories to—may perhaps conflict with the application of the GIPC Act, especially vis-à-vis the recent adoption of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, AfCFTA, by African nations; and also the movement towards a single currency in the West African sub-region.446

At the level of the actor nations’ (Nigeria and Ghana) goals, both countries exhibited nationalist inclinations, especially in the two countries condoning the deportation of immigrant regional citizens. First, there was Nigeria’s prolonged closure of its land borders in August 2019 (through 2020 during the COVID-19 era) on the ground of protectionism447 ; and there was, indeed, the xenophobic/aphrophobic expulsion of 444 See

Agwu (2009, pp. 1–2), op. Cit.

445 See Victoria Ojeme in “Ghanaian authorities inconsistent on closure of shops—Nnaji”, Vanguard

(Lagos), Tuesday, September 1, 2020, p. 7, op. cit. Rotimi Ojomoyela in “Gbajabiamila asks Ghana to revisit law on $1 m business capital: Seeks bilateral trade law between the two countries; Advocates application of ECOWAS protocols; At least for now, let Nigerian traders respect the law—Ghana trade Minister”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 4, 2020, p. 8. 447 Ironically, according to a critic, “Nigeria has an overwhelming control of trade across West Africa; its products are in all West African markets I have been. Nigeria is clearly the economic giant in West Africa, accounting for 73.5% of ECOWAS exports, 52% of its general imports and 51% of its food imports [excluding what is smuggled]. For a country to dominate a market and then shut itself against that market is nothing short of sabotage”. It was on the basis of the above observation that this critic said that “the Nigerian and Ghanaian governments have no basis for the quixotic war of attrition they are engaged in. Both are undeserving of their peoples, endanger African unity and integration, and are striving to be good boys of foreign financial institutions and their Western owners. They are bedwetting big boys who should find productive engagements”; see Owei Lakemfa in “Nigeria and Ghana: Big Boys disturbing the peace”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 4, 2020, p. 17. Unfortunately, this critic did not recognize that the much Nigeria was 446 See

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Ghanaians.448 On the part of Ghana, its government turned a blind eye to one of its citizens bulldozing of a section of Nigeria’s High Commissioner’s residence in Accra.449 In fact, Ghana threw the first gauntlet in the deportation of immigrants when its Prime Minister, Kofi Busia, in 1969, embarked on the first deportation of undocumented Africans (especially Nigerians) by virtue of Ghana’s Alien Compliance Order, a deportation to which President Shagari ostensibly retaliated in 1983 when his government deported over 1 million African immigrants that were mainly Ghanaians.450 Prime Minster Busia’s deportation of Nigerians and other Africans in 1969 illustrated some of the evils that nationalist and protectionist sentiments can do to a nation’s system and actor interests. It had become clear that: Statements by the Prime Minister and others on immigration policy were so ambiguous and ill-timed, and were acted upon so promptly and officiously by the police and immigration authorities, that a mass exodus of a substantial proportion of the approximately 2 m resident non-Ghanaians took place under panic conditions. These resident aliens, mainly from neighbouring African states (and in many cases resident in Ghana for generations), represented roughly a quarter of the total population of Ghana and a much higher proportion of the productive labour force than that. Their departure not merely inflicted a crippling blow on the already weak Ghana economy, but caused a serious deterioration in the Ghana Government’s relation with its neighbours. The government’s handling of the situation was thus not only clumsy and inept, and contrary to Ghana’s true interests, but visibly inhumane.451

But if the Ghanaian Prime Minister Kofi Busia could expel the undocumented Nigerians in 1969 when there was no ECOWAS, President Shagari’s retaliation in 1983 when the ECOWAS had been put in place was a clear indication of the ineffectiveness of the regional organization. Then, as far as actor nation goals that defied peaceful regional stability went, there was the Ghanaian deportation of about 825 Nigerians between January 2018 and February 2019452 over an unfair residency

afraid of that made it shut its land borders were recognizably smuggled goods; see “Resolving the Nigeria—Ghana trade feud”, Vanguard Comment, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 4, 2020, p. 18, op. cit. 448 See Fred Aja Agwu (2013, pp. 528–529, 579, 580), op. Cit. 449 See Owei Lakemfa in “Nigeria and Ghana: Big Boys disturbing the peace”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 4, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. 450 See Abdullah Tijani in “Ghana’s deportation of Nigerians is a new chapter in a very ugly history that must end”, African Liberty, March 6, 2019, available at https://www.africanliberty.org/2019/ 03/06/ghanas-deportation-of-nigerians-is-a-chapter-in-a-very-ugly-history-that-must-end/ (last visited on Sunday, September 6, 2020); see also Tunde Ajala in “Buhari’s foreign policy weak, he should be tougher on Ghana, others—Dele Momodu”, punchng.com, September 6, 2020, available at https://punchng.com/buharis-foreign-policy-weak-he-should-be-tougher-on-ghana-others-delemomodu/?amp=1 (last visited on September 6, 2020), op. cit. 451 See Price (1967, 1975, 1977, pp. 136–137). 452 See Owei Lakemfa in “Nigeria and Ghana: Big Boys disturbing the peace”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 4, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. The Ghanaian government disputed the 825 figure and alleged that it only deported 700 Nigerians, unfortunately in a regional community with a supposed free movement arrangement even though the period of stay is restricted to 90 days, loc. Cit.

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permit requirements453 ; and there was the Ghanaian government’s closure of Nigerians’ shops and the appeasement of its nationalism-inclined populace ahead of the country’s December 7, 2020 elections. But in respect of the appeasement of Ghana’s nationalist population as it concerned the GIPC’s registration fees, although Ghana’s local legislation cannot be said to be capable of triumphing over international law as it relates to the ECOWAS 1986 supplementary Protocol relating to the right of residence and establishment, and the 1990 Protocol on the protection of capital investment,454 the ECOWAS treaty and its additional protocols could have better solved the problem if, as parts of the constituent instruments of the ECOWAS, they had made the organization more efficient in nature by expressly designating ECOWAS citizens as none foreigners. This would have solved this problem of nationalism that is apparent in Ghana; and indeed in Nigeria that also retaliated by expelling many Ghanaian citizens in the 1980s.455 Nigeria’s foreign policy weaknesses also manifested in its loss of the AfCFTA headquarters to Ghana, the continued closure of its borders despite its commitment to the ECOWAS and AfCFTA, its futile attempt to mediate in the political impasse that eventually led to a coup d’état in Mali456 (even when Nigeria was also inflicted by the same malaise that led to the Malian coup—the malaise of political and electoral intimidation,457 corruption, mismanagement and the insecurity that dominates the entire Sahel), its continuing dependency on China and its initial lackluster reaction to China’s humiliation of Nigerians and Africans in general during the COVID-19 pandemic, its free-visa policy for African countries passports holders, its inability (as will be seen below) to stoutly resist Morocco’s aspiration to join the ECOWAS; and, of course, Egypt’s rejection of Okonjo-Iweala’s nomination for the WTO post aforementioned that the WTO later resisted. The inefficiency in Nigeria’s foreign policy as well as its disagreements with South Africa (and now Egypt) is an immense distraction to Africa’s capacity to effectively coalesce. But the greatest dysfunction in Nigeria’s foreign policy was 453 Loc.

Cit. Agwu (2016, pp. 541–542), op. Cit. 455 See Agwu (2013, pp. 528–529, 579, 580), op. Cit. 456 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Mali crisis: Buhari receives briefing from Jonathan, ECOWAS Special Envoy”, Vanguard (Lagos), August 19, 2020, p. 7; Henry Ojelu in “Soldiers seize Mali President Ibrahim Boubakar Keita”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, August 19, 2020, p. 9; and Henry Ojelu in “ECOWAS suspends Mali over coup, imposes sanctions”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 20, 2020, p. 10. 457 See The National Chairman of Nigeria’s opposition party, the PDP (Prince Uche Secondus), described the country as “a police state” where the press is muzzled and fake police and army used to rig elections; and where the presidential villa had become a place that plots to undermine democracy are hatched—referring to a video that reportedly went viral, of the Chief of Staff to the President, Professor Ibrahim Gambari, and the former National Chairman of the ruling APC political party, Mr Adams Oshiomhole, were allegedly plotting to truncate the September 19, 2020 gubernatorial election in Edo State; see Chuks Okocha in “Edo poll: PDP urges UN, EU, to sanction Gambari, Oshiomhole: Deplores alleged plot to clamp down on opposition leaders”, ThisDay (Lagos), Friday, August 21, 2020, p. 5. 454 See

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robustly manifest in the absence of a clearly designated spokesperson under President Muhammadu Buhari, which traditionally ought to be the Minister of Foreign Affairs. The question of who speaks on Nigeria’s foreign policy warranted a critic to query where the President’s Senior Special Assistant (SSA) on foreign policy and the Diaspora (Abike Dabiri-Erewa) derived the power to be commenting on a serious foreign policy issue like issuing an advisory on travel to the United States—a fact that clearly exceeded her brief, compelling the Foreign Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, to later countermand that advisory.458 The futility in the SSA’s posturing was that the country’s armada of diplomatic missions and consular posts around the world do not send the routine reports of their activities to the SSA; rather, they send these reports to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.459 In the travel to the US advisory issue, there were two conflictual reports. The SSA had issued a directive to Nigerians, urging that those that those without pressing needs should shun the United States because US-bound Nigerians with valid visas were being returned to Nigeria on the “next available flights”; but the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Onyeama, urged Nigerians to disregard the SSA’s order because there was no basis for caution as the relationship between both nations were very cordial—two conflicting statements that “obviously underscore a lack of cohesion in information dissemination” within the federal government.460 Even the United States’ American Embassy in Abuja itself contradicted Abike Dabiri-Erewa by denying claims that some Nigerians with valid travel documents were denied entry and were being sent back to Nigeria on the next available flight.461 Another contradiction in who speaks for Nigeria’s foreign policy emerged when the SSA on the Diaspora, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, threw herself in the news about five Nigerian boys that were paraded in Dubai for allegedly robbing a bureau de change, reportedly declaring that “the boys have brought shame to us and will now prompt the UAE authorities to start maltreating Nigerians”,462 not bothering about the obvious diplomatic requirement that, alongside the fundamental principles of law, they had to be presumed innocent until they were proved guilty, that they had to

458 See Amb. Sulaiman Dahiru in “Who speaks for Nigeria on foreign policy?”, Daily Trust (Abuja),

Tuesday, March 14, 2017, back page. Cit. 460 See Marcel Mbamalu and Bridget Chiedu Onochie in “Crack in presidency over claims on US travel ban: Foreign Minister says no Nigerian killed in xenophobia attacks; Wake up to your responsibilities, group charges Onyeama”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, March 8, 2017, pp. 1–6; see also Vitoria Ojeme in “Ignore call to boycott US, Onyeama tells Nigerians”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, March 8, 2017, p. 4.. 461 See Bridget Chiedu Onochie and Wole Oyebade in “Nigeria not affected by United States new immigration policy: Italy deports 37 Nigerians”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, March 9, 2017, p. 3; see also Victoria Ojeme in “Nigerians with valid visa free to travel to the US—American Embassy”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, March 9, 2017, p. 9. 462 See Joseph Edgar’s Loud Whispers in “Abike Dabiri—Calm Down!”, ThisDay (Lagos), April 7, 2019, p. 67. 459 Loc.

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be availed some diplomatic/consular services to enable them acquire the appropriate legal representation for a fair trial.463 What the SSA, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, did here was emblematic of convicting these Nigerians before their trial. It was symbolic of the lack of consular support that Nigerian consuls were not giving to Nigerians abroad. The Nigerian mission in the UAE is particularly notorious for this lack of consular care for Nigerians there. This notoriety is illustrated by the problematic in this dramatic account in early 2021 where a Nigerian victim in one of the immigration problems in the UAE recounted that: … 80% of the persons arrested are legal residents while the rest 20 are those with either visit visa or having any visa related issues. I was in jail and I made several attempts to reach the embassy but without success. After a couple of days in jail, I finally got hold of the secretary of the Nigerian consulate who directed the call to a certain man and he promised the consulate would swing into action; till now they never did. Barely 30 h since I came out from jail, I went straight to the embassy in Abu Dhabi and I met one Director, Mr. Ibrahim, who said that they would channel our complaint to the Ambassador but till today, we have not heard anything.464

It was for the above reason that Nigeria’s immediate former Ambassador to Singapore, Ambassador Ogbole Amedu Ode, called on the federal government and the Nigerian mission in the UAE to urgently engage the latter’s authorities to secure the release of Nigerians detained there, lamenting the increasing reckoning in Nigeria amongst foreign policy experts that in recent times, Nigeria is punching far below its weight.465 Part of the narrative in the above case was that on December 9, 2020, the UAE’s security operatives, in the enforcement of their immigration laws, raided the homes of many African migrants, most of whom were Nigerians because of visa overstay.466 As Ambassador Ode confirmed, diplomatic and consular protections are basic rights that are provided by the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular relations that secures consular access to nationals of a sending state in detention facilities of a receiving state.467 It was the lack of this consular support that prompted Nigerians in Indonesia to invade and wreck destruction on the Nigerian embassy in Jakarta, lamenting a lack of support from the embassy when a 41-year old Nigerian fell from a nine-storey building while trying to escape from Indonesian immigration officers.468 Although the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama, described the incident as an 463 Loc.

Cit. Victoria Ojeme in “Arrest of Nigerians in UAE: FG must urgently interface for citizens— Amb Ode: Detainees decry Nigeria’s indifference to their plight”, Saturday Vanguard (Lagos), January 9, 2021, p. 5. 465 Loc. Cit. 466 Loc. Cit. 467 Loc. Cit. 468 See Nwafor Sunday in “Breaking: Hoodlums attack Nigerian embassy in Indonesia, destroy properties”, Vanguardng.com (Lagos), June 26, 2020, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/ 06/breaking-hoodlums-attack-nigerian-embassy-in-indonesia-destroy-properties/ (last visited on June 28, 2020). 464 See

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“absolutely deplorable and disgraceful behavior by Nigerian hooligans who without justification attacked the Nigerian Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia”469 ; but by whatever name the Minister may have called them, the action of the attackers were highly justified if they were truly deprived consular protection by the controversially funded and allegedly corrupt Nigerian missions in Jakarta and other countries470 that additionally suffer prolonged non-deployment of foreign service officers.471 Diplomatic and consular protections are the basic rights of citizens of the sending state, irrespective of the circumstances of their arrest. As Ambassador Ode explained, it is only by interfacing through consular access with those arrested that the mission can establish the veracity of their circumstances; that is, on how the arrests were made (whether rightly or wrongly?), and whether the

469 Loc.

Cit. a dispute between retired Ambassador Shola Onadipe that was once the Deputy Chief of Mission in the Nigerian Embassy in China and another retired Ambassador Dahiru Sulieman, there were claims and counter claims that Nigerian missions are not well funded, and that the missions are wrecked by corruption and a prolonged non-deployment of Ambassadors. Ambassador Onadipe reportedly argued that the money meant for the missions vanish in private pockets because of corruption and financial recklessness, while Ambassador Sulieman was of the view that the problem was that of inadequate funding because the budgetary estimates of the missions go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which collates and send them to the Ministry of Finance that invariably approves about half or even less than half of what the missions requested; thus making it impossible for the missions to pay for the houses that they rented, including the payment for utilities like electric, water and garbage bills, amongst others; see Victoria Ojeme in “Retired envoys disagree over funding of Nigerian missions”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, January 12, 2021, p. 8. The incident of corruption in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) was illustrated when the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Accounts, Senator Matthew Urhoghide, threatened to issue a warrant of arrest against the Minister and the Permanent Secretary, for their none appearance before the Committee “to defend queries raised against the Ministry by the Auditor-General of the Federation in his 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 audit reports”, … “which revealed that a total of 289 vouchers under capital expenditure and 453 vouchers under overhead expenditure in the sum of #3.05 billion and #1.3 billion respectively”, but “were hidden from auditors when requested”; see Henry Umoru in “Senate blasts Foreign Affairs Ministry for failing to defend hidden #4.3bn vouchers: Threatens to issue warrant of arrest against Minister”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, March 17, 2021, p. 41. 471 This assertion of the non-deployment of Ambassadors was illustrated by the fact that there was a public hearing on the MFA by the Senate’s Committee on Public Accounts over “incessant malpractices associated with diplomatic postings and deliberate draining of resources in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs” at the National Assembly in Abuja on Tuesday, March 23, 2021, see “Photo: NAN”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, March 24, 2021, p. 35. In fact, in January 2021, President Buhari approved the posting of 43 career Ambassador-designates and 52 non-career Ambassadors to Nigerian missions abroad—all appointments that were confirmed by the Senate six months earlier but were left without being implemented or posted because of the “intense lobbying by noncareer Ambassadors, who are candidates of powerful politicians, including governors” that were lobbying “for the Nigerian Missions in the United Kingdom, the United States and other Western European countries”; see Adelani Adepegba in “Buhari approves envoys’ posting six months after 470 In

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detainees were being accorded the right treatment.472 One of the Nigerian detainees in the UAE in the case aforementioned said that they were abducted between 2 and 5 am early in the morning by masked individuals that claimed to be security operatives.473 In fact, one of the six general principles of law that also apply in international law is the presumption of the innocence of the accused until the person is proved guilty.474 This is the point that consular services seek to prove in international law. Even foreigners that allegedly commit murder in Nigeria, and those bootlegging Chinese nationals that flood Nigeria with substandard goods, including the pirates that come from all over the world and are caught frangrante delicto in Nigeria’s territorial seas are still offered consular services by their countries to enable them acquire basic legal treatments that agree with international law.475 The foregoing are the values of consular services that no responsible nation can deny its citizens around the world. In the UAE case aforementioned, because the SSA was a presidential appointment, and that she, Abike Dabiri, had no diplomatic training, she practically declared the Nigerian boys guilty before their trial and conviction; thus, she was reprimanded by a critic who declared that: … when you jump into matters or areas you are not totally qualified for, you will just be bumbling and tumbling around, causing confusion and complicating matters. [This is because Abike’s] statement should have sounded like this: We have received the news of the arrest of some individuals of perceived Nigerian heritage on an alleged charge of armed robbery. While we do not condone any form of illegality, we remain very confident that the UAE authorities will treat this case along internationally accepted judicial processes while safeguarding their fundamental human rights.476

But it was expected that Nigeria’s reaction to the Dubai incident should have come from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “if we still have one, and not from Special Assistant or an Adviser”.477 Even in the event of the demolition of the residence of the Nigerian High Commissioner in Ghana, the SSA also intervened in the matter at the same time with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama; as she was reportedly describing the incident as an insult to Nigerians while expressing optimism that the MFA, having intervened, would find a lasting solution to the

confirmation”, punch.com, January 13, 2021, available at https://punchng.com/buhari-approvesenvoys-posting-six-months-after-confirmation/?amp=1 (last visited on January 13, 2021); see also Victoria Ojeme & Fortune Eromosele in “FG okays ambassadorial posting”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, January 13, 2021, p. 14. 472 See Victoria Ojeme in “Arrest of Nigerians in UAE: FG must urgently interface for citizens— Amb Ode: Detainees decry Nigeria’s indifference to their plight”, Saturday Vanguard (Lagos), January 9, 2021, p. 5, op. cit. 473 Loc. Cit. 474 See Agwu (2016, p. 447), op. Cit. 475 See Joseph Edgar’s Loud Whispers in “Abike Dabiri—Calm Down!”, ThisDay (Lagos), April 7, 2019, p. 67, op. cit. 476 Loc. cit. 477 Loc. Cit.

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problem.478 There was ostensibly a struggle for “territorial control” here. And this was why another critic of the absence of a recognizable official spokesperson on Nigeria’s foreign policy sarcastically (with a tinge of patois) urged President Buhari to “please give mummy Minister of Foreign Affairs once and for all make we rest abeg; I tire”.479 Paradoxically, the House of Representatives elevated this contradiction of who speaks on Nigeria’s foreign policy by mandating the Diaspora Commission, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its Committee on Diaspora Matters to investigate the attacks on Nigerian traders in Ghana.480 The Ghanaian government that was supposed to be the Nigerian government’s ally in the building of the West African sub-region had become a pain on Nigeria’s neck because of Nigeria’s government’s weaknesses—the foreign and even domestic weaknesses in Nigeria’s policies. But on the other hand, especially as seen above in this book, Ghana had continued to record successes in her foreign policy as Nigeria’s policies depreciated. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives created overlapping responsibilities when it instructed three agencies (MFA, SSA, and its Committee on the Diaspora Matters) to do an investigation on the attack on Nigerian traders in Ghana.481 This was even when one agency, especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that gets diplomatic dispatches from foreign missions, could have done it. It was really one of Nigeria’s foreign policy contradictions. This lack of a defined spokesman/spokesperson in Nigeria’s foreign policy was further heightened when, in reaction to Ghana’s hostilities to Nigerians resident in their country, it was the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, rather than the Foreign Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, that issued a threat that Nigeria would no longer tolerate the incessant harassment of Nigerians in Ghana.482 The query here is who could have talked more authoritatively on this matter—the Ministry of Information Affairs that does not receive diplomatic dispatches, or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that gets diplomatic dispatches from foreign missions? The fact is that any country with this level of foreign policy instability can ill-afford to sustain and win in nationalist foreign policy making, as Nigeria under the Buhari administration is prone to, particularly in respect of the AfCFTA and other bilateral and multilateral relations in the West African sub-region.

478 See

Joseph Onyekwere in “Ghana apologises as Nigeria deplores attacks on its embassy: FG seeks immediate arrest of perpetrators”, The Guardian (Lagos), Monday, June 22, 2020, p. 3, op. Cit. 479 See Joseph Edgar’s Loud Whispers in “Abike Dabiri—Calm Down!”, ThisDay (Lagos), April 7, 2019, p. 67, op. cit. 480 See Levinus Nwabughiogu in “Reps mandate Diaspora Commission, Foreign Affairs to probe recent attacks on Nigerians in Ghana”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, December 5, 2020, p. 9. 481 Loc. Cit. 482 See NAN in “FG reads riot act to Ghana on hostility towards Nigerians”, vanguardngr.com, August 28, 2020, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/08/fg-reads-riot-act-to-ghanaon-hostility-towards-nigerians/amp/ (last visited on August 28, 2020).

References

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References Agwu, F. A. (2009). National interest, international law and our shared destiny. Ibadan: Spectrum Books Limited. Agwu, F. A. (2013). Themes and perspectives on Africa’s international relations. Ibadan: University Press Plc. Agwu, F. A. (2016). Nations among nations: Uneven statehood, hegemony and instrumentalism in international relations. Ibadan: HEBN Publishers Plc. Agwu, F. A. (2018). Armed drones and globalization in the asymmetric war on terror: Challenges for the law of armed conflict and global political economy. New York and London: Routledge. Akinterinwa, B. A. (2010). Nigeria’s Citizen Diplomacy: Theoretical genesis and empirical exegesis. Ibadan: Bolytag International Publishers. Albright, M. (2003). Madam secretary: A memoir. New York: Miramax books. Denza, E. (1976). Diplomatic law: Commentary on the vienna convention on diplomatic relations. New York: Oceana Publications, Inc. Eze, O. C. (2010). Reciprocity in international relation. Lagos: Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. Fafowora, O. O. (2013). Lest I forget: Memoirs of a Nigerian career diplomat. Lagos: Nigerian Institute of International Affairs. Kaplan, R. D. (2000). The coming anarchy: Shattering the dreams of the post cold war. New York: Vintage Books. Ogunsanwo, A. (2019). Nigeria and the BRICS under the Administration of President Muhammadu Buhari—2015– 2019, a paper presented at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs’ (NIIA) “One-Day Conference on Nigeria’ Foreign Policy under the Administration of President Muhammadu Buhari (2015–2019)”, Thursday, January 31, 2019, (pp. 43–44). Unpublished. Otobo, E. E. (2017). Africa in transition: A new way of looking at progress in the region (p. 277). Princeton NJ: AMV Publishing. Price, J. H. (1967, 1975, 1977). Political institutions of West Africa. London: Hutchinson and Co. (Publishers) Ltd. Tolofari, S. (2004). Exploitation and instability in Nigeria: The Orkar coup in perspective. Lagos: Press Alliance Network Limited. Wilmot, P. F. (1980). Apartheid and African Liberation: The grief and the hope. Ife: University of Ife Press Limited. Woodward, B. (2018). Fear: Trump in the white house. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Chapter 8

Globalization, Populism, Nationalism and the ECOWAS Regional Efforts

8.1 Francophone Policy Undermines the Eco Right from the 1960s when the Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah began campaigning for a continental African unity along the line of a continental government, his ideas were drowned in the suspicions of the African leaders, who were still enthralled by the enthusiasm of their newly won sovereignty.1 Those suspicions deeply militated against the ability of the African countries to marginally cooperate, not to talk about a continental integration—the lack of cooperation and integration that was so profound that, at the end of the day, it was only the sheer conspiracy of African leaders that have prevailed in the sense that today, “African leaders are well integrated, but African peoples are not”—a conspiracy that was demonstrated by the fact that when a political crisis engulfed Mali in June 2020 and led to a coup d’état in August of the same year,2 all that the ECOWAS “peace mission” to Mali could do was to act more like shareholders that were concerned about preserving their stock in a tottering holding company at all cost, rather than returning to the basics; that is, to question the fundamental assumptions, and to set the organization on a new path.3 In other words, the ECOWAS leaders were united in their call for the Malian President Ibrahim Boubakar Keita to be reinstated in power, a call that he rejected4 — and a rejection that apparently resulted in the military’s decision to free him.5 Thus, the ECOWAS leaders were only concerned in the preservation of President Boubacar 1 See Olatunji Dare at Home Abroad in “The ECOWAS failed mission to Mali”, The Nation (Lagos),

Tuesday, August 25, 2020, back page, op. cit. Owei Lakemfa in “Mali: African leaders leave leprosy to cure scabies”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 28, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. 3 See Olatunji Dare at Home Abroad in “The ECOWAS failed mission to Mali”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, August 25, 2020, back page, op. cit. 4 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Ousted Mali President reject calls for his reinstatement, ECOWAS envoy, Jonathan tells Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, August 27, 2020, p. 8. 5 See “Military junta frees President Keita eight days after his arrest”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 28, 2020, p. 8. 2 See

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0_8

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Keita’s rule rather than the assuasion and reassurance of the Malian population that had been saying in one strong, united voice since their June 2020 unrest/protest began, “that they had had more than enough” of President Keita, “citing rigged elections, official corruption, deepening deprivations and general insecurity”.6 The ECOWAS leaders were unmindful of the fact that President Keita was abusing the democratic process in Mali, just as they were equally unmindful of the fact that President Ouattara of Cote d’Ivoire was also abusing the democratic process by amending the constitution and giving himself a third term in office7 ; but whenever the soldiers in Cote d’Ivoire strike as they did strike in Mali in taking over the government, the ECOWAS leaders would begin a condemnation of the coup and even begin to embark on a call for the restoration of the ousted “illegal government”8 in such a manner that would be an outright intervention in those countries’ internal affairs.9 African leaders under the African Union were also concerned about preserving one of their own (at all cost in countries where the democratic processes were tottering, 6 See Olatunji Dare at Home Abroad in “The ECOWAS failed mission to Mali”, The Nation (Lagos),

Tuesday, August 25, 2020, back page, op. Cit. 7 In a speech at the 57th Ordinary Session of the ECOWAS Heads of State and Governments that held

in Niamey (Niger Republic) on Monday, September 7, 2020, Nigeria’s President Buhari, even when he came to office through a controversial 2019 Presidential election and was suppressing democratic institutions like the Press with an increase in hate speech fine from #500,000 to #5 million (see Chike Olisah in “FG increases hate speech fine from #500,000 to #5 million, moves against monopoly and antitrust”, Nairametrics, August 4, 2020, available at https://nairametrics.com/2020/08/04/fg-inc reases-hate-speech-fine-from-n500000-to-n5-million-moves-against-monopoly-and-antitrust/ (last visited on September 21, 2020) declaimed the regional leaders’ penchant for not adhering to the constitutional provisions in their countries, especially in terms of term limit; see Omololu Ogunmade in “Don’t elongate your tenure, Buhari urges ECOWAS leaders: Criticises adoption of single currency as premature”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, September 8, 2020, pp. 1, 8. This was even as a critic, one of Nigeria’s former Senate Presidents, Saraki, was urging President Buhari to use the Edo and Ondo States election to demonstrate the ECOWAS’ commitment to elections (see Henry Umoru & Joseph Erunke in “Use Edo, Ondo polls to show ECOWAS commitment to credible elections, Saraki tells Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 16, 2020, p. 7.). It may have been because of Saraki’s challenge that the Buhari’s government should not use the strong-arm tactic that it used in the 2019 elections. In fact, the success of the Edo election was also influenced by the intervention of some international partners (the United States and Britain), which resorted to the imposition of stiff sanctions on Nigeria’s election riggers and promoters of violence (in Kogi and some other States, for instance) through visa bans, asset seizure and the possible prosecution of the culprits under international law; see “Edo poll: We are relieved, but …”, Vanguard Comment (editorial) in Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, September 22, 2020, p. 18. The foregoing were the developments that culminated in an apparently transparent, free and fair election in Edo State, in which the incumbent Governor Obaseki won his re-election; see Clifford Ndujihe et al. in “EDO: APC, Ize-Iyamu cry foul as Obaseki wins”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 21, 2020, pp. 1, 5, 35, 36. 8 See Adeola Fayehun in “FFK vs. Journalist, Lagos Helicopter: DSS vs. Biafrans; Cameroon; Ivory Coast …”, in YouTube, available at https://youtu.be/hotpA.9elLA (last visited on September 2, 2020). 9 The ECOWAS, for instance, gave Mali, an independent and sovereign nation, an ultimatum of about 12 months to form a new civilian government; see “Mali must appoint civilian government immediately, says ECOWAS”, See Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, September 16, 2020, p. 36.

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instead of returning to the basics; that is, returning to questioning the misgovernance and putting the countries on a new path also happened) in Chad after President Idriss Deby was allegedly killed in the frontline by rebels and Chadian Army immediately announced his son, the 37-year old General Mahamat Deby Itno as the new President after dissolving the parliament.10 The expectation of the AU was that civilian rule would be restored with the speaker of the parliament expeditiously taken over as the constitution demanded, even though the dead Idriss Deby violated that constitution by maneuvering his election into a sixth term in office a few days before his fatal wounding and death at the age of 68 years.11 Although the Chadian opposition parties condemned the “dynastic coup”12 ; but it was just to preserve their own socalled civilian rules that the AU wanted an end to military rule in Chad instead of talking about the late Idriss Deby’s constitutional derelict and the positive ends that civilian rule ought to be providing the Chadian citizenry. The situation in Mali was also an abuse of the rules of democratic practice; but when the military took over the Malian government, the world, especially the former colonial master that was France, together with the Sahelian multinational task force, looked the other way. The Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) was a poorly manned and enfeebled Lake Chad Basin nation’s multilateral force that comprised Cameroun, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, which joined the French and UNled forces to prevent Mali from being overrun by the Tuaregs separatists and the ISIS jihadists.13 These foreign forces ostensibly looked the other way. Unfortunately, the ECOWAS leaders were only shouting that there was a military coup in Mali; and they were demanding the restoration of the ousted Malian leadership, even when the removed so-called Malian democracy was just inflicting the people with poverty and dictatorship14 to the neglect of Paris and the rest of the world. Thus, in this era of increased globalization, populism and nationalism, the illregionalized ECOWAS has remained ineffective while France continued to extend its colonialism and now imperialist policy on the continent in such a manner that it has converted the so-called independence of its erstwhile colonial African states into a “foul neocolonial schemes” that has left the African states with “a confiscated” or perverted sovereignty”.15 One of the “unique and absolutely fascinating political phenomena” (a sort of neocolonial scheme) that France has used to roll back Francophone African countries independence is the Francafrique, a symbolic “gentleman’s agreement” that required “the continuous subjugation of these supposedly independent African states like Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, [and] Gabon”, amongst others, as 10 See “Chad after Idriss Deby: African Union urges end to military rule”, BBC News, April 24, 2021, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56870996 (last visited on April 26, 2021). 11 Loc. Cit. 12 Loc. Cit. 13 See Conversation with Azu in “What is Mali telling Africa?, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 28, 2020, p. 19. 14 See Owei Lakemfa in “Mali: African leaders leave leprosy to cure scabies”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 28, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. 15 See Boubacar Boris Diop in “Francafrique: A brief history of a scandalous world”, New African, October 2016, p. 42.

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neo-colonial states that France kept “a tight rein” upon and ensured that their leaders or Presidents put the resources of their countries at France’s disposal.16 This “Francafrique” or “osmosis between France and former African colonies” was to puppeteer each and every one of these African states that were former French colonies and ensure today that each and every one of them will always “consider a foreign county’s [France] interests before taking any decision or signing any bill”; and to act in any manner contrary to this neo-colonial policy was to be seen as defiant or uppity, which will surely lead that African leader to go the way of the Ivorian Laurent Gbagbo that was dislodged to plant a more pliant Alassane Dramane Ouattara.17 It was in this France’s cat-paw’s intervention in Cote d’Ivoire (using a mis-characterized UN force) that Nigeria lost its so-called Africa policy footing because it could not resist the foreign intervention and insist, just like South Africa insisted in respect to the GERD,18 that an African solution to African problems (at least diplomatically) be upheld. Nigeria and the ECOWAS, with the crept support of the United Nations, used a military action to deal with what was perceived to be a recalcitrance by the then President Laurent Gbagbo19 ; when actually, Laurent Gbagbo’s then opponent (Alassane Dramane Ouattara) was “a pathetic lackey of France”.20 It was because France, which usually packages the leadership of Cote d’Ivoire, had found a successor in Prime Minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly” but was disposed by the death that killed Coulibaly and caused Alassane Ouattara to change the country’s constitution and commence an unconstitutional third term pursuit21 that clearly made Nigeria’s intervention in the ouster of Laurent Gbagbo an intervention in Cote d’Ivoire’s international affairs. That intervention in Cote d’Ivoire’s international affairs was a clear subservience to Francafrique, even when one of the reasons Gbagbo’s supporters were against Outtara was because he was considered to be Burkinabe-born22 and, thus, not from Cote d’Ivoire. In fact, Francafrique had become a “well-oiled engine” that “runs only through back channels and shady networks” in which the resources of these African nations’ became a “neocolonial treasure-trove” or “eye-popping bonanzas” that “are shared among African and French leaders, money that the beleaguered economies of poor countries can ill-afford to lose”.23 Exemplified by “Bokassa’s diamonds, the ELF 16 Ibid,

pp. 42, 43. Parenthesis mine. pp. 42, 42; see also Agwu (2013), Themes and Perspectives …, pp. 50, 111, op. cit. 18 See “Ethiopia asks South Africa to help to resolve dam dispute”, DW.com, January 12, 2020, available at https://www.dw.com/en/ethiopia-asks-south-africa-to-resolve-dam-dispute/a51976447 (last visited on August 18, 2020), see also “News report in Aljazeera on June 20, 2020, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) between 8 and 9am local time, op. cit.. 19 See Agwu (2013), Themes and Perspectives …, p. 122, op. cit. 20 See Owei Lakemfa in “Ouattara and power: Until death do them part”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, August 14, 2020, p. 17. 21 Loc. Cit. 22 Loc. Cit. 23 See Boubacar Boris Diop in “Francafrique: A brief history of a scandalous world”, New African, October 2016, p. 43, op. cit.. 17 Ibid,

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Affair, and the notorious Robert Bourgi scandal”, the latter involved a revelation by Robert Bourgi (a French lawyer of Lebanese descent that “served for decades as an errand boy for Francafrique’s marquee figures”) of “how he used to carry from Abidjan, Libreville or Brazzaville briefcases stuffed with millions of Francs he gave at the Elysee to Jacque Chirac, adding … “I saw Chirac and Dominique de Villepin count the money in front of me”.24 Francafrique undermined not only the African economy but also democratic practice on the continent; for as long as he complied, “the African President can toss his political opponents to the sharp-toothed, flesh-hungry crocodiles frothing in his private pond, crown himself emperor, embezzle and deposit billions in Swiss accounts, all without fearing the slightest rebuke”.25 The French’s looting of Africa was so brazen that despite the enduring slogan of liberty, equality and fraternity it gave the world, Paris, vis-à-vis Africa, became “like a greedy monkey with its clinched fist in a jar full of nuts, but refusing to release the nuts so it can free its hands; Paris is addicted to the annual $500 billion she extorts from African countries annually [as] her economy and wellbeing has come to rely on this annual loot [and] her elites are ready to do anything to preserve this theft”.26 This exploitation was such that (as testified by Kwame Nkrumah in his NeoColonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism) when the momentum for independence increased around the world, France, in 1968, conducted a referendum for its African colonies with the requirement that each colonial entity should vote “whether it wished to remain an oversea territory of France (that is, an autonomous Republic within the French community), or to be independent, only Guinea (led by Sekou Toure) rejected that enslavement.27 But fearing that the example of Guinea might be followed by other African colonies, France removed everything of value from Guinea, including financial assistance and trade support, amongst others.28 The other fourteen African colonies—from Benin to Gabon—were forced to sign an agreement for the continuation of colonialism, pay a tax for being enslaved and colonized by France, pay their foreign reserves into the French Bank in Paris, and made to continue in a zonal currency tied to the French franc, called the CFA—an acronym for Colonies Francaises d’ Afrique (French African Colonies), later changed to “Communaute Financiere Africaine”.29 Any independent French African country that tries to resist this subjugation is deemed to be uppity.30 France’s subjugation of its African former colonies with the CFA is a current risk that the 15 ECOWAS countries would face whenever they adopt the Eco monetary union as a common currency. The only savior that 24 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 26 See Owei Lakemfa in “Nkrumah—Quao: Africa still pays heavily for the truth”, Vanguard (Lagos), November 22, 2019, p. 31. 27 Loc. Cit. 28 Loc. Cit. 29 Loc. Cit. 30 See Agwu (2013), Themes and Perspectives …, p. 111, op. Cit. 25 Loc.

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will be encountered in this attempt to make the ECOWAS a more integrated subregion with the Eco is if the Anglophone countries abandon their currencies while the Francophone countries abandon the CFA to now embrace the Eco.31 But it will be difficult to envisage that France would permit its Francophone countries in West Africa to abandon the CFA, an alignment that has persisted as a tradition, and through which “France takes $500 billion annually from the Francophone countries”.32 At a meeting in Abuja (Nigeria) on December 6 and 7, 2019, of the ECOWAS Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors on the single currency had (amongst other issues like a statistical harmonization programme, the establishment of an exchange rate mechanism, preparation of the text of the monetary union, the ECOWAS Central Bank and the establishment of the ECOWAS Monetary Union within the agreed deadlines) indicated that some of the major roadblocks to the adoption of the Eco was the foreign reserve that would anchor the currency, the human resources constraint and the location and name for the ECOWAS Central Bank.33 The above issues reportedly “threw Francophone West African countries off balance”34 and may have prompted France to play a fast one on the ECOWAS by encouraging the eight francophone African countries in the ECOWAS to drop the CFA or rename it the Eco.35 In the wake of this change of name, the Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara, France’s “Man-Friday” in the sub-region (who was supported by France against President Laurent Gbagbo36 ) found his mojo and announced during a news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron that France had agreed to the renaming of the CFA franc to the Eco and the cutting of some of the financial links with Paris that had underpinned the CFA since its creation.37 According to President Ouattara in the Abidjan news conference with France’s President Macron in attendance, “we have decided to reform the CFA franc with three major changes including the change of name and stopping the centralization of 50% of the reserves to the French Treasury”.38 In other words, in the change of name from the CFA to the Eco, the new Eco still remained pegged to the euro while the Francophone “African countries in the 31 See

“African News Update” in https://www.facebook.com/groups/isuikwuato.nwanneukwu/per malink/10157556475969461/ (last visited on July 28, 2019). 32 See Owei Lakemfa in “Nkrumah—Quao: Africa still pays heavily for the truth”, Vanguard (Lagos), November 22, 2019, p. 31, op. cit. 33 See Nduka Chiejina in “Nigeria prepares response to Eco currency adoption”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 42. 34 Loc. Cit. 35 See Ange Aboa, Alessandra Prentice, David Clarke in “West Africa renames CFA franc but keeps it pegged to euro”, Reuters, available at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ivorycoast-france-mac ron-idUSKBN1YP0JR (last visited on December 23, 2019). 36 See Agwu (2013), Themes and Perspectives …, pp. 50, 51- 52, 111, 123- 125, op. Cit. 37 See Ange Aboa, Alessandra Prentice, David Clarke in “West Africa renames CFA franc but keeps it pegged to euro”, Reuters, available at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ivorycoast-france-mac ron-idUSKBN1YP0JR (last visited on December 23, 2019), op. cit. 38 See Babajide Komolafe, Peter Egwuatu, Edeme Akpan in “Experts condemn Francophone currency name change to ECO”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, January 1, 2020, p. 12.

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bloc [CFA franc] won’t have to keep 50% of their reserves in the French Treasury” as “there will no longer be a French representative on the currency union’s board”.39 The immediate criticism to this Cote d’Ivoire-led arbitrary move from the CFA franc to the Eco was for the policy to be framed as “a whitewash” that had once again fore-grounded the rivalry between Cote d’Ivoire and Nigeria and threatened the pan-African unity of the sub-region.40 The Anglophone had been “blindsided” as France tried “to subtly arms-twist the sub-continent into kowtowing to its terms” in a manner that was inconsistent with an earlier decision of the Authority of the Heads of State and Governments of the ECOWAS on the mooted joint Eco currency that would cover the entire West African region.41 The Francophone countries had in this agenda, imposed on them by President Emmanuel Macron of France, unilaterally taken a currency name that the ECOWAS had chosen, thus, aggravating an already tough relationship between the two linguistic blocs and widening the “wall between” the UEMOA and the Anglophone.42 The intention of France in this arrangement was to relieve the CFA of its colonial legacy since its founding after the Second World War—a fact that allegedly provided the CFA some financial stability in turbulent times at the region.43 Although France’s effort in this renaming of the CFA to the Eco would only affect its West African former French colonies—minus Guinea Bissau—(Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo),44 it still remains a problem to the ECOWAS because the fact that the Eco is still pegged to the euro; and that the ECOWAS had decided to call its own common currency the Eco puts the Eco in a great handicap because the ECOWAS countries would consequently not have full sovereign control over the common Eco currency that they formally adopted at the 55th Ordinary Session of the Authority of Heads of State and Governments at the Presidential Villa on Saturday, December 21, 2019 in Abuja.45 This French and Francophone African countries’ policy was, however misunderstood by some experts in Nigeria who implicitly argued that even though Nigeria should not allow itself to be stampeded into the Francophone initiative, the idea would hasten the common currency process; and that “anytime the Anglophone countries 39 See Ange Aboa, Alessandra Prentice, David Clarke in “West Africa renames CFA franc but keeps it pegged to euro”, Reuters, available at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ivorycoast-france-mac ron-idUSKBN1YP0JR (last visited on December 23, 2019), op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 40 See Aurelie M’Bida, Baudelaire Mieu, Joel Te-Lessia Assoko, Nicholas Norbrook, Nadoun Coulibaly, and Mathieu Millecamps in “Anglophone West Africa kicks back at use of Eco to replace CFA franc”, theafricareport, Friday, January 17, 2020, available at https://www.theafricarep ort.com/22312/anglophone-west-africa-kicks-back-at-use-of-eco-to-replace-cfa-franc/ (last visited on January 19, 2020). 41 Loc. Cit. 42 Loc. Cit. 43 See Ange Aboa, Alessandra Prentice, David Clarke in “West Africa renames CFA franc but keeps it pegged to euro”, Reuters, available at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ivorycoast-france-mac ron-idUSKBN1YP0JR (last visited on December 23, 2019), op. Cit. 44 Loc. Cit. 45 See “Strengthening Relationships” in ThisDay (Abuja), December 22, 2019, p. 10.

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now wants to join them, then there can be negotiation as to the conditions and all of that”.46 A former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Kingsley Moghalu, also argued that France and Francophone Africa’s pegging of their Eco to the Euro “ensures currency stability even if monetary policy will not be fully independent”; more so when, according to him, “I once proposed as Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria that Nigeria should look at the option of pegging the naira to the dollar as a matter of strategic national interest”.47 Kingsley Moghalu’s suggestion here was truly contradictory and neo-colonial in character; but with respect to those experts that suggested that Anglophone Africa could negotiate the conditions for joining the Francophone Africa’s Eco, it was still curious what these conditions would be as the suggestion and the conditions were definitely uncertain. With France indulging in its former eight West African colonies or Francophone countries—Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote D’Ivoire, GuineaBissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo—that were using its colonial West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU or UEMOA or CFA franc) arbitrarily changing the name of their currency to the Eco, Paris had ostensibly sabotaged the ECOWAS common currency and divided the countries in the sub-region because whereas Nigeria was not complicit in the French and West African Francophone countries’ policy48 (coupled with some elements of misunderstanding on the parts of some of its experts at home49 ), but the government of Ghana was reportedly readying to “soon adopt the use of the new Eco common currency which was declared by the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) for introduction in 2020”.50 A statement signed by Eugene Arhin (the Ghanaian Director of Communication) revealed that France and Francophone countries’ “decision is a good testimony to the importance that is being attached not only to the establishment of a monetary union but also the larger agenda of West African integration”.51 The Ghanaian director’s statement further revealed that the effort of France and its West African allied countries: … is a welcome decision, which Ghana warmly applauds … We, in Ghana, are determined to do whatever we can to enable us to join the member states of the UEMOA, soon, in the use of the Eco, as we believe it will help remove trade and monetary barriers, reduce transaction costs, boost economic activity, and raise the living standards of our people”.52 46 See Babajide Komolafe, Peter Egwuatu, Edeme Akpan in “Experts condemn Francophone currency name change to ECO”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, January 1, 2020, p. 12, op. cit. 47 See Kingsley Moghalu in “My take on Francophone countries’ Eco”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 3, 2020, p. 43. 48 See Emma Ujah in “Nigeria studying Francophone currency name-change to Eco—FG”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 8. 49 See Babajide Komolafe, Peter Egwuatu, Edeme Akpan in “Experts condemn Francophone currency name change to ECO”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, January 1, 2020, p. 12, op. cit. 50 See “Ghana reveals plan to adopt ‘Eco’ currency”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 42. 51 Loc. Cit. 52 Loc. Cit.

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Interestingly, Ghana changed this position when it joined the Anglophone countries’ West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) in its rejection of the Francophone renaming of its CFA to the Eco.53 The English speaking countries’ rejection of the remaining of the CFA Franc to the Eco was the result of the Nigerian Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed’s indication that the Nigerian government was still studying the situation.54 This was a clear case of a clash between the Francophone West Africa and the Anglophone West Africa (the WAEMU or UEMOA and the WAMZ) that France orchestrated.55 That clash promised to be the waterloo of the ECOWAS’ Eco. It was an indication of the extent to which foreign interests can go to jeopardize African countries’ political will to forge ahead a development path. Before WAMZ eventually rejected the Eco policy of the WAEMU, other reports indicated that Nigeria would respond56 because it was completely “dissatisfied with what it considered the hasty adoption of the Eco and, thus, would “be unwilling to dump the naira for the Eco unless all the prescribed criteria are met”.57 Expert views across Nigeria were also full of condemnation of “the decision of Francophone countries to change the name of their currency, CFA franc to Eco”.58 These experts maintained that the Francophone policy was “improper” and “not a good one for Nigeria”.59 A former Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, was one of those that reportedly described the Eco in the wake of the Francophone policy as a joke that was not in Nigeria’s interest, especially since one of the basic requirements for convergence of the sub-region’s currencies (the audit and verification of the various ECOWAS Central Banks) had not happened.60 The Nigerian experts advised that all apprehensions over France and Francophone Africa’s policy on the Eco should be dropped because the ECOWAS declaration on the Eco still remained a fluke and a joke because the requisite conditions for its implementation, even in the next two years were none existent.61 In addition, 53 See Emma Ujah in “English speaking W-African countries reject adoption of Eco by Francophone countries: Heads of Government to meet”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 17, 2020, p. 9. 54 See Emma Ujah in “Nigeria studying Francophone currency name-change to Eco—FG”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 55 See Emma Ujah in “English speaking W-African countries reject adoption of Eco by Francophone countries: Heads of Government to meet”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 17, 2020, p. 9, op. cit. 56 See Nduka Chiejina in “Nigeria prepares response to Eco currency adoption”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 42, op. cit. 57 See Obinna Chima and Ndubuisi Francis in “Nigeria moves against hasty adoption of Eco, says it’s studying the situation: why nations may move against hurried approval of single currency”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 1. 58 See Babajide Komolafe, Peter Egwuatu, Edeme Akpan in “Experts condemn Francophone currency name change to ECO”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, January 1, 2020, p. 12, op. cit. 59 Loc. Cit. 60 See Mathias Okwe in “Why Eco is a joke, not in Nigeria’s interest, by Experts: Blames Nigeria for dithering on decision; most ECOWAS Central Banks have not audited accounts in four years”, The Guardian (Lagos), Saturday, January 4, 2020, p. 1. 61 Loc. Cit.

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a onetime Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria even posited that this Francophone’s policy “makes the ECOWAS plan for a regional currency named the Eco by 2020 dead in the water”.62 In fact, a Presidency source insisted that Nigeria: “would stand resolutely against the hasty move by French West Africa on three major grounds: it’s just a change of name from CFA to Eco, therefore, it’s of no moment; it’s an attempt at re-colonizing West Africa with French backing of a currency that is benchmarked against the Euro; and it’s an assault on the push for a flexible exchange rate, which must meet all the prescribed conditionalities”.63 As already indicate above, the Nigerian Minister of Finance, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed, announced the English speaking West African rejection of the Francophone’s renaming of the CFA to the Eco, a position she said was adopted by an Extra-Ordinary Meeting of Finance Ministers and Governors of Central Banks of the Anglophone’s West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) in Abuja64 ; and which communiqué read as follows: The meeting noted with concern, the declaration by His Excellency, Alasane Outtarra, Chairman of the Authority of Heads of State and Governments of the West African Economic and Monetary Union, WAEMU, on December 21, 2019, to unilaterally rename the CFA Franc as ‘Eco’ by 2020. WAMZ Convergence Council wishes to emphasize that this action is not in line with the decisions of the Authority of Heads of State and Governments of ECOWAS for the adoption of the ‘Eco’ as the name of an independent ECOWAS Single Currency. WAMZ Convergence Council reiterates the importance for all ECOWAS member countries to adhere to the decisions of the ECOWAS Authority of Heads of State and Governments towards the implementation of the revised roadmap of the ECOWAS Single Currency Programme.65

Unfortunately, the ECOWAS house had been apparently divided by France. But, apart from the challenge in France now sabotaging the Eco by not allowing the Francophone countries in West Africa and, indeed, the ECOWAS an independent control of the Eco as it had been pegged to the euro; the other challenges of the proposed West Africa’s single currency (since its conception in 2003 had missed its launching date in 2005, 2010 and 201466 ), which launching would now be clearly postponed beyond the announced 2020 (or only achieved in virtual and not physical terms, according to the Director-General of the West African Institute of Financial

62 See Kingsley Moghalu in “My take on Francophone countries’ Eco”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 3, 2020, p. 43, op. cit. 63 See Obinna Chima and Ndubuisi Francis in “Nigeria moves against hasty adoption of Eco, says it’s studying the situation: why nations may move against hurried approval of single currency”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 64 See Emma Ujah in “English speaking W-African countries reject adoption of Eco by Francophone countries: Heads of Government to meet”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 17, 2020, p. 9, op. cit. 65 Loc. Cit. 66 See Silja Frohlich, Katrin Gansler, Robert Ade and Carole Assignon in “West Africa’s New Currency, the Eco—Rebrand or fresh start?”, allAfrica, December 23, 2019, available at https://all africa.com/stories/201912240015.html (last visited on December 25, 2019).

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and Economic Management—WAIFEM, Dr. Baba Musa67 —include the ECOWAS member countries’ inability to meet the convergence criteria they themselves had set up.68 The Nigerian Minister of Finance (Mrs. Zainab Ahmed) had revealed that “although the overall economic performance of the sub-region has continued to trend upwards (with average growth put at 3.1% at the end of the first half of 2019, and which is expected to grow further to 3.3% at the end of 2019), many member countries have not yet met these convergence criteria.69 Like the EU’s convergence criteria,70 and the euro-compatibility criteria—the irrevocable monetary union that the European Union created with respect to the Euro, and which some countries like Greece never met,71 the convergence criteria that were set up by the ECOWAS member countries themselves include: (1) a singledigit inflation rate; (2) a fiscal deficit of no more than 4% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP); (3) a central bank deficit financing ceiling of 10% of the previous year’s tax revenue; and (4) gross central reserves that can give import cover for a minimum of three months.72 In fact, one media report had it that for the Eco to be successfully implemented, the West African Monetary Institute (WAMI) had set up ten (10) convergence criteria, divided into four primary and six secondary criteria.73 The four primary criteria are as indicated above, while the six secondary criteria to be achieved by each ECOWAS member country are (1) the prohibition of new domestic default payments and the liquidation of the existing ones; (2) tax revenue that is equal to or greater than 20% of the GDP; (3) a wage bill to tax revenue that is equal to or less than 35%; (4) public investment to tax revenue that is equal to or greater than 20%; (5) a stable real exchange rate; and (6) a positive real interest rate.74 Apart from Togo that met the four (4) primary criteria over a period of two years (and this was in the last half of 2019), no other ECOWAS country had met them, as reported by the ECOWAS Technical Committee on the single currency programme.75 A poser has been posed that if, despite its industrialization and sophistication, the EU

67 See Obinna Chima and Ndubuisi Francis in “Nigeria moves against hasty adoption of Eco, says it’s studying the situation: why nations may move against hurried approval of single currency”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 68 See Emma Ujah in “ECOWAS single currency faces challenges—Finance Minister”, Saturday Vanguard (Lagos), December 7, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 69 Loc. cit. 70 See Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, p. 766, op. Cit. 71 Ibid, pp. 758- 763. 72 See Emma Ujah in “ECOWAS single currency faces challenges—Finance Minister”, Saturday Vanguard (Lagos), December 7, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 73 See Obinna Chima and Ndubuisi Francis in “Nigeria moves against hasty adoption of Eco, says it’s studying the situation: why nations may move against hurried approval of single currency”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 74 Loc. Cit. 75 See Emma Ujah in “ECOWAS single currency faces challenges—Finance Minister”, Saturday Vanguard (Lagos), December 7, 2019, p. 8, op. cit.

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was finding it difficult to come up with the common or single currency architecture, there is little doubt that the ECOWAS would find the effort easy either.76 The WAIFEM boss, Dr. Baba Musa, had argued that the West African sub-region was imitating Europe that was much more developed in education, transportation, infrastructure and other aspects of economic life, insisting that a common currency was a laudable initiative that must be carefully implemented.77 His biggest concern, however, is that the achievement of the four primary criteria can only be met by a country in one or two years and later, that country would miss them—a situation that has been the common trait amongst the ECOWAS sub-regional countries.78 The dominant reason why ECOWAS countries fail to meet these four primary convergence criteria, according to Dr. Bala Musa, is that they cannot determine the prices of the commodities that affect revenue and so many other indicators.79 And apart from the fact that West African countries are facing these volatilities that are beyond their control, they too are reportedly not implementing policies that avoid the volatilities, policies that are defined by “continuing fiscal sustainability because most of the targets that are missed relate to the fiscal issues”.80 This is the reason why Dr. Musa averred that although the ECOWAS had announced that the common currency would be in operation in 2020, but given the action of France and the Francophone countries in the sub-region in precipitately (and without the ECOWAS consent) the renaming of the CFA franc to the Eco and benchmarking it against the Euro and, thereby, tying it to colonial handicaps, the ECOWAS launching of the Eco in 2020 was pretty difficult. It was envisaged that at best, “the implementation would start, but not in a physical form; rather, it might be a virtual currency, pending when all the countries would converge and address the issue”.81 Against West Africa’s underdevelopment and susceptibility to the externally generated volatilities that they do not internally regulate with sustainable fiscal policies, the launching of the Eco even in a virtual form would be a tall dream. In fact, at a virtual extraordinary regional meeting of the Authority of Heads of State and Government on the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) that held on Tuesday, June 23, 2020, President Buhari expressed concern about the decision of the Francophone countries in the UEMOA to replace the CFA Franc with the Eco ahead of the rest of the ECOWAS member states and warned/cautioned that the action might put the Eco in a “serious jeopardy” unless the Francophone countries agreed with the processes of reaching the Eco collective goal.82 At that meeting that 76 See

Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 763- 675, op. Cit. Obinna Chima and Ndubuisi Francis in “Nigeria moves against hasty adoption of Eco, says it’s studying the situation: why nations may move against hurried approval of single currency”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 8, op. cit. 78 Loc. Cit. 79 Loc. Cit. 80 Loc. Cit. 81 Loc. Cit. 82 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Buhari calls for caution on ECOWAS common currency”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, June 24, 2020, p. 8. 77 See

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discussed the implementation of the ECOWAS Monetary Cooperation Programme and the ECOWAS Single Currency Agenda, President Buhari stated as follows: Your Excellencies, you are all familiar with the history of the Eco thus far, so I will not bore you with that. We reverted to a single track approach, giving up Eco, which is the original idea of the WAMZ so the ECOWAS-wide programme could thrive. In this regard, we have made remarkable progress, including the adoption of the Exchange Rate regime, the name and model of the common Central Bank and the symbol. We have urged our Ministers towards an expeditious path to success. It, therefore, gives me an uneasy feeling that the UEMOA zone now wishes to take up the Eco in replacement for its CFA Franc ahead of the rest of the member states. This is in addition to deviating from the Community Act on a consistent attainment of convergence in the three years running up to the introduction of the currency, and our subsequent reinforcing directives.83

But President Buhari assured the ECOWAS leaders of Nigeria’s commitment to the Eco; but he urged them to critically consider the recommendations of the Convergence Council and take a common position to safeguard the WAMZ from the pitfalls of a questionable union.84 Ultimately, the inability of the ECOWAS to achieve the common currency is one of the problems that have assailed West Africa and other sub-regions in Africa, making some of them like Nigeria very vulnerable to the currency swap deal with China. A private sector critic of the ECOWAS Eco calamity (Guy-Bertrand Njoya—the financial officer of a Nigerian start-up) saw it as “a red herring”, as something that was not altruistic but designed to sabotage the aspiration for a “monetary sovereignty for the whole region … that will free up trade; … unlock financial resources by pooling risk and capital to finance [international] rural roads”—a kind of project that would be “much easier in the framework of a common currency”.85 This failure of the ECOWAS Eco was a calamity particularly for the Anglophone because the latter had been campaigning for a complete monetary independence in the region—something that could grow the trade between the Francophone and the Anglophone areas.86 Unfortunately, France has clearly used its Francafrique as a neo-colonial tool to thwart the project. Like many African countries, this is an imperialist enslavement that the ECOWAS may never escape, not in this era of increased globalization and the sway of populism and nationalism. It is this same contradiction that has continued to ensnare the ECOWAS in the still not completely resolved attempt by Morocco to join the union, for the matter is clearly in abeyance at the moment.

83 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 85 See Aurelie M’Bida, Baudelaire Mieu, Joel Te-Lessia Assoko, Nicholas Norbrook, Nadoun Coulibaly, and Mathieu Millecamps in “Anglophone West Africa kicks back at use of Eco to replace CFA franc”, theafricareport, Friday, January 17, 2020, available at https://www.theafricarep ort.com/22312/anglophone-west-africa-kicks-back-at-use-of-eco-to-replace-cfa-franc/ (last visited on January 19, 2020), op. cit. 86 Loc. Cit. 84 Loc.

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8.2 In Diplomatic Flat-Footedness in the ECOWAS Moroccan Minefield On June 4, 2017—in the height of the surge of anti-globalization, populism and nationalism across the world, a time that national consciousness was pervasive (the raw country first or the “America first” that the likes of President Trump was trumpeting in the United States over and above globalism)—the 51st Ordinary Session of the Authority of Heads of State and Governments of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) met in Monrovia (Liberia) under the Chairmanship of the Liberian President Mrs. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and gave a receptive consideration to the Kingdom of Morocco’s request for the membership of the ECOWAS.87 This receptiveness happened despite the threat posed by Morocco to both the bilateral and multilateral interests of the ECOWAS member states, jointly and severally—like the fact that Morocco is in North Africa and a member of the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU); Morocco is neck-deep in non-tariff pacts with the European Union; Morocco had not renounced or disavowed its occupation and non-recognition of the sovereignty of Western Sahara or the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic; Morocco is a theocratic and undemocratic state; and Morocco’s presence in the ECOWAS is a threat to Nigeria and, indeed, other ECOWAS members states efforts at industrialization and economic diversification.88 Unfortunately, in all of this, Nigeria, despite shouldering the responsibility for the establishment and creditable nurturing of the ECOWAS, was caught diplomatically flat-footed because of its virtual absence from that Monrovian ECOWAS summit.89 Although Nigeria “gave the ECOWAS the financial, diplomatic, military and political support it needed to face the numerous challenges it encountered … especially during the conflict in Liberia and Sierra Leone where it was estimated that Nigeria spent over US$7 billion”, the country’s “influence in ECOWAS began to wane as a result of lackadaisical foreign policy”.90 In fact, “although Abuja hosts the Commission, fundamental decisions are often taken without Nigeria’s leadership input or with very inconsequential contributions by some Nigerian apparatchiks”.91 This was evident in the absence in Monrovia of any Nigerian government official in a high leadership position.92

87 See Mohammed K. Ibrahim in “Nigeria, Morocco and the future of ECOWAS”, ThisDay on Sunday (Lagos), June 25, 2017, p. 78. 88 See “Keep Morocco out of ECOWAS”, Vanguard Comment or Editorial, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, September 25, 2017, p. 18. 89 See Mohammed K. Ibrahim in “Nigeria, Morocco and the future of ECOWAS”, ThisDay on Sunday (Lagos), June 25, 2017, p. 78, op. cit. 90 Loc. Cit. 91 Loc. Cit. 92 Loc. Cit.

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It was evident that President Buhari could not attend on health grounds; and that the Acting President Yemi Osinbanjo would not also be there “because of the likely political implications of leaving the country in the absence of the President; but there was no explanation as to why the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyema, himself was absent from the Monrovian meeting.93 And as recalled by the retired Ambassador Ibrahim, it was the first time such a thing had happened in the history of the ECOWAS; and sadly, it “was a Summit in which the Heads of State in attendance took some critical decisions, which if upheld would seriously harm [Nigeria’s] national interest”.94 The impression that gathered roots in the federal government of Nigeria’s failure to explain its absence in Monrovia was that it “decided to boycott the Summit because of the invitation extended to Benjamin Netanyahu, [the] Israeli Prime Minister, to address the Summit, which made Netanyahu the first non-African to be so honoured”.95 The situation left critics asking why, since the decision or proposal to invite Netanyahu was mooted since 2006 and Nigeria was averse to it, Abuja did not use its “diplomatic skills and muscles to abort it right at the conception stage”; and this was even when the invitation was discussed and agreed upon by the Council of Ministers before it was extended to the Israeli Prime Minster with the apparent acquiescence of Nigeria that then changed its mind at the last minute when it was too late to stop Netanyahu’s use of the ECOWAS platform.96 To say the least, this was actually a very bad diplomacy for Nigeria, if it cannot be said completely that the country’s diplomacy had collapsed under the President Buhari’s administration. Unfortunately at the Monrovian ECOWAS Summit, the worst diplomatic faux pas for Nigeria happened when other member countries’ Presidents were represented but Nigeria faced “the avoidable embarrassment” of being represented by a Charge d’ Affaires—a Charge d’ Affaires taking or sitting on Nigeria’s seat.97 The vital posers for Nigeria here was why it was not substantially represented at the Summit and, thus, utilize its might and influence in the sub-regional organization to enormously veto Netanyahu’s coming; in other words—as posed by Mohammed K. Ibrahim—“why didn’t she use her diplomatic skills and muscles to abort it [Netanyahu’s coming to address the ECOWAS) right at the conception stage?”.98 Although Nigeria is the chief financier of the ECOWAS, its diplomacy had grown so bankrupt that, according to Ambassador Mohammed Ibrahim, “the Netanyahu affair was a project of President Sirleaf and Mr. Marcel Alain de Souza, President of the ECOWAS Commission”.99 The Liberian President Sirleaf had done Nigeria in on Israel when she visited the Israelis on her work in “promoting women equality and other human rights issues”, taking an honorary Doctorate from the University of Haifa 93 Loc.

Cit. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 95 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 96 Loc. Cit. 97 Loc. Cit. 98 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 99 Loc. Cit. 94 Loc.

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and apparently using the opportunity of the end of her tenure as ECOWAS Authority Chairmanship “to reciprocate the Israeli gesture by inviting Netanyahu to address the Summit in Monrovia”.100 In fact, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that “while Netanyahu held meetings during his trip to Monrovia with ECOWAS leaders, Israeli officials signed an MOU pledging to invest $1 billion by 2021, to advance green energy and power projects in all 15 ECOWAS member countries”.101 The question to be asked here is would Nigeria be part of this Israeli largess? As a matter of fact, “the first project under this MOU will be a $20 million commercialscale solar field at the Roberts International Airport in Monrovia, which will have the capacity to supply 25% of the country’s power”.102 Meanwhile, in addition to security and its so-called fight against corruption, the economy was one of the planks that actuated President Buhari into Nigeria’s presidency. To this extent (and from a neoliberal economic perspective), the quest for foreign investment ought to be one of President Buhari’s prerogatives. But here was his government failing in a clear responsibility to use the ECOWAS platform to make a difference on this economic matter.

8.3 The Impossibility of Morocco’s Membership of the ECOWAS Conceptually, a treaty is “a written international agreement concluded between states or other subjects of international law, governed by international law, whether embodied in a single document or in two or more related instruments and whatever its particular designation like Protocol, Convention, etc.]”.103 According to Harris, a treaty is that “ubiquitous instrument through which all kinds of international transactions are concluded”.104 As an agreement governed by international law, some of the cardinal principles of the law of treaty include, among others, the principle of “Pacta Sunt Servanda (a Latin that means that treaties shall be observed as entered into105 ) and the principle of Pacta Tertiis Nec Nocent Nec Prosunt, a fundamental maxim of Roman (civil) law that means that “treaties do not create either obligations or rights for third states without their consent”.106 For Morocco’s quest for the membership of the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS), what this simply means is that it cannot have obligations or rights in the organization without accession. Depending on what the treaty explicitly 100 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 102 Loc. Cit. 103 See Bledsoe and Boczek (1987, p. 271). 104 See D. J. Harris (1998); Cases and Materials on International Law, Fifth Edition, London, Sweet & Maxwell, p. 765. 105 See Bledsoe and Boczek (1987, p. 258), op. cit. 106 Ibid, p. 259. 101 Loc.

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provides, rights and obligations are only incurred in a treaty by signature, ratification, acceptance (subject to ratification), or approval (without prior signature107 ), adoption (which does not mean that the treaty has been signed108 ), accession, or adhesion.109 It is important to observe here that a distinction is sometimes made between accession and adherence/adhesion, but this distinction is not generally supported by state practice.110 By accession (acceding) to a treaty, the implication is that the state acceding did not take part in the negotiation and signing of the treaty.111 So, “the institution of accession allows states to join a treaty arrangement in which negotiation and signature they did not participate”.112 Thus, accession is the only viable institution of the ECOWAS Treaty that can be used to assess Morocco’s quest for its membership. Meanwhile, it is trite knowledge that whenever there is a problem with any treaty, the solution can only be sought by looking at the provisions of that treaty. To this effect, Article 15 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) provides that “the consent of a state to be bound by a treaty is expressed by accession when: (a) the treaty provides that such a consent may be expressed by that state by means of accession; (b) it is otherwise established that the negotiating states were agreed that such consent may be expressed by the state by means of accession; or (c) all the parties have subsequently agreed that such consent may be expressed by that state by means of accession”.113 Having made reference to the fact that whenever there is a problem with a treaty— be it internally (with respect to its provisions) or externally (in terms of new members joining), the best way to resolve such a problem is to ascertain what the treaty says about it and from there, solve the problem. It is by dint of this reality that the ECOWAS treaty must be a guide in ascertaining whether or not Morocco is qualified to be a member, using such criteria as (1) the goal and objective of the ECOWAS treaty; (2) what the treaty says about the concept of regionalism; (3) whether or not the ECOWAS treaty contains accession clauses; and (4) the implication of Morocco joining the ECOWAS for peace and security issues in the West African sub-region, the ECOWAS having morphed into a security arrangement from its economic orientation at inception. Of course, in interrogating these issues, varied forms of treaty interpretation will be applied—including the textual or ordinary meaning of the words used; the objective or intention of the parties; the teleological interpretation that focuses on the general purpose of the treaty; the principle of effectiveness that insists that treaties shall be interpreted in ways that will render them most effective and useful; and the travaux preparatoires or preparatory work or record of the drafting of the treaty and the 107 Ibid,

p. 262. p. 242. 109 Ibid, pp. 241, 244- 245. 110 Ibid, p. 241. 111 Loc. Cit. 112 Loc. Cit. 113 See Harris (1998); Cases and Materials on International Law, pp. 785- 786, op. cit. 108 Ibid,

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circumstances surrounding its conclusion (although this paper did not have access to that of the ECOWAS), amongst114 —all of which serves as the theoretical base for this paper, one that is basically policy oriented and, thus, eschews excessive theorization.

8.4 Morocco’s Quest and itsImplication for ECOWAS Treaty There is no shade of treaty interpretation that the ECOWAS treaty can be subjected— from the scores of aims (goals) and objectives, concept of regionalism, the accession clause, to its peace and security architecture—that the result will not be the exclusion of Morocco from the fold of the organization. A textual interpretation of the aims and objectives that were expressed in the preamble of the founding treaty of the ECOWAS, concluded in Lagos (Nigeria) on the 28th day of May, 1975, would inevitably lead to the unambiguous conclusion that the Parties did not intend that extra-sub-regional countries be included or would be included in future because they emphasized “progress towards sub-regional economic integration”115 ; “bilateral and multilateral economic cooperation existing in the sub-region”116 ; “”efforts at subregional cooperation should not conflict with or hamper similar efforts being made to foster wider cooperation in Africa”117 ; and “the unity of the countries of West Africa”.118 Being situated in the Mediterranean region of North Africa, Morocco is, of course, not in the West African sub-region that the ECOWAS treaty literarily emphasized in the thrust of its goals (aims) and objectives. The preamble of the ECOWAS revised treaty, done at Cotonou on the 24th day of July, 1993, also advanced this emphasis on sub-region-centrism in its goal and objectives by “reaffirming the Treaty establishing the Economic Community of West African States signed in Lagos on 28 May, 1975” against the background of its achievements.119 In fact, this ECOWAS revised treaty (1993) expressly affirmed “that our final goal is the accelerated and sustained economic development of Member States, culminating in the economic union of West Africa”.120 Also part of the broader aim of the ECOWAS, as enshrined in the 1975 Lagos founding treaty, is the task of “fostering closer relations among its members and of contributing to the progress and development of the African continent”.121 The organization, in the revised treaty,

114 See

Bledsoe and Boczek (1987, pp. 249–251), op. cit. para 16 of the preamble to the ECOWAS 1975 Lagos treaty. 116 Loc. Cit.; para 18. 117 Loc. Cit.; para 20. 118 Loc. Cit.; para 21. 119 See para 3 of the preamble of the ECOWAS revised treaty of 1993. 120 Loc. Cit.; para 13. 121 See Article 2, para (1) of the ECOWAS 1975 Lagos treaty, op. cit. 115 See

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also enjoins its members “to foster relations among Member States and contribute to the progress and development of the African Continent”.122 Again, Morocco is known to be devoid of this credential or reputation for contributing to the development of the African continent because its antecedents in the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU) reek of truculence and disruptiveness rather than cooperation for the sake of development.123 As a critic observed, the Kingdom of Morocco “is noted for its tantrums, rascality and general disregard for human rights, international norms and conventions”.124 And in its desperation to be a member of the ECOWAS, the point has been made that “rather than West Africans grappling with the challenges of economic prosperity, mass employment, democratic culture, security, full integration and development, they are being diverted by a divisive application [by Morocco] whose politics are unclear but destructive125 ; and that: It is not that Morocco is an orphan; it belongs to the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), which was established in Marrakech, Morocco, 28 years ago. Also the headquarters of the AMU is in Rabat, the Moroccan capital. But due to Morocco’s quarrelsomeness, the AMU has been unable to hold a high level meeting for nine years now. … Of its two neighbours, it is illegally occupying Western Sahara to the South and has no friendly relations with Algeria, on its eastern border. Apart from indicating the character of the country, it also casts doubts whether it can abide by the ECOWAS basic Non-Aggression Principle. If Morocco had helped built AMU as Nigeria did building ECOWAS, we may be talking today about ECOWAS-AMU cooperation and not about accommodating Morocco’s wandering spirit.126

In fact, because of Morocco’s truculent antecedent in the AMU, this critic summed that “Morocco has the capacity and propensity to bring the ECOWAS group down”.127 For instance, at a conference (between March 23 and 28, 2017) organized in Dakar (Senegal) by the African Union and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa to discuss the issues of ‘growth, Inequality and Unemployment’ in the African continent, Morocco threw a spanner in the works when it held the meeting up over the participation of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (Western Sahara), reviving its pre-colonial claim to the ownership of that fellow African country.128 Meanwhile, the same Morocco that had just rejoined the African Union three months earlier on January 31, 2017, insisted that the conference would not hold if Western Sahara was not expelled from the meeting—the very reason why it pulled out of the then OAU in 1982, the OAU’s recognition of the sovereignty of Western Sahara.129

122 See

Article 3, para 1 of the ECOWAS revised treaty of 1993.

123 See Owei Lakemfa in “When the goat claims same paternity with the sheep”, Vanguard (Lagos),

Friday, June 23, 2017, p. 31. Cit. 125 Loc. Cit. 126 Loc. Cit. 127 Loc. Cit. 128 See Owei Lakemfa in “Time for Nigeria to stand up for Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), April 7, 2017, p. 31. 129 Loc. Cit. 124 Loc.

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It was in this hubristic attitude that Morocco stopped the Dakar conference aforementioned. Nigeria and other African countries that dissented had become humiliated by Morocco. Earlier (for the same reason), the same Morocco had tried to disrupt Japan’s ‘Unilateral Multilateralism’130 with Africa—that is, the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) that took place from August 27 to August 28, 2016 in Nairobi (Kenya) as well as the 2016 Malabo Africa-Arab Summit; but it was checked.131 And citing other retired Nigerian diplomats like Professor Bolaji Akinyemi (one of the country’s former Ministers of Foreign Affairs), a Nigerian ambassador, Mohammed Ibrahim (rtd), equally reiterated Akinyemi’s remark that Morocco’s move in applying to be a member of the EOWAS was to whittle down Nigeria’s influence in the organization.132 There is also the Association of Retired Career Ambassadors of Nigeria (ARCAN), which insisted that: Morocco’s moves are a calculated attempt aimed at whittling down the strength of Nigeria for her role in the admission of Western Sahara into the then OAU”.133 Ambassador Ibrahim himself maintained that: … the federal government would realize the need to shake off the lethargy with which it has been treating this vicious move from Rabat. Morocco has the dubious distinction of causing dissension in any organization it belongs; it has done that in OAU and AMU; and given the chance, it will do the same thing in ECOWAS. Recall also how last year it led eight other Arab countries to withdraw from the 4th Arab-African Summit in Malabo over the insistence of AU on the participation of Western Sahara. This action nearly crippled the Summit.134

The ECOWAS treaty also enjoins that members “shall take steps to reduce gradually, the community’s economic dependence on the outside world and strengthen economic relations among themselves”.135 This provision, of course, readily disqualifies Morocco because this North African Mediterranean country is framed in the

130 This

is denotative of a one-sided organization of multilateralism with African countries by the prosperous developed countries of the West; or by the rising emergent economies from Asia and Eurasia. Examples include the TICAD under reference with Japan; the FOCAC with China (the Sino-African relations); the first Russia-African countries (54 African countries) summit of October 23 and 24, 2019, in the Russian southern city of Sochi; and, of course, the historic United StatesAfrican relations, the Anglo-African relations (for Britain), and the French-African or Francophone relations. Unilateral multilateralism is historically one-sided in nature against African countries— all of them proceeded by Germany’s Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 that inaugurated or heralded the scramble for Africa; see Toga et al. (2018). Even Egypt, a fellow African country had even gone ahead to institute its own ‘Unilateral multilateralism’ with its Aswan Forum for Sustainable Peace in Africa that held in December 2019, where President Buhari unilaterally announced his visa on arrival for African country without any internal consultation; see The Visa on Arrival Policy”, Sunday Comment, ThisDay, The Sunday Newspaper, December 15, 2019, p. 10, op. Cit. 131 See Owei Lakemfa in “Time for Nigeria to stand up for Africa”, Vanguard (Lagos), April 7, 2017, p. 31, op. cit. 132 See Mohammed K. Ibrahim in “Nigeria, Morocco and the future of ECOWAS”, ThisDay on Sunday (Lagos), June 25, 2017, p. 78, op. cit. 133 Loc. Cit. 134 Loc. Cit. 135 See Article 32, para 2 of the ECOWAS 1975 Lagos treaty, op. cit. op. cit.

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European Neighbourhood Policy in addition to being in economic dalliance (in nontariff trade) with the European Union,136 which Nigeria and some West African countries have refused to sign the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with.

8.5 Morocco in the ECOWAS Conception of Regionalism According to a report by the Borderless Alliance Group, the ECOWAS is reputed to be the least integrated region in the world in terms of cross border trade137 ; but nevertheless, the goals and objectives the ECOWAS treaty emphasized the exclusive centrality of the West African sub-region in its conception of regionalism, with emphasis on physical contiguity—meaning that not even with the low level of integration, no effort will be made to bring into the organization, any country that is not geographically close. It was against this background that the treaty is focused at ensuring infrastructural links in the field of transport and communication; so as to further “the physical cohesion of the Member States and the promotion of greater movement of persons, goods and services within the Community”.138 The ECOWAS’ aspiration to further the physical cohesion of its member states, therefore, underlines the fact that it cannot accommodate an extra-West African country like Morocco that is located in the northern Mediterranean region of the African continent. This is also true of the ECOWAS’s aspiration to have “a network of roads traversing the territories of the Member States”.139 The Kingdom of Morocco certainly cannot be conceded membership because it cannot by any stretch of the imagination be a beneficiary of the organizational priority of the ECOWAS because being physically removed from the West African sub-region, this network of roads cannot traverse its territory. And as also envisaged by the ECOWAS treaty, the plan of “connecting the railways of the Member States”140 as well as the task of Member States undertaking “to form multinational shipping companies for both maritime and river navigation”,141 are incompatible with the inclusion of Morocco that does not share territorial contiguity with ECOWAS member states in the West African sub-region. 136 See

“Morocco-European Union relations”, WikipeDiA, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/ wiki/morocco%E2%80%93European-Union-relations (last visited on November 28, 2019); see also Owei Lakemfa in “When the goat claims same paternity with the sheep”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, June 23, 2017, p. 31, op. cit. 137 See Godwin Oritse in “West Africa the least trade integrated region in the world—Report”, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2019/03/west-africa-the-least-trade-integrated-regionin-the-world-report/ (last visited on March 20, 2019). 138 See Article 40 of the ECOWAS 1975 Lagos treaty, op. cit. 139 Loc. Cit.; Article 41. 140 Loc. Cit; Article 42. 141 Loc. Cit.; Article 43, para 2.

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In view of the above aspirations; the ECOWAS treaty maintains that “region means the geographical zone known as West Africa as defined by Resolution CM/Res.464 (XXVI) of the OAU Council of Ministers”.142 The same Article 1 of the 1993 revised treaty also states that “Member State of Member States means a Member State or Member States of the Community as defined in paragraph 2 of Article 2 of this Treaty”.143 Meanwhile, the Article 2, paragraph 2 of the 1993 revised treaty under reference states that “the members of the Community, hereinafter referred to as “the Member States” shall be the States that ratify this Treaty”.144 And the States that ratify the treaty, according to Article 1, paragraph 2 of the ECOWAS 1975 Lagos treaty, are “the Members of the Community … and such other West African States as may accede to it”. If the phrase, “and such other West African States” is contextualized, it becomes obvious that “the Members of the Community” are also West African States; which, subsequently, Article 1 of the 1993 revised treaty definitively delineated as “the geographical zone known as West Africa”. It is important here to point out that ordinarily, economic regionalism transcends geo-physical propinquity; that is why there, for instance, exists the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and European countries; and, until President Trump withdrew the United States, there was the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) between the United States and Asian countries (excluding China). And that was why the European Union was mulling the idea of an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with African countries. However, the ECOWAS has definitively and expressly restricted its conception of regionalism to physical propinquity, especially on account of the fact that it has transcended an economic arrangement to also become a security arrangement. The ECOWAS as a security arrangement is also examined below.

8.6 Morocco and the ECOWAS Treaty Accession Clause Without any form of ambiguity, the founding ECOWAS treaty expressly excluded non-West African countries by exclusively maintaining that “any West African State may accede to this Treaty on such terms and conditions as the Authority may determine”.145 Meanwhile, it is trite law that express inclusion is tantamount to express exclusion. Thus, in both ratification and accession, the ECOWAS, in conformity with its subsequent insistence (in Article 1 of the 1993 revised treaty) on the principle of territorial propinquity in the conception of regionalism (as already pointed out above), maintains that only those States that are territorially or physically in West Africa can ratify or accede. 142 See

Article 1 of the ECOWAS Revised Treaty of 1993, op. cit. Cit. 144 Loc. Cit.; Article 2, para 2. 145 See Article 62, para 2 of the 1975 ECOWAS Treaty, op. cit. 143 Loc.

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In fact, even before the Parties to the ECOWAS treaty’s definitive conception of regionalism in the 1993 revised treaty, the 1975 Lagos founding treaty had insisted that “the members of the Community, hereinafter referred to as “the Member States”, shall be the States that ratify this Treaty and such other West African States as may accede to it”.146 Contrary to any notion that may be harboured to the effect that the ECOWAS treaty has no accession clause, the true state of the law is that Articles 1, paragraph 2 and 62, paragraph 2 of the 1975 Lagos treaty actually had accession clauses. The 1993 revised treaty, though silent on accession, also maintains that “… the Member States” shall be the States that ratify this Treaty”.147 But since the 1993 revised treaty reaffirms the 1975 treaty, it is imperative that its Article 2, paragraph 2’s reaffirmation that the member states shall be the states that ratify this treaty also implicitly recognizes the exclusive limitation of accession (like Article 1, paragraph 2 of the 1975 treaty before it) to West African States. Even where a treaty does not possess the accession clause and there are countries aspiring for its membership; the right aperture or window for the admission of such aspiring members is usually with the consideration of the aims, goals and objectives of such a treaty. In the ECOWAS, for instance, the West African States of Mauritania and Chad are currently not members of the organization. But these countries can still be admitted on the basis of the accession clause in Articles 1, paragraph 2 and 62, paragraph 2 of the ECOWAS 1975 Lagos treaty; this is implicitly embedded in the 1993 revised Cotonou treaty because the latter not only reaffirmed the 1975 treaty, but as already argued above, its Article 2 (2)’s reaffirmation that the member states shall be the states that ratify this treaty also implicitly recognizes the exclusive limitation of accession (like Article 1, paragraph 2 of the 1975 treaty before it) to West African States. But even if hypothetically, the ECOWAS treaty were to be devoid of the accession clause, these West African countries of Mauritania and Chad (instead of Morocco) could still be admitted into the fold of the organization because (unlike Morocco) they are not only territorially or physically located in the West African sub-region, the aims, goals and objectives of the ECOWAS as an organization as stipulated in the preamble of the treaty (and alluded to earlier above) are favourable to them because they are to ensure sub-regional economic integration, cooperation and unity. But the issue of the lack of capacity to accede to the ECOWAS treaty is not the only handicap that Morocco is facing in its quest to be admitted into the organization. When Article 2 (1) of the ECOWAS 1975 founding Lagos treaty is juxtaposed with paragraph 13 of the preamble of the 1993 revised treaty as well as Article 3(1) of the latter—the revised treaty—being all concerned with the goals and aspirations of the ECOWAS in the advancement of Africa’s progress and development, it will obvious that the Kingdom of Morocco is ill-qualified to be a member of the organization. This is also true with Morocco’s position vis-à-vis the ECOWAS’ requirement that “member states undertake to take favourable conditions for the attainment of the objective of the Community, and particularly to take all necessary measures to 146 Ibid, 147 See

Article 1, para 2 of the 1975 ECOWAS Treaty. Article 2, para 2 of the ECOWAS revised 1993 treaty, op. cit.

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harmonize their strategies and policies, and refrain from any action that may hinder the attainment of the said objectives”.148 Allied to this provision is the ECOWAS requirement that “each Member State undertakes to honour its obligation under this treaty and to abide by the decisions and regulations of the Community”149 —a provision that is synonymous with the principle of Pacta Sunt Servanda aforementioned. If it is a fact that “Morocco has refused to ratify the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights,150 it becomes obvious that it is incapable of creating the condition for the ECOWAS’ attainment of its objectives on human rights, or allying/harmonizing its strategies and policies in such a manner that it would not hinder the ECOWAS’ attainment of its objectives in that sphere. The argument has also been made, and this is self-evident, that because Morocco is monarchical and dynastic, ruled now by King Mohammed VI, it will be viscerally incapable, as a member of the ECOWAS, of adopting the ECOWAS Protocol on Democracy and Good Governance, “which stipulates that accession to power must be made through free, fair and transparent elections”.151

8.7 The Incompatibility of Morocco with ECOWAS Security Architecture The ECOWAS and Morocco are incompatible as a security structure because of the geopolitical difference between them, the ECOWAS being in the West African subregion while Morocco is in the Arab Maghreb. To this extent, it is inconceivable that Morocco would ever be enthusiastic to put butts on the ground in West Africa in defence of existential security threats. Although as a state, Morocco can be described as appearing to have a moderate religious inclination, but it is obviously not in control of the multifarious non-state entities marauding in its territory, like the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), which when wedded to the Boko Haram by virtue of the ECOWAS free movement protocol may constitute a dire security issue for a country like Nigeria. The foregoing is part of the considerations for the cautious attitude of the ECOWAS Authority on the question of Morocco and other aspiring new members to the organization. But on December 16, 2017, the ECOWAS Summit that held in Abuja, Nigeria, decided as follows: 52. Regarding the applications received by ECOWAS from Morocco for membership, Tunisia for observer status and Mauritania for associate membership, Authority decides to set up a committee of Heads of State and Government comprising the Togolese Republic, Republic of Cote d’Ivoire, Republic of Ghana, Republic of Guinea and the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 148 See

Article 5 (General Undertakings) of the 1993 revised ECOWAS treaty, op. cit. Cit.; Article 5(3). 150 See Femi Falana in “It’s Illegal for Morocco to join ECOWAS”, ThisDay (Lagos), Friday, November 10, 2017, back page. 151 Loc. Cit. 149 Loc.

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to adopt the terms of reference and supervise a comprehensive study on the implications of the membership. 53. Authority notes that matters of accession to the ECOWAS Treaty and the granting of observer status to third countries should be preceded by the appropriate institutional framework, which constitutes the legal basis for such a decision. 54. In that respect, Authority instructs the President of the Commission to immediately commence the preparation of the appropriate Community act which will set out the decisionmaking process within the community, in accordance with Article 9 paragraphs 2, and 3 of the Revised ECOWAs Treaty.

The ECOWAS summit had, with the above Resolution, put the re-admission of Morocco on a hold until the legal niceties were taken care of; which was practically an indefinite decision. Before the ECOWAS summit aforementioned, the Nigerian foreign Minister had declared in September 2017 that it was the ECOWAS Heads of State that would determine in the December Summit the fate of Morocco in terms of its admission into the organization.152 A country like Nigeria that bears much of the brunt in ECOWAS’ sustenance, and which could put its foot on the ground to influence decisions and even wield the “veto” to forestall the unacceptable ones like the admission of Morocco into the ECOWAS, ought not to have indifferently abandoned the decision to the ECOWAS Summit where a democratic determination would prevail. International politics is governed by realpolitic, not democratic decisions—which explain why there is provision for the veto in the United Nations Security Council’s decisions on non-procedural or “all other matters”.153 The prevalence of realpolitic in international politics also informs the reluctance to expand the permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council or to even enlarge the veto where the expansion of the permanent membership of the Council possible.154 Nigeria was, therefore, not playing its diplomatic game very well in the proposed admission of Morocco into the ECOWAS. Even an organization of Nigeria’s retired diplomats—the Association of Retired Career Ambassadors of Nigeria (ARCAN)—had warned that the ECOWAS treaty should not be changed to admit Morocco because first (1), Morocco had political and economic objectives in which its membership of the ECOWAS would strengthen its hands in getting Western Sahara (SADR) out of the AU and, thus, frustrate the United Nations’ efforts to resolve the Western Sahara problems.155 The second (2) warning of ARCAN is that because Morocco had failed to be admitted into the European Economic Community (the EEC or EU), its admission into the ECOWAS would offer it a vast market for its “fairly well developed manufacturing sector in view of the fact that member countries have free movement of goods and services within the [ECOWAS] community”.156 But the question is this, is an 152 See

“ECOWAS Heads of State to determine Morocco’s fate in December, says Onyeama”, The Nation (Lagos), September 26, 2017, p. 41. 153 See Article 27, paras 2 and 3 of the United Nations Charter. 154 See Agwu (2013), Themes and Perspectives …, pp. 172–200, op. Cit. 155 See Anthony Maliki in “Don’t change ECOWAS treaty to admit Morocco—Ex-diplomats”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Sunday, June 18, 2017, p. 56. 156 Loc. cit.

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ECOWAS treaty amendment possible? The answer is yes, but this must be according to the provisions of the treaty on its amendment. But again, such an amendment must be weighed with realism (the aims and objective) of the ECOWAS treaty as well as some idealistic considerations. The realism consideration has to do with the legal provisions of the treaty as well as the aim and objectives in terms of socio-economic and political matters. In other words, the amendment of the ECOWAS treaty to admit Morocco must consider the realistic economic benefits as well as the idealistic consideration of the non-material benefits like the ECOWAS members taking their future into their own hands and not being dictated to by the comparatively more developed Morocco, a clear extra-regional country. Historically (particularly in terms of Nigeria’s Africa policy), Nigeria’s foreign policy has been sumptuously idealistic; that is, not primarily predicated on material or economic gains, but on the dignity of the black man everywhere in the world.157 Idealism is one of the basic assumptions of the post-World War 1Wilsonian liberal internationalism.158 It is the reasons for international organizations and alliances. It is also the reason why utterances in umbrage that Nigeria should leave the ECOWAS if Morocco is admitted are totally unacceptable. Nigeria exiting the ECOWAS is like infecting the West African sub-region with the Human-Immunodeficiency-Virus (HIV) and, thus, predisposing it to many opportunistic diseases like intractable conflicts and Morocco’s admission, with the country easily getting at Nigeria on Western Sahara, amongst others. Meanwhile, one of the reasons for the Kingdom of Morocco’s temerity to aspire to join the ECOWAS was the ease with which it rejoined the AU. After thirty-three (33) years of quitting the AU in 1984 in anger after the latter’s recognition of the sovereignty of Western Sahara, Morocco’s King Mohammed VI was cheered as he took the seat for the first time in the Addis Ababa headquarters of the AU on Tuesday, January 31, 2017; even without disavowing its claim of the phosphate-rich Western Sahara, culminating to 39 African countries approving of its comeback while only 10 countries expressed reservations.159 This was the same Morocco whose King Hassan II (after Moise Tshombe became appointed as Prime Minister following his return from his self-imposed exile in Spain, “totally denuded of the Katangese secessionist garb and now effectively adorned with the mantle of Congolese nationalism, unity and independence”160 ) flatly refused, during the first Ordinary Session of Heads of State and Governments of the OAU in Cairo, Egypt on July 17, 1964, to accede to Prime Minister Tshombe’s government’s admission into the OAU, reportedly arguing “that he could not sit at the same table

157 See

Agwu (2013), Themes and Perspectives …, pp. 509–513, op. Cit. Agwu (2009), National Interest, International Law …, pp. 97–99, op. Cit. 159 See “Morocco rejoins African Union”, Vanguard (Lagos), February 1, 2017, p. 44. 160 See Nnabuchi Nwodo in “The Role of International Law and Politics in the Congo Civil War of 1964 with Special Emphasis on the Roles of the Organization of African Unity and the United Nations”, being the Text of a paper presented at the annual conference of the Nigerian Society of International Law at Jos on 2nd of April, 1987, p. 6 (unpublished). 158 See

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with the murderer of Patrice Lumumba”.161 This Moroccan position was quickly adopted by Ghana, Algeria, Guinea and Mali, etc.; culminating in the triumph of the repudiation of the Tshombe government over and above the Nigeria-Malagasy objection.162

8.8 Resisting the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) When the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Belgium to Nigeria, Stephane De Loecker, was pleading the European cause in the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) and urging Nigeria to ratify it in order not to make “a historic mistake”, he did, perhaps, inadvertently, concede (with respect to his country, Belgium) the fact that Belgium is “a country that benefitted so much from opening its economy to international trade while improving its own competitiveness”.163 But while advising “Nigeria not to isolate itself from important market opportunities, both on the import and on the export side”,164 the ambassador, perhaps, deliberating failing to understand that Nigeria was not on the same pedestal with Belgium in this theater of the globalizing world; that unlike Belgium, Nigeria is in no way “improving its own competitiveness”, being chronically incapable of adding values to the primary commodities it mainly exports because of the collapse of infrastructure and industrial cum productive activities in the country. Like Nigeria, this is why for many African countries, despite all the economic and trade agreements with the European Union as a result of globalization, and owing largely to the lack of infrastructure and institutional capacity, they have not made the most of it because of either the problem of the rule of origin, or the cognate problem arising from phytosanitary measure.165 Many African countries, including Ghana, Rwanda, Cameroun, Mauritania and the Southern African countries have signed the EPA.166 Of all “the sixteen ECOWAS member countries, twelve have ratified the agreement, except Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia”, triggering a threat by the EU “to terminate the temporary free market access it granted Nigeria and other ECOWAS member states to export their products to the Union” after October 2016; and some interest groups in Nigeria urging the EU not to stampede the country into signing, and to locate manufacturing

161 Ibid,

p. 10. Cit. 163 See the Ambassador’s interview with Onome Amawhe entitled “Belgium-Nigerian relations have intensified”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, August 1, 2016, p. 35. 164 Loc. Cit. 165 See Vinod Rege (2011); Negotiating at the World Trade Organization: Lessons from the Commonwealth 2, London, Commonwealth Secretariat, pp. 16–17, 170–171, 173, 211. 166 See Okwy Iroegbu-Chikezie in “EU intensifies push for Nigeria to endorse EPA deal”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, June 28, 2016, p. 7. 162 Loc.

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plants in ECOWAS.167 Of course, manufacturing in West Africa will enable these countries to add value to their top ten exported primary products—“oil and gas, cocoa preparations, oil seeds, skins and leather, rubber, copper, fish and crustaceans, including wood and wood charcoal”.168 It was no surprise that the Gambia had not signed. Despite the controversial manner with which he exited office/power after losing an election to Adama Barrow, former President Yayaha Jammeh of the Gambia was a leader with established antiimperialism credentials.169 But Nigeria remained very reluctant to sign the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the EU because of this lack of infrastructure and institutional capacity to add value to its exports to EU markets.170 Consequently, Nigeria was “loosing so much by the rejection of [its] beans and other export products to the EU because of the presence of a pesticide known as dichlorvos, which [by EU standard was considered] harmful to health”.171 Meanwhile, it is estimated that “more than 70% of beans exported to the EU from Nigeria contained pesticide”.172 Meanwhile, Nigeria and many African countries have been estimated by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to be yearly losing about $23b to product (non-oil exports) rejection by the EU.173 Imperialism in the globalized world has a way of giving with its right hand and simultaneously retrieving what was given with the left hand. This is because whereas the numerous trade organizations that exist at the moment advocate a decline in tariffs in order to ease trade flows (the so-called free trade174 ), non-tariff or phytosanitary measures are introduced by most Western governments to replace the tariff measures, thus, constituting a new barrier to trade.175 It is part of their back door or surreptitious protectionist strategy that presumably secures the health of consumers as well as their thriving local industries.176 Indeed, because of Nigeria’s peculiar domestic contradictions, it suffers more rejection rate, reportedly trailing far behind countries like Zambia, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa; for in the number of rejections “in major foreign markets between 2012 and 2013, … Benin Republic had two; Egypt

167 See

Franklin Alli & Naomi Uzor in “EU threatens to stop market access for Nigerian products over EPA: Do not stampede us into signing—MAN; Locate manufacturing plants in ECOWAS— NACCIMA”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, October 17, 2016, p. 19. 168 Loc. Cit. 169 See Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 88, 90, 94–95, op. cit. 170 See Okwy Iroegbu-Chikezie in “EU intensifies push for Nigeria to endorse EPA deal”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, June 28, 2016, p. 7, op. cit. 171 Loc. Cit. 172 Loc. Cit. 173 See Femi Adekoya and Kingsley Jeremiah in “Nigeria, others lose $23b yearly to products rejection by EU”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, July 22, 2016, p. 1. 174 So-called because it is not entirely free and mutually beneficial; see Agwu (2016), Nations Among Nations …, pp. 429–437, op. cit. 175 See Femi Adekoya and Kingsley Jeremiah in “Nigeria, others lose $23b yearly to products rejection by EU”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, July 22, 2016, p. 1, op. cit. 176 Ibid, pp. 1, 6.

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had 95; Ethiopia three; Zambia five; and South Africa 56, while Nigeria recorded 102” rejections.177 The implication of this is that there is no way that Nigeria can make the most of the EPA because its problems are aggravated by infrastructural and institutional deficiencies; and this is definitely without prejudice to the fact that the EU had reportedly “shown goodwill with the release of 12 million euro to support the enhancement of the National Quality Infrastructure, to improve quality, safety, integrity and marketability of Nigerian goods and services”.178 By the time this money goes round all the beneficiary countries and be feasted upon by the administrators (including the Non-Governmental Organizations, NGOs, with their huge service charges), not much would be left for the execution of the substantive infrastructural projects the money was earmarked for. Now, saddled with a “humongous bureaucracy”, it has been estimated that “Nigeria requires about $20bn annually to build infrastructure”, to close its huge infrastructural gap.179 This is an infrastructural gap so huge that MultiChoice, a South African company operating in Nigeria, to the embarrassment and chagrin of the Nigerian government, had to Choose its home country (South Africa) as a location to shoot it re-launched programme, Big Brother Naija, in South Africa.180 Ironically, this was a programme with a Nigerian audience that was being shot outside the country; but the supporters of MultiChoice’s action cited “the darkness we find ourselves in Nigeria” while MultiChoice itself argued that shooting the programme outside Nigeria would enable it achieve high quality production181 —all the alibi boiling down to the absence of the relevant infrastructure in Nigeria. Talking about the inherent distortion that might attend the disbursement of the EU’s 12 million euro support for infrastructure, it will be recalled once again, although already stated earlier in this book, that when the Western coalition that invaded and rid Afghanistan of the Taliban released some aid for that country, the NGOs practically “descended” on the Afghanistan capital, Kabul, and skimmed off the entire foreign aid meant for the post-war reconstruction of that country,182 leaving the country still in abysmal infrastructural deficiency. 177 Ibid,

p. 6. Okwy Iroegbu-Chikezie in “EU intensifies push for Nigeria to endorse EPA deal”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, June 28, 2016, p. 7, op. cit. 179 See Niyi Odebode, Olalekan Adetayo and Tunji Abioye in “Buhari’s govt. refusing to change wrong policies—Ezekwesili”, The Punch (Lagos), Wednesday, January 25, 2017, p. 10. 180 See Mike Ebonugwo, Prince Osuagwu, Emmanuel Elebeke, Princewill Ekwujuru & Favour Ulebor in “FG probes shooting of Big Brother Naija in S-Africa: Mixed reactions trail probe; It’ll enable us achieve high production—MultiChoice”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, January 25, 2017, p. 3; see also “Big Brother Nigeria”, The Punch (Lagos), Wednesday, January 25, 2017, p. 9. 181 See Mike Ebonugwo, Prince Osuagwu, Emmanuel Elebeke, Princewill Ekwujuru & Favour Ulebor in “FG probes shooting of Big Brother Naija in S-Africa: Mixed reactions trail probe; It’ll enable us achieve high production—MultiChoice”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, January 25, 2017, ibid, p. 3. 182 These NGOs and the representatives of the U.S. government poured into the country with their private jets in pursuit of their own agendas, deploying much of the aid money into the service of bureaucrats (“to chauffeur and chaperone them around, paying them multiples of … salaries”), including “to commission an airline to shuttle around UN and other international officials” whereas 178 See

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And without seeming to digress here, it must be reinstated (as has already been done above in this book) that the use of NGOs to disburse the aid meant for reconstruction in Afghanistan highlighted the extent to which the war on terror since 9/11, according to Woods, had “magnified and exacerbated” the challenges associated with foreign aid, making it clear that first, (at the level of the goals of the aid) donors “hijack foreign aid to pursue their own security objectives rather than those which would help the poorest”; second (in terms of money), that the cost of the budget for the war on terror had begun to gobble up the aid budget; and third (in terms of aid delivery), that the major donors had begun failing to coordinate aid through existing multilateral institutions, choosing instead to create their own new mechanisms, the NGOs under reference, and to pursue their own priorities.183 So, the 12 million euro under reference here is simply abysmally insufficient for Nigeria’s enormous infrastructural and institutional challenges, especially when Nigeria’s Finance Minister, Kemi Adeosun, revealed in July 2016 that the country required a yearly (“over the next several years”) capital investment of about #7.325 trillion to close its infrastructure gap.184 It is, therefore, clear that globalization has a mixed reputation; for in every benefit of globalization, there is always a polluting effect, the reverse or obverse side of it. In fact, the Belgian ambassador to Nigeria, Stephane De Loecker, did acknowledge that “globalization comes with challenges and opportunities”; that “this has not always been easy as Belgium was often a battlefield for the world most cruel wars” and “the process of integration has not always been easy … [because of] the fight against all forms of discrimination and extremism … [on] a daily basis.185 Belgium is not alone in dealing with the cosmopolitanism and cultural tension, discrimination and extremism created by globalization. In France (especially in the wake of the Nice attack in which a terrorist “truck mowed down a crowd during Bastille Day celebration on July 14, 2016”, killing at least 84 people186 ), this globalization-generated cosmopolitan and intra-community tension was seen when the Mayor of Corsica banned in the swimming area, the Muslims’ full-body swimsuits known as “burkinis”, thus, leading to the flared tension igniting a brawl at the beach in which dangerous weapons were freely used, causing bodily injuries to about five people.187 The Corsica beach incident was a quintessential clash of culture between the “local communities and Muslims of North African origin in the South of

the public infrastructure (schools and other public services for the development of democratic and inclusive institutions necessary for the restoration of law and order) in Afghanistan remained in tatters; see Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2012); Why Nations Fail …, p. 451, op. cit. 183 See Ngaire Woods (2005), “The shifting politics of foreign aid”, p. 393, op. cit. 184 See Anthony Otaru in “Nigeria needs #7.325tr to bridge infrastructure shortfall yearly”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, July 22, 2016, p. 4. 185 See the Ambassador’s interview with Onome Amawhe entitled “Belgium-Nigerian relations have intensified”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, August 1, 2016, p. 35, op. cit. Parentheses mine. 186 See Alberto Estevez in “Bastille Day Bedlam”, Newsweek, August 5 (08/05/2016), 2016, pp. 4–5. 187 See “Burkini ban follows Corsica beach brawl”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Tuesday, August 16, 2016, p. 22.

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France”,188 a mix of culture that was occasioned by globalization and the attendant migration. This is part of the crises of globalization that is found in many countries of the world, and which has made many societies to become resistant to globalization, especially the implicit migration. However, the Belgian ambassador did confess that the Belgians attach much importance to integration despite the challenges because “we understand the importance of integration and good relations …”189 Again, at the level of the importance and challenges of globalization, its enhancement or reduction in the costs of transportation and communication comes with the easy spread of epidemics and diseases that never respects borders; its breaking down of boundaries for easy trade and movement of peoples, no matter how limited the human movements may be, has resulted in anxieties over the preservation of culture and food safety, especially with respect to the genetically modified foods, amongst other serious concern that globalization has created, even forcing the United States itself to move against economic globalization by seeking to restrict free trade with, for instance, its “bioterrorism law that imposes registration and record keeping requirements on those wishing to export goods to the United States”.190

References Agwu, F. A. (2009). National interest, international law and our shared destiny. Ibadan: Spectrum Books Limited. Agwu, F. A. (2013). Themes and perspectives on Africa’s international relations. Ibadan: University Press Plc. Agwu, F. A. (2016). Nations among nations: Uneven statehood, hegemony and instrumentalism in international relations. Ibadan: HEBN Publishers Plc. Boczek, B. A., & Bledsoe, R. L. (1987). The International Law Dictionary. Santa Barbara: ABCCLIO. Harris, D. J. (1998). Cases and materials on international law (5th ed.). London: Sweet & Maxwell. Stiglitz, J. E., & Work, M. G. (2006). Making globalization work. London: Penguin Books. Toga, D., Boukhars, A., & Ukeje, C. (2018). State of peace and security in Africa 2019. TANA Forum Report, Addis Ababa, Institute of Peace and Security Studies (IPSS).

188 Loc.

Cit. the Ambassador’s interview with Onome Amawhe entitled “Belgium-Nigerian relations have intensified”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, August 1, 2016, p. 35, op. cit. 190 In addition to the bioterrorism law that imposes this registration and the keeping of records (which though Washington claimed are not onerous, foreign firms claim they are and, indeed, “an added cost to selling to the United States”), the United States also, in arguing for trade restrictions in order to enhance its national security, “subsidizes oil and does not allow foreign ships to transport goods within its borders; argues for “secondary boycotts”; does “not allow its firms to sell products that might be of military use to China” and “puts enormous pressure on Europe to follow suit”. In addition, the United States also, before the normalization of relations with Cuba under President Barack Obama, enacted the “Helms-Burton Act of 1996 [imposing] sanctions against foreign firms that trade with Cuba; see Stiglitz (2006, pp. 280, 289). 189 See

Chapter 9

COVID-19 and the Contradictions of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism

9.1 COVID-19 and the Creative Destructiveness of Globalization It was by virtue of the way that globalization had made the world interconnected that the outbreak of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID- 19) spread across the whole world.1 It is this interconnectedness that Joseph Schumpeter described as the “creative destruction” of globalization”.2 And it is in this same “creative destruction” of globalization that the COVID-19 pandemic “made it clear that problems at local and regional levels are rapidly gaining global dimensions” because having first occurred in China, it turned into a global disaster that spread across the whole world.3 In terms of fear, globalization and COVID-19 have created a ‘new normal’ in the world. Just like Joseph Schumpeter aforementioned, another geopolitical analyst— Marc Lipsitch (in the case of COVID-19)—believed that even if a vaccine was

1 See Patricia Gell in “Preparing for the Coronavirus and other epidemics in Africa”, Africa in Focus,

February 28, 2020, available at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2020/02/28/pre paring-for-the-coronavirus-and-other-epidemics-in-africa/?utm-campaign=Brookings%20Brief& utm-source=hs-email&utm-medium=email&utm-content=84075934 (last visited on March 2, 2020). 2 See Dash et al. (2003); Introduction, in C. Roe Goddard, Patrick Cronin, Dash (2003, ed.); International Political Economy …, p. 2, op. Cit. 3 See Kaan Devecioglu in “Analysis – COVID-19 pandemic: Great danger awaits Africa”, aa.com, March 2, 2020, available at https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/analysis-covid-19-pandemic-great-dan ger-awaits-africa/1789840 (last visited on March 3, 2020). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0_9

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found or herd immunity attained (after many had been infected, cured and or inherently bestowed with immunity4 ), the consequences of the virus would still be with humanity for a very long time in different socio-economic and political forms.5 The socio-economic consequences of the virus are a reminder that life would never go back to normal after COVID-19 because being the fourth geopolitical shock in many decades (beginning with the end of the Cold War that allegedly brought the American hegemony; the 9/11 attacks that was widely seen as the effective end of the twentieth century, even though belied by the fact that the United States is still fighting in the Middle East, leading to the revolutionalization of warfare with the arming of the drones; and the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 that was underestimated but which amongst other consequences led to the unfolding of nationalist and populist tendencies that brought about Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in the United States), the novel coronavirus has actually created a ‘new normal’ after stretching the international order to its breaking point in which the consideration of livelihood overrode that of life. This consideration of livelihood over life was what underlined the opening up of countries after extensive lockdowns because of economic considerations. The inability of life to go back to normal after the COVID-19 pandemic’s orchestration of the dilemma between life and livelihood also reminds humanity about the “creative destruction” or the good and the bad of globalization . Globalization and the COVID-19 all exemplify dialectical contradictions (the struggle and unity of opposites) because the two phenomena embody on the part of the virus, the severe public health crisis and the neoliberal economic changes that were unavoidable6 ; and on the part of globalization, the inevitability of globalization’s pursuit, and the inevitability of its reform. Contrary to the persuasion of metaphysicians that formal logical contradictions are only the impermissible inconsistencies or wrongness that exist only in human thoughts (statements and actions), and that contradictions cannot be found in nature or the society, increased globalization and the outbreak of COVID-19 have typically embodied dialectical contradictions (a scientific truth in nature) of the unity and struggle of opposites—a dialectical contradiction that also exists in scientific realities like the atom, which possesses both positive and negative characteristics.7 With the COVID-19, there is an evident presence of the two opposing aspects (the positive and the negative of globalization and neoliberalism) of dialectical contradictions. These are not logical contradictions but contradictions belonging to realities 4 See

Marc Lipsitch in “Who is Immune to the Coronavirus?”, The New York Times, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/opinion/coronavirus-immunity.html (last visited on Tuesday, April 14, 2020); see also “Herd Immunity” in Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Herd-immunity (last visited on Tuesday, April 14, 2020). 5 See Thomas Wright in “Order from Chaos: Stretching the international order to its breaking point”, Brookings, Monday, April 6, 2020, available at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/orderfrom-chaos/2020/04/06/stretching-the-international-order-to-its-breaking-point/?utm-campaign= Foreign%20Policy&utm-source=hs (last visited on Thursday, April 9, 2020). 6 Loc. Cit. 7 See Yakhot and Spirkin (1971); The Basic Principles of Dialectical and Historical Materialism …, pp. 54–57, op. cit.

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themselves—that is, contradictions of the unity and struggle of opposites in which one cannot get away from the other, a relationship between opposites where the opposites appear as two sides of the contradiction.8 As explained by Spirkin and Yakhot, in formal logical contradictions, opposites are mutually exclusive, but in a dialectical contradiction (as the COVID-19 has shown in globalization and neoliberalism), opposites are mutually inclusive because their apparently mutually opposing positive and negative processes or aspects exist together; just as in man and animals, “two opposite processes are both going on within their bodies at the same time—cells that are both growing and dying away (in mutation and heredity that make stereotyping impossible in nature9 ); and in this context, which is not a logical contradiction, if one of these processes ceases, the living organism dies.10 As can be deduced from Spirkin and Yakhot’s analogies, the dialectical contradictions or opposites (the positives and negatives) that exist in globalization and neoliberalism as forms of natural realities are not separated from one another as there is always some relationship between them.11 This is because “each can be comprehended only in its relation to the other” just as “mechanical action and counteraction can exist only in conjuction with one another—[as in] when you apply a force in giving a boat a push, you are yourself pushed in return by an equal force”.12 It was because of this unity and struggle of opposites in globalization that the COVID19 development in Wuhan (China) witnessed the negative effect of being dispersed around the whole world. And it was also because of these negative dynamics of globalization that there was a problem in acquiring a global cooperation to find a solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly since the negative nationalism of the Chinese in their coverups, the repression of its medical doctors/whistle-blowers, the stone-walling of its citizens, the false figures of the dead in Wuhan that was later upwardly reviewed by 50 percent,13 the ramping up of propaganda in crave of public relations; and the Chinese other problems were also followed by President Trump’s nationalism and nativism in making “America Great Again” and attacking multilateral institutions like the World Health Organization (WHO), which he threatened to defund because of its alleged China sympathy or centrism.14 It was in this sense that Trumpism and 8 Ibid,

pp. 56, 57. p. 59. 10 Ibid, p. 56. 11 Ibid, p. 57. 12 Loc. cit. Parenthesis mine. 13 See “China’s post-covid propaganda push”, The Economist online, April 16th 2020, available at https://www.economist.com/china/2020/04/16/chinas-post-covid-propaganda-push?utmcampaign=the-economist-today&utm (last visited on Saturday, April 18, 2020); see also Rachael Rettner in “China increases Wuhan’s COVID-19 death toll by 50%”Livescience, available at https:// www.livescience.com/wuhan-coronavirus-death-toll-revised.html (last visited on Saturday, April 18, 2020). 14 See Noah Higgins-Dunn and Kevin Breuninger in “Trump escalates tension with World Health Organization over coronavirus pandemic, repeats threat to withhold funding”, CNBC Africa, April 8, 9 Ibid,

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COVID-19 in particular made the year 2020 “the perfect annus horribilis” because “it is not a year on which we shall look back with undiluted pleasure”.15 As President Trump battled the WHO for its assumed slow actions and Chinacentrism (amidst fears that his own response to COVID-19 might fracture the possibility of his re-election), he proceeded to cut the WHO’s funding despite the pandemic.16 Unfortunately, as the COVID-19 pandemic was still raging unrelentlessly, President Trump, on Tuesday, June 7, 2020, notified the US Congress about his decision to pull the US out of the world health body, having earlier on July 6, 2020 formally submitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the notice of the United States’ withdrawal from the WHO, effective from July 6, 2021.17 So, effective from July 6, 2021, the United States ceased to be a member of the WHO. This was ostensibly detonative of how President Trump’s populism and nativistic nationalism had made him exceedingly hostile to multilateral institution, having started the withdrawal of the United States from a global health institution at a time that COVID-19 was raging and the United States had surpassed over 130,000 deaths from the pandemic.18 But despite the foregoing, globalization also had its positive adherents that insisted that the only way to solve the pandemic was through an internationally-coordinated multilateral action, as advocated in a media release by a group of 165 past and present global leaders that argued for the G20 executive task force that would radically rethink global public health institutions and pursue the invention of the vaccine and a massive support for the poverty-stricken developing countries.19 This multilateral approach was supported by the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (Gordon Brown), 2020, available at https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/08/trump-escalates-tension-with-world-healthorganization-over-coronavirus-pandemic-repeats-threat-to-withold-funding.html (last visited on Thursday, April 9, 2020); see also “Coronavirus: Trump attacks ‘China-centric’ WHO over global pandemic”, BBC News, April 8, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada52213439 (last visited on Monday, April 13, 2020), and “Trump accuses WHO of ‘China bias’, threatens to withhold funds”, The Week, April 8, 2020, available at https://www.theweek.in/news/ world/2020/04/08/trump-accuses-who-of-china-bias-threatens-to-withhold-funds.html (last visited on Monday, April 13, 2020). 15 See Reuben Abati in “2020: The Year That Was”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, December 29, 2020, back page. 16 See Kate Mayberry and Usaid Siddigui in “Trump cuts WHO funding over coronavirus: Live updates”, Aljazeera, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/trump-cuts-funding-cor onavirus-pandemic-live-updates-200414231400449.html (last visited on Wednesday, April 15, 2020). 17 See “US begins formal withdrawal from WHO”, Nigerian Tribune (Ibadan), Wednesday, July 8, 2020, p. 3, see also Pien Huang in “Trump sets date to end WHO membership over its handling of virus”, npr.org, July 7, 2020, available at https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/07/ 07/888186158/trump-sets-date-to-end-who-membership-over-its-handling-of-virus (last visited on July 8, 2020). 18 Loc. Cit. 19 See “Global leaders issue G20 call to action to coordinate world response to COVID-19”, CNBC Africa, April 8, 2020, available at https://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/2020/04/08/global-lea ders-issue-g20-call-to-action-to-co-ordinate-world-response-to-covid-19/ (last visited on Thursday, April 9, 2020).

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who canvassed a COVID-19 cooperation that, in addition to the G20, would genuinely involve the multilateralsm of the G7 and the United Nations Security Council acting honestly and productively to bring about an international solution to the pandemic.20 It was also by dint of the dialectical contradiction in the unity and struggle of opposites (the positives and the negatives of neoliberalism) that many states positively utilized their leviathan status and neoliberal powers to enforce the physical or social distancing; but on the negative side, their laissez faire principles were wholly and brutally consumed in their massive interventions when their private sectors faltered in the grip of COVID-19. It is also obvious that it was because of the neoliberal practice of outsourcing that the healthcare systems of the United States and many other developed capitalist countries were overwhelmed by the scarcity of the medical equipment to control the COVID-1921 —a situation that also obtained in the midst of the gutting of the private sectors that forced these governments to intervene to save their various economies amid fears of recession; and this was in total negation of the ethos of capitalism that they were sworn to. Regarding globalization and the neoliberal practice of outsourcing, little doubt also existed that the incidence of COVID-19 would be an assault on globalization because of multiple sources that ranged from the financial crisis, the US-China competitions, to the climate change activists that would be pushing for people to buy local.22 Because of the healthcare crisis that related to the scarcity of the equipment to deal with COVID-19, there were also fears that globalization could be restricted because “countries would be wary of outsourcing crucial medical supplies and pharmaceuticals to other countries.23 This could also result, in addition, to the disruption of supply chains that would be hard to repair, and governments prioritizing the domestic industries and playing much larger roles in the economy for purposes of rebuilding the national economies instead of building the global economy.24 As the COVID-19 affects migration, it still remains obvious that “in the coming years, the coronavirus outbreak may be remembered as a milestone moment on the road toward the end of the first phase of globalization”.25 This is because, over the past few decades when globalization was at its zenith, markets had opened, 20 See Larry Elliott in “Gordon Brown calls for global government to tackle coronavirus”, The Guardian (London), March 26, 2020, available at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/ 26/gordon-brown-calls-for-global-government-to-tackle-coronavirus (last visited on Monday, April 13, 2020). 21 See Kayode Oyero in “Our hospitals are stretched, US tells citizens leaving Nigeria”, Punchonline, available at https://punchng.com/our-hospitals-are-stretched-us-tells-citizens-leaving-nigeria/ (last visited on Tuesday, April 7, 2020). 22 See Thomas Wright in “Order from Chaos: Stretching the international order to its breaking point”, Brookings, Monday, April 6, 2020, available at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/orderfrom-chaos/2020/04/06/stretching-the-international-order-to-its-breaking-point/?utm-campaign= Foreign%20Policy&utm-source=hs (last visited on Thursday, April 9, 2020), op. Cit.. 23 Loc. Cit. 24 Loc. Cit. 25 See Ian Bremmer in “The coronavirus’ blow to globalization”, Time (New York), March 16–23, 2020, p. 19.

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supply chains had gone global, the middle classes had emerged, and new connections had been made.26 But with the contradictions that globalization later developed in such backdoor protectionism-inducing deglobalization factors as climate change and populism27 and now the outbreak of the novel coronavirus constitutes—there is currently “a backlash against the increasingly free flow of information, ideas, money, jobs,”; and people have now created extraordinary political pressures that have resulted in “tightened immigration rules, new barriers to trade and investment, a shortening of supply chains, a technological decoupling and a new emphasis on country-first politics”,28 the sort that the United States’ President Trump latched on to “Make America Great”. Inevitably, and in addition to the widespread practice of lessening high social density (gatherings) through the physical or social distancing that the coronavirus imposed, many countries across the globe used it as an excuse to limit human movements and invariably trade barriers.29 As soon as the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pandemic occurred, the “populist right” (especially in North America and Europe) tried to blame open borders for the spread of the disease.30 In the United States, particularly with President Trump’s fixation with the United Kingdom’s Shengeninsularity in Europe as well as his disdain for the Shengen visa itself (which the United Kingdom had opted out from even before Brexit—a visa system that liberally admitted migrants from all over the world), the American President unilaterally (without any consultation) banned all travels from the 26 EU countries for thirty (30) days, accusing the EU of spreading the coronavirus in the United States by not imposing sufficient travel restrictions on China and elsewhere.31 The US President changed his mind later with respect to the UK by including the latter as well as Ireland to the 30-day travel ban—effective midnight of Monday,

26 See Larry Elliott in “Of Course there’s a globalisation backlash; it has failed billions of people”, The Guardian on line, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentsfree/2020/feb/13/global isation-backlash-open-markets-borders-climate-populism-coronavirus (last visited on March 14, 2020). 27 Loc. cit. 28 See Ian Bremmer in “The coronavirus’ blow to globalization”, Time (New York), March 16–23, 2020, p. 19, op. cit. 29 See Larry Elliott in “Of Course there’s a globalisation backlash; it has failed billions of people”, The Guardian on line, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentsfree/2020/feb/13/global isation-backlash-open-markets-borders-climate-populism-coronavirus (last visited on March 14, 2020), op. cit. 30 Fareed Zakaria in his GPS on CNN, monitored in Lagos on Sunday, March, 8, 2020, between 8 and 9 pm local time; it is also available on youtube at https://youtu.be/GEcVFUXPbMI (last visited on March 10, 2020). 31 See “Europe in chaos as Trump restricts travel from 26 countries”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 13, 2020, p. 39; see alsoErnest Ohene in “Donald Trump bans all travel from Europe to US for 30 days, excluding UK in fear coronavirus spread”, pinaxonline, available on https://pinaxonline.com/donald-trump-bans-all-travel-from-europe-to-us-for-30-days-exc luding-uk-in-fear-coronavirus-spread/ (last visited on Thursday, March 12, 2020).

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March 16, 2020.32 Only American citizens and permanent residents were to be allowed to return to the US; even though they were to be “funneled” through selected US airports.33 Many other countries like Germany, Canada, Spain, amongst others, followed suit in shutting their borders to foreigners.34 After the confirmation of the coronavirus in at least 30 of Africa’s 54 countries, some African nations like Algeria began to cut off air and sea contacts with European countries that, after the spread of the coronavirus subsided in China, became the new epicenter of the virus.35 Even Nigeria had to extend a travel caution and later banned travel from very high-risk fourteen (14) countries like Germany, France, Spain, China, Japan, Iran, Italy, and the Republic of Korea.36 Norway, Switzerland, and Netherlands were also included in the travel ban; in addition to Nigeria’s suspension of its visa on arrival policy for African countries passport holders.37 This migration crisis is the tragedy that has become a part of the fear of globalization today. The restriction in global travels also restricted the export of healthcare facilities, including the COVID-19 vaccines, in many countries.38 The restriction in global travels slowed down the production of COVID-19 vaccines by the manufacturing companies because in a meeting that either the WTO or the Global Vaccine Alliance (GAVI) held with the COVID-19 manufacturers in Geneva, the representatives of the Pfizer BioNtech COVID-19 manufacturers disclosed that “it takes 280 components to manufacture their vaccine.39 And it is in a supply chain that involves 19 countries.40 Thus, because the supply chains of the COVID-19 vaccines are global, the export restrictions that arose from the pandemic meant a slow production and even distribution of the vaccines, including the export of other medical supplies and equipment.41 And because “trade is very instrumental in access to medical supplies and equipment”, the WTO under Dr, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala professed its commitment to make its member countries abide by the 32 See Demola Ojo in “Coronavirus: Trump calls on God, declares day of prayer, adds UK to travel ban”, ThisDay (Lagos), Sunday, March 15, 2020, p. 5. 33 Loc. Cit. 34 See “Germany, Canada, Spain, others shut borders to foreigners”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, March 17, 2020, p. 42. 35 See “African nations impose restrictions”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, March 17, 2020, p. 42. 36 See Onyebuchi Ezigbo in “FG extends travel caution to Germany, France, Spain”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, March 17, 2020, p. 5. 37 See Henry Umoru, Chioma Obinna, Olasunkanmi Akoni, Levinus Nwabughiogu, Omeiza Ajayi, Joseph Erunke, Luminous Jannamike and Shehu Danjuma in “Coronavirus: Lagos, Ogun going into lock-down: … As FG bans travel from 14 countries, suspends visas”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, March 19, 2020, pp. 1, 5, 9, 39, 40.; see also Azimazi Momoh Jimoh, Nkechi Onyedika-Ugoeze, John Akubo, Gbenga Salau, Ibe Wada, Olumide Ologbosere, Murtala Adewale and Danjuma Michael in “Govt searches for contacts of five new coronavirus suspects: Restricts travel from US, UK, France, others, cancels visa …”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, March 19, 2020, pp. 1, 4, 16, 42 and 43. 38 See Omeiza Ajayi in “COVID-19: Export restrictions hampering vaccine production, WTO DG tells PTF”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, March 17, 2021, p. 38. 39 Loc. Cit. 40 Loc. Cit. 41 Loc. Cit.

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organization’s rules and unblock their exports and restrictions to medical supplies and equipment.42 These are some of the fundamental crises that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the international system, making it difficult to make the vaccines and other medical supplies and equipment accessible, particularly by the poor nations and unprivileged individuals and groups.

9.2 COVID-19 and the Unraveling of Sino-africa Relations In the light of African countries’ concentration of much of their resources on the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the basic ways that the pandemic had unraveled the Sino-Africa relations was in the fact of its warranting a call for the cancellation of African debts, especially those debts that were connected with the Belt and Road projects.43 The purpose of this call for a debt cancellation was to enable the African countries meet up with globally acclaimed expectations on the “war” against the virus. But as shown in many African countries like Zambia where Beijing had taken over some of their critical infrastructure, China is very hard in debt cancellation. However, in the absence of the cancellation of the debts, the minimum that was expected from China was either the removal of the interests in the loans or a total moratorium on the repayment of the BRI loans.44 However, on Wednesday, June 17, 2020, after a virtual (through zoom or video link) extraordinary China-Africa summit in Beijing on solidarity against COVID-19 that was presided over by President Xi, China merely promised to exempt some African countries from repaying the zero-interest-rate loans because of the end of 2020–in fact, to further extend the loan repayment forbearance (deferment) for some countries, including African countries, once the COVID-19 vaccines are ready for use.45 Apart from the further reinforcement of Africa’s dependency on the emergent China with the establishment of the Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention that is headquartered in Addis Ababa,46 the loan forbearance was the only priority 42 Loc.

Cit. “China faces waves of calls for debt relief on ‘Belt and Road’ projects”, Financial Times, available at https://www.ft.com/content/5a3192be-27c6-4fe7-78d4158bd39b (last visited on May 1, 2020). 44 Loc. Cit. 45 See Vanguard news in “China to exempt some African countries from repaying zero-interest loans”, Vanguardngr.com, June 18, 2020, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/06/chinato-exempt-some-african-countries-from-repaying-zero-interest-loans/amp/ (last visited on June 18, 2020). 46 The opening of the Africa CDC was officiated by the African Union Commissioner for Social Affairs, H E, Amira Elfadi Mohammed Elfadi; see “AU commends China for continued support to building Africa’s capacity of disease control, prevention”, Xinhua, July 29, 2020, available at http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/africa/2020-07/29/c-139249467.htm (last visited on July 31, 2020); see also Peter Fabricius in “Ethiopia: Nation urged to stop China building Africa Disease Control Center HQ in Addis Ababa”, allafrica.com, June 9, 2020, available at https://allafrica.com/ stories/202006090127.html (lase visited on July 31, 2020). 43 See

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that China wanted to give to African countries in respect of COVID-19 and the vaccines’ use.47 This was also happening within the context of China’s over-dependence on African resources through the African Safari—the commoditization of Africa in China’s reliance on Africa as chiefly a source of raw materials. But even though the African Safari was attached to the BRI that saddles Africa with enormous loans, this African Safari began suffering some setbacks when in some countries like Kenya, an appellant court passed a judgment against the USD 3.2 billion Standard Gauge Railway (between the port city of Mombasa to the capital, Nairobi), which the court considered (that is, the project/contract) to be too expensive, illegal and debt-laden.48 This was happening at the time that Nigerians had begun to fret over the terms of the Chinese loans, especially the perception that the Nigerian government was mortgaging the country’s sovereignty to China. The debt situation was such that if Kenya failed to repay the huge loans that were advanced by the Chinese lenders, then it would risk losing the lucrative Mombasa port.49 And losing the Mombasa port would in essence be akin to losing the sovereignty of Kenya because Mombasa is not just the gateway into Kenya, it also borders Kenya’s landlocked neighbouring countries of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda.50 It was for these and other critical reasons that the loans that were granted to develop the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) project were deemed illegal by the Kenyan appellant court.51 The BRI and China’s reliance on African resources encapsulate an expensive gamble or bet; and this Beijing’s bet on Africa is now considered to have started failing because the coronavirus pandemic had crashed commodity prices (including that of crude oil) and wasted China’s $200 billion in investment and loans.52 Although Beijing’s commercial activities (like investments, infrastructure projects and banking) had been dogged by critical criticisms, including the accusation of a new form of colonialism and debt entrapment, these dominating critical narratives were considered somewhat an exaggeration of China’s strategic foresight that overlooked the type of pitfalls in the bet, pitfalls that are orchestrated by the instability in commodity prices, as seen in the plunge in the prices of oil, copper and minerals 47 See Vanguard news in “China to exempt some African countries from repaying zero-interest loans”, Vanguardngr.com, June 18, 2020, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2020/06/chinato-exempt-some-african-countries-from-repaying-zero-interest-loans/amp/ (last visited on June 18, 2020). 48 See Abhinav Singh in “Major setback for China’s African Safari. Its Kenyan BRI project is all set to be shelved”, tfipost.com, June 25, 2020, available at https://tfipost.com/2020/06/major-set back-for-chinas-african-safari-its-kenyan-bri-project-is-all-set-to-be-shelved/ (last visited on June 27, 2020), op. cit. 49 Loc. Cit. 50 Loc. Cit. 51 Loc. Cit. 52 See Minxin Pei in “China’s expensive bet on Africa has failed”, Nikkei Asian Review, May 1, 2020, available at https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/China-s-expensive-bet-on-Africa-has-failed (last visited on May 2, 2020).

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in the heat of the COVID-19 related economic meltdown that consequently caused the pressure on China “to forgive the tens of billions of dollars of loans” it had given to African countries since the early 2000s.53 As already noted above, the torrid economic scenario or meltdown has recognizably endangered or put at risk, “the crown jewel of China’s economic engagement with Africa, the trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure programme”.54 Apart from the fact that it was doubtful that Beijing would have the resources to fund the BRI post-COVID-19a telltale sign of which was the absence of references to the BRI as a priority in the communiqués of a recent Politburo meeting of the Chinese Communist Party—the pandemic had also dealt a body blow to the Chinese economy (with its output falling to 6.8% in the first quarter), thus, highlighting China’s flawed strategy or assumptions about Africa, its leaders’ perception of Africa as merely a source of natural resources.55 As has been shown in this book, the pandemic had also fueled in Africa, cries of racism against China because of the mistreatment of Africans resident in Quanzhou while the COVID-19 pandemic lasted, prompting many African countries to embark on diplomatic protests against Beijing.56 In fact, racism against Africans in China was not peculiar to the COVID-19 era, for though Sino-Africa relations were marked by solidarity (especially in Africa’s colonial days and the era of China’s admission to the United Nations), the ill-treatment of Africans during the COVID-19 pandemic suggested that China’s racism was deeply entrenched, and that African countries needed a drastic change from that malaise.57 On April 10, 2020, a video emerged of a Nigerian diplomat in China, Razaq Lawal, who publicly criticized the treatment of Nigerians in Guangzhou by Chinese officials.58 Ambassador Lawal protested that Nigerians were kept in COVID-19 quarantine beyond the normal 14 days for Chinese citizens; and that Chinese officials were also seizing the passports of these Nigerians.59 Although this ill-treatment was equally meted on many African nations’ citizens, the experience of Nigerians had dated a long time amid China’s portray of its relationship with Nigeria and Africa at large as marked by equality (win–win); even though China had dominated the relations with imbalanced trade and Africa’s dependence on China—a relationship that is marked by bootlegging, counterfeits, adulterated and sub-standard drugs and other products from China.60 The ill-treatment of Nigerians in China was happening despite the fact that the Nigerian government was not treating Chinese citizens living in Nigeria in any way different from how the 53 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 55 Loc. Cit. 56 Loc. Cit. 57 See Abdul-Gafar Tobi Oshodi in “The maltreatment of Nigerians in China isn’t likely to end anythime soon”, Quartz Africa, May 31, 2020, available at https://qz.com/africa/1863029/chineseracism-to-nigerians-is-likely-to-end-soon/ (last visited on May 31, 2020). 58 Loc. Cit. 59 Loc. Cit. 60 Loc. Cit. 54 Loc.

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Nigerian government treated its own Nigerian citizens.61 The favourable treatment of Chinese citizens in Nigeria was even so profound that the Nigerian government invited a Chinese medical team to assist in the fight against COVID-19, an invitation that the Nigerian Medical Association was forced to protest.62 Although Beijing felt that the COVID-19 era ill-treatment of Africans was a provincial rather than a national incident, but with that abrasive treatment of Africans in Quanzhou, China had implicitly overreached itself because although it is the exclusive sovereign right of every country to admit or deprive aliens’ entry into its territorial space, no state is at liberty to discriminate or mistreat aliens, for this might be regarded as an unfriendly act that would be dealt with more politically (through the act of retorsion) than legally (as in the exhaustion of local remedies and resort to the International Court of Justice).63 Aliens can be treated in various forms, ranging from the national treatment, through the most-favoured nations treatment, to another public international law Convention clause on national treatment that insist on the insertion of the principle of reciprocity (a conditional or qualified version of the most-favoured nations treatment) by which any favour or privilege granted by one of the contracting states to a third state should be extended to the nationals of other contracting states if the states satisfied the conditions under which the favours or privileges had been allowed to the grantee.64 The principle of reciprocity raised many difficulties of interpretation as to the conditions and so, created some unfairness as between states in different situations and were disavowed as the general practice of unconditional most-favoured nations remained and formed the kernel of the 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).65 Thus, although aliens can be expelled only in the interest of public order or welfare and other reasons of the state’s internal and external security (the COVID-19 infections in China coming to mind here),66 no state is allowed to expel aliens under a condition of hardship or violence or unnecessary harm to the aliens expelled (like China’s alleged detention of some Africans, including Nigerians because of COVID19 infections), unless they refused to leave or tried to escape from the control of the state authorities.67

61 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 63 See Sorensen (1968, ed.), pp. 481, 482. 64 Ibid, pp. 483, 484. 65 Ibid, p. 484. 66 Ibid, p. 482. 67 Ibid, p. 483. 62 Loc.

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9.3 COVID-19 and Enforcing Interconnectivity Amid Protectionism Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science. In a single season, civilization has been brought low by a microscopic parasite 10,000 times smaller than a grain of salt. COVID-19 attacks our physical bodies, but also the cultural foundations of our lives, the toolbox of community and connectivity that is for the human what claws and teeth represent to the tiger. Our interventions to date have largely focused on mitigating the rate of spread, flattening the curve of morbidity. There is no treatment at hand, and no certainty of a vaccine on the near horizon. … COVID-19 killed 100,000 Americans in four months. … If the global population is to be immunized, lethal complications in just one person in a thousand would imply the death of millions.68

The above epigram was authored by Wade Davis, an anthropologist that holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at the Risk at the University of British Columbia.69 It illustrated the gravity of the disruption that COVID-19 had brought to humanity in this age of globalization and interconnectivity. Wade Davis was not alone in the characterization of the disruptive effects of COVID-19. Far-right extremist views in the United States also keyed into the flagellation of China in this regard. According to John Bolton: More thunder out of China, in the form of the coronavirus pandemic, came in early 2020. Although epidemiologists (not to mention biological weapons experts) will be studying this catastrophe long into the future; the mark of China’s authoritarian government and socialcontrol systems is all over it. There is little doubt that China delayed, withheld, fabricated, and distorted information about the origin, timing, spread, and extent of the disease, suppressed dissent from physicians and others; hindered outside efforts by the World Health Organization and others to get accurate information; and engaged in active disinformation campaigns, actually trying to argue that the virus (SARS-CoV-2) and the disease itself (COVID-19) did not originate in China. Ironically, some of the worst effects of China’s cover-up were visited on its closest allies. Iran, for example, looked to be one of the worst-hit countries, with satellite photos showing the excavation of burial pits for the expected victims of COVID-19.70

At the 75th—birthday of the United Nations when New York was supposed to be normally gridlocked, the constraints of COVID-19 had ensured that the 2020 General Assembly stood out in a different way, described by the Economist “as a general

68 Wade

Davis in “The unravelling of America: Anthropologist Wade Davis on how COVID-19 signals the end of the American era”, RollingStone, August 6, 2020, available in https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/covid-19-end-of-americanera-wadw-davis-1038206/ (last visited on August 20, 2020), op. Cit. 69 Loc. Cit. 70 See Bolton (2020), pp. 314–315, op. Cit.

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non-assembly” because world leaders did not travel to New York.71 Like the Cold War, 9/11, and the financial crisis that created populism and Brexit, the onslaught of COVID-19 created a geopolitical shock that gave “a whole new meaning to globalization ”.72 The virus spread like a wildfire and caused the prescription of the practice of less social density or physical distancing (conservatively described as ‘social distancing’), which made a world that was supposed to be a global village now “a vast collection of neighbouring but isolated islands”, where all the things that made us human have suddenly become weaponized as tools of separation by the COVID-19 pestilence.73 The COVID-19 pestilence was to re-impose national boundaries and borders because all the nations of the world began to look in rather than cooperate to deal with the pandemic.74 All the countries around the world have had to order very strict travel warnings for their citizens across all the COVID-19 high-risk spots, while some countries embarked on the repatriation of their citizens from those countries that were either high-risk spots or lacked the appropriate medicare system, especially the Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)—face masks, quarantine facilities and testing kits—the PPE that can used to cater for the victims of the virus.75 Nigeria was so incapacitated by inadequate resources or means that its highly bureaucratized Presidential Task Force (PTF) was popularly accused of excluding medical professionals and private hospitals from the fight against COVID-19, even though the truth was that it did not have enough quarantines, enough PPE and even enough reagents to do the COVID-19 testing and stem the transmission of the highly contagious pathogen. And apart from the closure of schools and the limitation of mass gathering in the national shutdowns, South Africa and (indeed, all nations of the world) restricted international travels76 and even announced that it was going to erect a fence along its border with Zimbabwe in order to prevent immigrants from entering and spreading 71 See “The UN renews its vows in a 75th-birthday general non-assembly: There is little celebration as leaders stay away”, economist.com, September 20th 2020, available at https://www.economist.com/international/2020/09/20/the-un-renews-its-vows-in-a-75th-bir thday-general-non-assembly? (last visited on September 21, 2020). 72 See Olatunji Dare in At Home Abroad in “Dis Coronavirus sef”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, March 24, 2020, back page. 73 See Tuesday with Reuben Abati in “Corona Chronicles”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, March 24, 2020, back page. Parenthesis on becoming mine. 74 Discussion on BBC World News by a three panel interlocutors that included Mrs. Chobielin, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Thursday, March 26, 2020 between 7 and 8 pm local time. 75 Alongside other nations that evacuated their citizens from different parts of the world, the state of Israel, for instance, repatriated its citizens from Nigeria, see “COVID-19: Air Peace evacuates 274 Israelis from Abuja; Lagos to Tel-Aviv”, Nigerian Flight Deck, Travel and Business Reportage, available at https://nigerianflightdeck.com/2020/03/29/covid-19-air-peace-evacuates-274-israelisfrom-abuja-lagos-to-tel-aviv/ (Last visited on Tuesday, March 31, 2020); see also Kayode Oyero in “COVID-19: UK pledges 75 m to evacuate citizens from Nigeria, others”, punchng.com, available at https://punchng.com/covid-19-uk-pledges-75m-to-evacuate-citizens-from-nigeria-oth ers/ (last visited on March 31, 2020). 76 See “WHO tells Africa to ‘wake up’ to threat”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 20, 2020, p. 40.

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the coronavirus.77 In Ecuador, “police cars and hundreds of police officials blockaded the Ecuador airport runway [the Jose Joaquin de Olmedo international airport] to stop international flights [from Europe] from landing after they were banned” because of the coronavirus.78 This was the context in which the COVID-19 pandemic was not seen by observers as a joke, for the global economy had begun to point downwards as flights were cancelled, events suspended, and the issuing of visas equally suspended as mobility gradually crawled and ground to a halt.79 On the heels of the international immobility, the G20 that was billed to meet to discuss the challenges of COVID-19 even resorted to a virtual summit.80 And apart from the restriction of global logistics and ipso facto international trade, oil prices surged on the heels of a base-line price disagreement between Saudi Arabia and Russia, contributing to the liberal or capitalist economic system also taking a bashing under the sway of COVID-19, causing several governments around the world, including the United Kingdom and the United States, to begin a pro-economy and pro-worker policy of intervention.81 In the United States, this defiance of the libertarian principle in order to save the capitalist system from the COVID-19 began after a number of Americans filled for unemployment because the economy had tanked as the country went into a lockdown from the COVID-19 pandemic that was surging astronomically.82 It must be appreciated that from the outset, the Trump administration tried “to classify certain public-health information regarding the United States on the spurious excuse that China was involved”; which was a reason it should disseminate the information more broadly and not restrict it; but President Trump was reluctant to disseminate the COVID-19 pandemic “for fear of adversely affecting the elusive definitive trade deal with China, or offending the ever-so-sensitive Xi Jinping”.83 But because of the shutdown of international travels and the limitation of the aggregation of humans by COVID-19, Trump’s demonization of China began, a demonization that was not helped by the identity politics that the American President added to the

77 See “S’Africa to fence Zimbabwe border over coronavirus”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 20, 2020, p. 19. 78 See “Video: Police block runway with cars to prevent planes from landing”, Khaleej Times, available at https://m.khaleejtimes.com/world/europe/video-police-block-runway-with-cars-to-pre vent-plane-from-landing (last visited on March 20, 2020). Parentheses mine. 79 See Benjamin Alade in “COVID-19 hurts Nigeria’s auto, rail projects”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 6, 2020, p. 28, op. cit. 80 CNN News monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Friday, March 27, 2020 between 8 and 9am local time. 81 See “US Senate approves $2 trillion rescue bill”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 27, 2020, p. 34. 82 See “Washington unemployment claims hit record high”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 27, 2020, p. 35. 83 See Bolton (2020), p. 315, op. Cit.

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pandemic through his divisive reference to it as the “China Virus” or the “Chinese Virus”84 —a virus that was made in the laboratory.85 Although the Chinese government originally stated that the COVID-19 pandemic spread from a seafood market in Wuhan, President Trump’s State Department put out a statement that seriously claimed that, by the United States intelligence, the origins of the virus was from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which though presented as a civilian institution that was a leading center for research on bat coronaviruses, was conducting secrete research projects with the Chinese military; and that several of its researchers were sick with COVID-19 symptoms in the autumn of 2019; which was an indication that the Chinese government had hidden crucial information about the outbreak of COVID-19 for months.86 Thus, President Trump’s State Department continued to allege a Chinese government cover-up, with the assertion that Beijing had continued to withhold the vital information that scientists needed to protect the world from the deadly virus and the next one that might come.87 This conspiratory theory of COVID-19 was exacerbated when a scientist that fled China (Dr. Li Meng-Yan, a specialist in virology at Hong Kong’s School of Public Health) alleged that the pandemic was created in a military laboratory and not a wet market.88 In fact, Li-Meng Yan specifically accused the Chinese military of creating the COVID-19; a conspiratorial project that was formally overseen by the People’s Liberation Army and actively covered up by the Chinese Communist Party.89 The consequences of these allegations for President Trump were that, rather 84 See James S. Brady in “Remarks by President Trump in press briefing, August 11, 2020, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-press-bri efing-august-11-2020/ (last visited on August 12, 2020); see also Jerome Viala-Gaudefroy and Dana Lindaman in “Donald Trump’s ‘Chinese virus’: the politics of meaning”, The Conversation, available https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-chinese-virus-the-politics-of-naming136796 (last visited on August 12, 2020). 85 Those who joined President Trump to wave this conspiracy theory argued in the social media that the virus was not a living organism but a laboratory invention, a protein molecule whose DNA showed that it was covered by a protective layer of lipid (fat), which, when absorbed by the cells of the ocular, nasal or buccal mucosa, changes their genetic code (mutation) and convert them into aggressor and multiplier cells; and that since the virus is not an organism but a protein molecule, it is not killed but easily decays on its own, with the disintegration depending on the temperature, humidity and the type of material they lie. Because of the fragility of the virus, the only thing that protects it is a thin layer of fat, which explains why any soap or detergent is the best remedy because the foam cuts the fat and the protein molecule disperses and breaks down on its own. 86 See Josh Rogin in “In 2018, Diplomats warned of risky Coronavirus experiments in Wuhan Lab. No one listened”, Yahoo!News, March 8, 2021, available at https://news.yahoo.com/diplomats-war ned-coronavirus-danger-wuhan-043020270.html (last visited on March 8, 2021). 87 Loc. Cit. 88 See Richard Percival in “China cover up: COVID-19 ‘created in military lab’ not wet market says scientist who fled”, Express, updated on August 4, 2020, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1317588/China-coronavirus-cover-up-scientist-militarylab-wet-market-where-did-coronavirus-start (last visited on August 3, 2020). 89 See Paula Naveira in “Li-Meng Yan: Coronavirus was developed in Chinese military lab”, EN DIRECTO, updated August 4, 2020, available at https://en.as.com/en/2020/08/03/latest-news/159 6459547-022260.html (last visited on August 5, 2020).

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than his leading the charge against the virus, he contributed to the transformation of the otherwise global village into a landscape of distrust, mutual suspicion and the risk of not doing everything humanly possible to prevent a reoccurrence of a virus attack that had the potentials of wiping out large sections of humanity or even threatening the human race with extinction.90 President Trump was not only nationalistic (and initially in denialism over COVID-19), he was quintessentially divisive, so much so that a Washington-based law firm (the Freedom Watch) and a Texas company (Bus Photos) dragged China to a Texas court over the outbreak of the coronavirus, demanding $20 trillion in damages.91 The litigants or petitioners claimed that the coronavirus was created by the Wuhan Institute of Viroja as an illegal biological weapon against the American people, claiming that Beijing accidentally released it at an unexpected time, and was now spreading it to the whole world.92 Even in Nigeria, this conspiratorial bent was exemplified when twenty-five Nigerians from all works of life dragged the People’s Republic of China before the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court over an allegation on China’s culpability in the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, thus, suing the defendant for damages it occasioned to the Nigerian class (claimant] and members thereof on account of the COVID-19 that was caused by the defendant’s negligence, nuisance, and breach of environmental and humanitarian rights”.93 It was this conspiracy theory that seriously limited a coordinated international cooperation of the scientific community in finding a vaccine for the virus, with Western scientists working alone while the Chinese scientists were also working alone too.94 Even when the vaccines—PfizerBiotech, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, and Oxford-Astrazeneca—were released, populists like President Trump of the United States and Jair Bolsenaro of Brazil so promoted vaccine hesitancy that it took a lot of persuasion to get people into their inoculation as well as getting the vaccines across to poor countries because the rich countries had apparently cordoned

90 See Owei Lakemfa in “Coronavirus: Destroy Biological weapons, we’re mere humans”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 20, 2020, p. 32, op. cit. 91 See “Italian nurse with coronavirus kills herself over fear of infecting others: US groups drag China to court, demand $20 trillion for allegedly creating Covid-19”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, March 26, 2020, p. 2. 92 Loc. Cit. 93 See Alex Enumah in “Nigerians drag China to court, seeks $200bn compensation over COVID-19 pandemic”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, July 7, 2020, p. 34. 94 British scientists began the trial of their potential COVID-19 vaccine that was developed by scientists at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute on humans on Thursday, April 23, 2020, see Sarah Dean, “Covid-19 vaccine trial on human starts as UK warns restrictions could stay in place until next year”, cnn.com, available at https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/23/health/coronavirus-vaccine-trial-ukgbr-intl/index.html (last visited on Thursday, April 23, 2020).

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them off95 in an inordinate assertion of COVID-19 ‘vaccine nationalism’. The stringency of this vaccine nationalism was further upped in the wake of the OxfordAstraZeneca blood clot controversy when, because AstraZeneca is a British as well as a Swedish company that was allegedly fulfilling its contract to the UK but not to the EU, the European Union threatened that it could stop AstraZeneca from exporting its COVID-19 vaccine from the EU bloc to other countries “if the British-Swedish pharma company does not meet its supply obligations” to Europe.96 However, the vaccine hesitancy was not helped by the concerns that the Oxford Astrazeneca and Johnson and Johnson (J&J) vaccines were causing blood clots and death amongst some recipients, a situation that caused the US, S’Africa and Denmark to temporarily halt the J&J vaccination campaign.97 This was despite the fact that (in respect of Oxford Astrazeneca) the UK’s PM had defended the AstraZeneca shot over blood clot fears.98 It was not out of place that much of the EU countries were probably embarking on Oxford-AstraZeneca hesitancy because99 of their intolerance on the Brexit,100 even when investigations were on and assurances had been given by the WHO and other agencies as well as the Oxford vaccine chief that the vaccine was safe.101 Graciously, the outcome of the investigations saw even the European Medicines Agency (EMA) assuring that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine was safe and effective, 95 See Kingsley Omonobi in “GOC, 6 Div, General Irefin dies of COVID-19 complications … Nigeria to get COVID-19 vaccine January 2021, says Okonjo-Iweala; Africa needs $9bn to buy, distribute 1.4bn doses of COVID-19 vaccines—WHO”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, December 11, 2020, p. 9. 96 See “EU warns AstraZeneca of export ban if bloc not supplied first”, DW.com, March 20, 2021, available at https://www.dw.com/en/eu-warns-astrazeneca-of-export-ban-if-bloc-not-sup plied-first/a-56937185 (last visited on March 21, 2021). 97 See Sola Ogundipe & Chioma Obinna in “Concerns over AstraZeneca vaccine disrupts vaccination campaigns: Suspension worrisome but no cause for alarm – PSN; DR Congo postpones roll-out; Lagos begins roll-out in 88 health facilities”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, March 17, 2021, p. 4; see also Sola Ogundipe in “COVID-19: US suspends J&J vaccine over blood clots fears: CDC, FDA investigate 6 reported cases”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, April 14, 2021, p. 3, and Chukwuma Munya in “Red flags over AstraZeneca, J&J deal new blow to vaccination drive: US, S’Africa, Denmark halt campaign; Excercise goes on as NPHCDA vacinnates 1,403,737; Benefits of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh risks, experts insist”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, April 15, 2021, pp. 1, 2. 98 See “UKé PM defends AstraZeneca shot over blood clot fears”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, March 17, 2021, p. 45. 99 See “AstraZeneca vaccine: Europe divided over suspensions as investigation continues”, BBC News, March 16, 2021, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56412784 (last visited on March 18, 2021). 100 Svar Nanan-SEN in “EU nations blasted for suspending AZ jab over blood clot fears There is NO link”, Express, March 15, 2021, available at https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/ 1410054/BBC-news-EU-AstraZeneca-blood-clots-coronavirus-vaccine-latest-Covid19-update-vn (last visited on March 18, 2021). 101 See “COVID-19: Oxford vaccine chief assures AstraZeneca jab is safe—as more nations suspend use over clotting concerns”, Sky news, Monday, March 15, 2021, available at https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-oxford-vaccine-chief-assures-astrazeneca-jab-is-safeas-more-nations-suspend-use-over-clotting-concerns-12245626 (last visited on March 18, 2021).

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and that the jab was not associated with a higher risk of blood clots—a finding that led the hesitant EU countries to beginning rolling out the vaccine and taking the jabs on Friday, March 19, 2021.102 Ironically, regarding the COVID-19 vaccines in general, the populist doubting Thomas, the former US President Donald Trump, “secretly took a dose before sulking out of the White House”, despite “his crackbrained plan to sit tight there with the aid of home-bred terrorists and White supremacists having collapsed ignominiously”.103 As a matter of fact, as a body chaired by the WHO, the original idea of COVAX was to coordinate purchases of COVID-19 vaccines globally to ensure that poor countries were not priced out of the vaccines race.104 Nigeria’s Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala was the African Union Special Envoy to COVAX, the platform for the mobilization of an international economic support for the continent’s fight against COVID-19.105 The COVAX was the product of the WHO and an international initiative called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), which in April 2020, developed this platform called the COVAX facility (with 186 countries, manufacturers, the private sector, philanthropist and civil society organizations on board) to raise resources; serve, in particular, the poor countries, and ensure that people in all crannies of the world would get equitable access in the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines as soon as they were available.106 But despite the COVAX, as lamented by the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the wealthy countries of the world started the practice of COVID-19 ‘vaccine nationalism’ by hoarding the surplus of COVID-19 vaccine supplies and not allowing the global supplies to be shared more equally.107 The discrepancy in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines was a huge concern because the rich countries had started to quickly vaccinate lower risk groups very quickly while the poor

102 See

“COVID-19: EU states to resume AstraZeneca vaccine rollout”, BBC News, March 18, 2021, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56440139 (last visited on Thursday, March 18, 2021). 103 See Olatunji Dare’s At Home Abroad in “Now that the vaccines are here”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, March 16, 2021, back page. 104 See Lauren Chadwick in “What is COVAX and is it helping poor countries get access to COVID19 vaccines?, euronews, Friday, January 8, 2021, available at https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/ 08/what-is-covax-and-is-it-helping-poor-countries-get-access-to-covid-19-vaccines (last visited on February 9, 2021). 105 See Kingsley Omonobi in “GOC, 6 Div, General Irefin dies of COVID-19 complications … Nigeria to get COVID-19 vaccine January 2021, says Okonjo-Iweala; Africa needs $9bn to buy, distribute 1.4bn doses of COVID-19 vaccines—WHO”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, December 11, 2020, p. 9, op. cit. 106 See Seth Berkley in “COVAX explained”, September 3, 2020, available at https://www.gavi.org/ vaccineswork/covax-explained (last visited on February 2, 2021). 107 See Alexander Winning in “Stop hoarding COVID-19 vaccines, South Africa’s Ramaphosa tells rich nations”, yahoo news, January 26, 2021, avalaible at https://www.yahoo.com/news/stop-hoa rding-covid-vaccines-south-082056481.html (last visited on January 27, 2021).

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countries were still not able to fully vaccinate health care workers.108 Indeed, this was when Africa was “struggling to secure sufficient vaccines to start countrywide inoculation programmes for its 1.3 billion people”; even when the head of the international GAVI vaccine alliance that controls the COVAX had said that “the surplus doses that rich countries had ordered ran into the hundreds of millions”.109 In fact, President Ramaphosa told the World Economic Forum (WEF) that “the rich countries of the world went out and acquired large doses … Some even acquired up to four times what their population needs … to the exclusion of other countries”.110 The practice of COVID-19 ‘vaccine nationalism’ was described by the WHO’s Ghebreyesus as a “catastrophic moral failure”.111 At the same time, the COVAX platform’s talk about stemming vaccine nationalism was meaningless because in the increased outbreak of waves of new variants of the COVID-19 disease that were proving defiant to the efficacy of the available vaccines and killing people in great numbers, it would be difficult to ask the developed countries to continue to export the vaccines when their local populations were endangered or dying. The practical end to vaccine nationalism was for every country, including the African countries, to cultivate the local capacity to produce the vaccines. The inability to cultivate a local capacity for the production of these vaccines, including the propensity to be dependent on the developed-manufacturer nations, was creating an additional vulnerability of not being able to take the full complement of two jabs of the vaccines because when an individual takes the first jab and the country runs out of the vaccines, the failure to take the second jab or dose would not grant the individual the requisite protection from the virus. And in the midst of people being inadequately protected, the transmission of the virus would be encouraged—and more transmission encourages more mutation and the development of new variants that would continue to defy the available drugs. But despite the conspiracy theory and the dysfunctional ‘vaccine nationalism’ in that rich countries’ hoarding that produced increased transmission, mutation and the development of the new variants of COVID-19, the prevailing attitude that made the hoarding unnecessary was that as long as one person had it in the world, there was no one that would be safe; which was why poor countries and “lower-middleincome countries like Nigeria” needed to get a local capacity or the vaccines as quickly as possible112 ; more so because “where countries push to get first access” in the COVID-19 nationalism “could slow the global economic recovery, costing 108 See Lauren Chadwick in “What is COVAX and is it helping poor countries get access to COVID-

19 vaccines?, euronews, Friday, January 8, 2021, available at https://www.euronews.com/2021/02/ 08/what-is-covax-and-is-it-helping-poor-countries-get-access-to-covid-19-vaccines (last visited on February 9, 2021), op. cit. 109 See Alexander Winning in “Stop hoarding COVID-19 vaccines, South Africa’s Ramaphosa tells rich nations”, yahoo news, January 26, 2021, avalaible at https://www.yahoo.com/news/stop-hoa rding-covid-vaccines-south-082056481.html (last visited on January 27, 2021), op. cit. 110 Loc. Cit. 111 Loc. Cit. 112 See Kingsley Omonobi in “GOC, 6 Div, General Irefin dies of COVID-19 complications … Nigeria to get COVID-19 vaccine January 2021, says Okonjo-Iweala; Africa needs $9bn to buy,

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high-income $119 billion per year”.113 But the conspiracy theory about China and the coronavirus was also rife in the belief that the 5th Generation network (5G) that the Chinese telecoms organization (Huawei) developed was responsible for the virus, having been rolled out in Wuhan.114 But the implication of this as well as President Trump’s induced identity politics on the COVID-19 was that globalization and the capacity for international coalescence were being questioned—that is, the use of global solidarity to defeat the coronavirus. It was in the above context that O’Connell opined that “the pandemic has exposed the dominant intellectual paradigm as one mired in competition, materialism, and militarism”; so much so that there are so many current metaphors used in describing COVID-19 that invoke war and “dangerously ‘narrow our vision of the illness’ and the concepts we need for healing and recovery”.115 Some of these metaphors that invoke war were the adoption of conflict terminologies signifying war on the coronavirus that was used by politicians, academics and even journalist, especially in Europe and North America.116 This metaphoric shift in language was considered to be possessing dangerous consequences on the real frontline of armed conflicts because real armed conflicts have humanitarian considerations; and according to these humanitarian considerations or the law of war, “health care workers are protected, [and] the right to choose means and methods of warfare is not unlimited, [as] everyone, even the enemy, must be seen as a human and protected”.117 The COVID-19 did not show any humanitarian consideration because it also killed health workers. Thus, according to Iaria, “hijacking the language of conflict in stemming a pandemic may, in the long run, affect the dictates of the public conscience in peace-time as well as war-time and, ultimately, our capacity to serve our mission to protect human dignity”.118 But the fact is that although epidemics and pandemics had spread in the world much earlier than in today’s globalized world, the way the problems were tackled in the Middle Ages (long before the age of globalization)

distribute 1.4bn doses of COVID-19 vaccines—WHO”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, December 11, 2020, p. 9, op. cit. 113 See Harry Kretchmer in “Vaccine nationalism—and how it could affect us all”, World Economic Forum, January 6, 2021, available at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/01/what-is-vaccinenationalism-coronavirus-its-affects-covid-19-pandemic/ (last visited on January 31, 2021). 114 See Rhiannon Williams in “Why 5G isn’t causing the coronavirus pandemic, despite the conspiracy theory about towers, Wuhan and radiation”,inews, available at https://inews.co.uk/ news/technology/5g-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-towers-radiation-dangers-wuhan-explained2525663 (last visited on Tuesday, April 7, 2020). 115 See Mary Ellen O’Connell in “We can ‘recover better’ through the art of law in the international community”, EJIL: Talk!, April 27, 2020, available at https://www.ejiltalk.org/we-can-recoverbetter-through-the-art-of-law-in-the-international-community/ (last visited on Tuesday, April 28, 2020). 116 See Adriano Iaria in “We are not at ‘war’ with COVID-19: concerns from Italy’s frontline”, Law and policy, April 9, 2020, available at https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2020/04/09/not-at-warcovid-19-italy/?utm-campaign=DP-FORUM%20% (last visited on April 9, 2020). 117 Loc. Cit. Parentheses mine. 118 Loc. Cit.

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was to reduce or defeat it by going back to the level of isolation that was comparable to the medieval kingdom or the Stone Age—a protectionist method that man cannot retreat to in this age of interconnectedness through globalization.119 President Trump’s preachment was, therefore, sowing distrust in scientific experts, distrust in global public authorities and distrust in the international community that needed to trust one another.120 As in the protectionist remarks that had marked his presidential past (both as an aspirant and as a President), President Trump was quintessential of “irresponsible politicians” that “deliberately undermined trust in science, in public authorities and in international cooperation”; so much so that that humanity began facing the COVID19 “crisis bereft of global leaders who can inspire, organize and finance a coordinated global response”.121 Before COVID-19 and President Trump, the United States had provided such leadership during the 2014 Ebola, the 2008 financial crisis (when it rallied behind enough countries to prevent a global economic meltdown); but under President Trump, “the US has resigned its role as global leader; … cut support for international organizations, and has made it very clear to the world that the US no longer has any real friends, only interests”.122 The consequence of the foregoing was that if the pandemic resulted in closer global cooperation, it would be victory not only against the coronavirus but against all future pathogens.123 Although the pandemic reinstated international boundaries and borders, it unwittingly did result in humanity’s global interconnectedness. In other words, in an ironical twist, the coronavirus pandemic worked against the protectionist instincts of President Trump’s fixation with America First because it rooted for interconnectivity and the inevitability of global cooperation. A critic metaphorically wrote that the global tragedy that was the coronavirus, in underpinning our global interconnectedness, did the world a book of humour.124 How did this tragedy and humour in the coronavirus pandemic happen? One of the rudest tragedies of the coronavirus pandemic was that President Trump had to extend his travel bans to UK citizens, in spite of the Trans-Atlantic, especially the UK-US relations that were a mutual source of pride for the United Kingdom and the United States.125 But here are the strings of tragedy meeting humour that illustrate the inevitability of globalization and our interconnectivity: there was a British ship that had been marooned at sea (with 667 Brits and only 5 confirmed COVID-19 victims onboard) since February 2020 and even denied passage through the Panama canal and denied a berthing space at Barbados; but help ultimately came in March 2020 from the most 119 See

Yuval Noah Harari in “Disease in a world without a leader: Humanity needs trust and cooperation to fight the pandemic”, Time (New York), March 30, 2020, p. 42. 120 Ibid, p. 43. 121 Loc. Cit. 122 Loc. Cit. 123 Loc. Cit. 124 See Conversation with Azu in “Unusual story as tragedy writes book of humour”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 20, 2020, p. 30. 125 Loc. Cit.

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unlikely of places on earth, not from Barbados, the ‘Little England’ (a British ally in the Caribbean), but from Cuba, the Communist cauldron that British intellectuals loved to hate.126 There was also the Chinese government that was apparently left to stew in its juice (the COVID-19 virus) by the rest of the world, which broke out of its loop and became the first foreigner to arrive in Italy (and other parts of the world with medical teams, masks and ventilators127 ) and help to stem the COVID-19 pandemic when Italy’s European neighbours had abandoned their multilateral obligations in the EU and closed their borders despite the Shengen arrangement.128 There were also the case of the distressed migrants sighting the shore when their boat was a few miles from the Italian port of Lampedusa and were crying out to the Italian Coast Guard for help because the boat had started taking water and sinking.129 To their greatest dismal, the Guards who were nearby enough to help asked them to directly call Malta for help, a help from Malta that never came; consequent upon which the boat capsized and the migrants died.130 But at the outbreak of COVID-19, some 35 Italian tourists that went to Ethiopia on holidays refused to return home, preferring to stay in Ethiopia as refugees because of the fear of the COVID-19 pandemic, even when their visa had expired—a humanitarian situation that Addis Ababa accepted instead of paying the Italian migrants in the coin of the Italian Coast Guards aforementioned.131 The United States also had its case of tragedy authoring humour in California, a US state that share border with Mexico—a country where because of COVID-19, about eight million US citizens took shelter despite the fact that the United States had threatened to build a border wall with the Mexican government paying for it.132 With COVID-19, the Mexicans thought that the wall would have been worth it because even if they were to pay for it, it certainly would not have been with their lives as in the case of COVID-19 where they were now obliged to pay for it with their lives because of the Americans fleeing from the US and spreading the virus from across the San Ysidro border,133 even after that world’s busiest border crossing that witnessed about 5 m people a month was closed to all but essential traffic—a carefully calibrated closure.134 126 Loc.

Cit. “China’s post-covid propaganda push”, The Economist online, April 16th 2020, available at https://www.economist.com/china/2020/04/16/chinas-post-covid-propaganda-push?utmcampaign=the-economist-today&utm (last visited on Saturday, April 18, 2020), op. cit. 128 See Conversation with Azu in “Unusual story as tragedy writes book of humour”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 20, 2020, p. 30, op. cit. Loc. Cit. 129 Loc. Cit. 130 Loc. Cit. 131 Loc. Cit. 132 Loc. Cit. 133 Loc. Cit. 134 See Distancing neighbours: Mexica and the United States shut their border, sort of”, economist.com, March 26, 2020, available at https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2020/ 03/26/mexico-and-the-united-states-shut-their-border-sort-of?utm-campaign=the=economisttoday&utm-medium=newsletter&utm-source=salesforce-marketing- (last visited on April 1, 2020). 127 See

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The futility of tackling COVID-19 in Africa as in many developing countries, is in the fact that colonial legacies had left porous borders that permit kin cross-border communities and pastoralists that remain outside the purview of states to observe the formality of social distancing in their informal settlements, conflict-generated internally displaced camps where basic healthcare and social amenities are nonexistent.135 In Africa, the donor countries were distracted by the mobilization of their own resources to confront the virus in their own countries, living Africa totally helpless; so much so the South Africa that was the most prosperous African country itself declared the virus a national disaster and solely employed its emergency fund to confront it (about 5000 intensive-care unit (ICU beds), as against Sudan with just 40 ICU beds.136 In fact, in relation to South Africa and Sudan, Nigeria had little or nothing to deal with the crisis because poor governance had destroyed its healthcare in an incensing manner; so much so that the onset of COVID-19 revealed the “absence of purposelybuilt isolation centers across the country, unlike in the past when infectious diseases Hospitals existed in every state of the federation.137 Whereas South Africa with its most advanced healthcare system in sub-Sahara Africa managed by the Middle of April 2020 to have tested 73,000 of its 57 million population, Nigeria, the so-called biggest economy in Africa was only able to have 5,000 coronavirus tests in a country of about 190 million people.138 The lower testing in Nigeria apparently explained the low record in the number of the coronavirus cases in Nigeria vis-à-vis South Africa and other African countries like Ghana. It was in the above context as well as the importation of the Chinese doctors and equipment that the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Boss Mustapha, lamented that he was actually unaware of the extent of the decay in the Nigerian healthcare system.139 The COVID-19 had really tasked African countries’ national capacity and its record of poor governance—a continent where “resources are poured into government security, governing parties and the interests of select individuals or groups” while the states “are too weak on the functions of state necessary to ensure human security, such as health, education and trust, all that are necessary

135 See Mehari Taddele Maru in “Covid-19: Why it is so difficult for Africa to flatten the curve”, avail-

able at https://meharitaddele.info/2020/03/covid-19-why-it-is-so-difficult-for-africa-to-flatten-thecurve/ (last visited on March 29, 2020). 136 Loc. Cit. 137 See Chioma Obinna in “NMA laments absence of purpose-built isolation centres nationwide”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 27, 2020, p. 8. 138 See Philippe Alfroy in “Why Africa’s coronavirus outbreak appears slower than anticipated”, AFP bureaus, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-africas-coronavirus-outbreakappears-slower-anticipated-004600725.html (last visited on Sunday, April 12, 2020). 139 See Msugh Ityokura in “Lockdown in Lagos, Abuja, others still on, says FG”, The Guardianon line, available at https://m.guardian.ng/news/lockdown-in-lagos-abuja-others-still-on-says-fg/ (last visited on Sunday, April 12, 2020).

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to deal with the COVID-19 crisis.140 The COVID-19 pandemic in Africa is so dire that no African nation has the luxury to focus beyond its own national population; that is, to focus on the so-called 2016 Common African Position on Humanitarian Effectiveness that was designed to enable African Union member states to prioritize transnational governance like cross-border responses and the facilitation of intra-Africa and inter-African aid and information sharing.141 The neo-liberal West itself had also been distracted by the virus, so much so that it had to breach its libertarian culture with stimulus relief packages, creating a “state of exception” in heavily militarized situations that granted governments unusual powers over their citizens and their civic freedoms; so much so that its member countries did not have time for one another, talk less the rest of the world.142 The West was not exempted from the quarantines, lockdowns and governmental monitoring that existed all over the world and granted state authorities the capacity to “curtail freedoms in the name of “safety” that they alone can ostensibly guarantee”.143 Of course, China itself with an institutionally defined populism, had so curtailed the freedoms of its citizens to such as extent that it detained an outspoken Professor Xu Zhangrun, who had criticized its handling of the coronavirus crisis as well as its “new normal” in handing over a “Mao-like cult personality” to President Xi Jinping.144 This exceptional mode of political control went beyond the domestic realm because the spatial partitioning and subdivision of populations extended to the extreme in its international dimension.145 The irony in the COVID-19 pandemic was that despite the sway of populism and nationalism in the neoliberal global economy that existed globally—a strange mix of economic nationalism, the dominance of the stock market and transnational corporations, and the oft-disavowed economic interdependence—it was still obvious that any large-scale restriction that hindered the movement of capital, labour, and commodities would be “counter-growth” and hence undesirable by governments and corporations.146 It was for this neoliberal calculation that a large-scale lockdown and quarantine were not immediately imposed by the Chinese government because it did not want to prevent the country’s industrial production growth.147 140 See Mehari Taddele Maru in “Covid-19: Why it is so difficult for Africa to flatten the curve”, avail-

able at https://meharitaddele.info/2020/03/covid-19-why-it-is-so-difficult-for-africa-to-flatten-thecurve/ (last visited on March 29, 2020), op. cit. 141 Loc. Cit. 142 See Ani Maitra in “COVID-19 and the neoliberal state of exception”, Aljazeera.com, March 29, 2020, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/covid-19-neoliberal-state-except ion-200325161722610.html (last visited on March 30, 2020). 143 Loc. Cit. 144 See “Xu Zhangrun: Outspoken professor detained in China”, BBC News, July 6, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53306280 (last visited on July 6, 2020). 145 See Ani Maitra in “COVID-19 and the neoliberal state of exception”, Aljazeera.com, March 29, 2020, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/covid-19-neoliberal-state-except ion-200325161722610.html (last visited on March 30, 2020), op. cit. 146 Loc. Cit. 147 Loc. Cit.

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Ultimately, the global lockdowns triggered the fears of a looming recession and a glaring revelation of the weaknesses of the free market economy; that is, the burden of neoliberalism in the overreliance on the private sector (with the state now massively intervening everywhere); and the healthcare systems all over the world becoming seriously overwhelmed.148 The situation was such that on March 16, 2020, the Spanish government, for instance, decided to nationalize all private hospitals as some people were turned away from hospitals despite testing positive to the virus because they were “not sick enough” to be treated under the emergency circumstance.149 In the state of exception in which the government massively acquired powers to regulate, social distance, quarantine and isolate people, the decision on who is sick enough was unfortunately taken by private hospitals, making “bare the neoliberal state’s incapacity to save and care for most of its citizens”.150 In places like Africa, poor governance had made healthcare prostrate; so much so that COVID-19 posed a great danger to the continent that do not have proper and robust health infrastructure, a continent where cooperation mechanisms like the AU’s 2016 Common African Position on Humanitarian Effectiveness for solving problems are completely inadequate.151 In Nigeria, for instance, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) acknowledged that the efforts to contain the COVID-19 “were being limited by finance, manpower and other indices despite the support from government and individuals; which was why Nigeria requested that Chinese doctors, nurses, medicants and medical experts should come and assist the country in the fight against the virus.152 Nigeria is one of the African countries where the COVID-19 upended the duplicity of the elite because the virus prevented them from jetting off to Europe or Asia for the healthcare that was unavailable in their nations.153 Unfortunately, the fact that Nigeria was a country without any sense of national pride, especially amongst its ruling elite that were already obsessed with medical tourism in Europe and Asia, informed the fact that it requested for doctors and nurses from China over the COVID-19 pandemic. Nigeria’s national misgovernance and loss of confidence were informed by the fact that in the country’s earlier days when it opened diplomatic relations with China and the Chinese government promised to equip Nigeria’s six standard hospitals in any part of the country and send medical doctors and other personnel, Nigeria’s 148 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 150 Loc. Cit. 151 See Kaan Devecioglu in “Analysis—COVID-19 pandemic: Great danger awaits Africa”, aa.com, March 2, 2020, available at https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/analysis-covid-19-pandemic-great-dan ger-awaits-africa/1789840 (last visited on March 3, 2020), op. cit. 152 See Olufemi Atoyebi, Tobi Aworinde, Daud Olatunji and Wale Oyewale in “Chinese medical team arrives in Nigeria soon—Health Minister”, Punch, April 4, 2020, available at https://pun chng.com/chinese-medical-team-to-arrive-in-nigeria-soon-health-minister/ (last visited on April 4, 2020). 153 See Cara Anna in “African elite who once sought treatment abroad are grounded” AP NEWS, available at https://apnews.com/3fd908519a2a746f965150d8bf1f83ae (last visited on Sunday, April 5, 2020). 149 Loc.

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“Ministry of Health was vehemently opposed to such a development because they felt that Chinese medical qualifications were suspect”.154 Of course, for reasons of national security (the fear that the Chinese Doctors and Nurses may not be subjected to the necessary 14-days quarantine before being allowed into the country), national pride and the extant laws regulating the practice of medicine in Nigeria (the Medical and Dental Council Act), amongst others, the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) opposed the importation of the Chinese doctors and nurses.155 Although because of global interdependency, many countries are getting supports from China, but the supports were mainly medical equipments (surgical masks and protective suits) and not doctors and nurses156 ; more so when some of the Chinese deliveries of COVID-19 testing kits and other medical supplies had been marred by similarly dangerous poor-quality and fake products.157 This reality underlined the fact that despite the imperative of interdependency, the meeting of every nation’s need at the shortest time possible was solidly dependent on the recognition of selfreliance or endogenous solutions.158 Despite the protestation by the NMA and some members of the National Assembly (House of Representatives), the Chinese doctors (comprising cardiologists, neurologists, general surgeons and anesthesiologists, etc.) and nurses arrived in Nigeria, allegedly to test the staff of the CCECC (a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned Railway construction company in Nigeria) after observing a 14 days quarantine.159 The messaging in respect of the Chinese doctors visit were complex and complicated with some insisting that they were here on the invitation of the federal government to help Nigeria fight COVID-19 as part of a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)160 while others argued that they were in Nigeria solely to attend to the workers 154 See

Sanu (2016), p. 312, op. Cit.

155 See Nkechi Onyedika-Ugoeze, Bridget Chiedu Onochie, Cornelius Essen, Chukwuma Muanya,

Wole Oyebade, Gloria Nwafor and Agosi Todo in “Outrage over government’s move to invite Chinese doctors”, The Guardian (Lagos), April 6, 2020, available at https://m.guardian.ng/news/ outrage-over-governments=move-to-invite-chinese-doctors/ (last visited on April 6, 2020). 156 See Toi Staff in “With 11 planes, Israel airlifts huge quantities of medical equipment from China”, The Times of Israel, available at https://www.timesofisrael.com/with-11-planes-israel-airlifts-hugequantities-of-medical-equipment-from-china/ (last visited on Monday, April 6, 2020). 157 See Vanda Felbab-Brown in “What coronavirus means for online fraud, forced sex, drug smuggling, and wildlife trafficking”, Brookings, available at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ order-from-chaos/2020/04/03/what-coronavirus-means-for-online-fraud-forced-sex-drug-smuggl ing-and-wildlife-trafficking/?utm-campaign=Brookings%20Brief&utm (last visited on Monday, April 6, 2020). 158 See Wisner (1988), pp. 34–35. 159 See Adelani Adepegba and Olaleye Aluko in “Chinese doctors arrive today, to spend one month —Minority Reps reject Chinese doctors”, The Punchonline, Wednesday, April 8, 2020, available at https://punchng.com/chinese-doctors-arrive-today-to-spend-one-month/ (last visited on April 8, 2020); see also “Air Peace flight back in Abuja with Chinese Doctors, COVID-19 Medical supplies”, available at https://www.sunnewsonline.com/breaking-news-chinese-medical-team-arr ives-nnamdi-azikiwe-international-airport/ (last visited on Thursday, April 9, 2020). 160 This explanation was also offered by the Honourable Minister of Health, Dr. Osagie Ohanire, at his appearance on Channels Television’s News @ Ten, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Sunday, April 12, 2020 at 10 pm, local time.

9.3 COVID-19 and Enforcing Interconnectivity Amid Protectionism

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of the CCECC.161 The arguments of the Nigerian objectors to this policy of inviting the Chinese doctors were that as far as Nigeria obtaining some technical advice from the Chinese experience with COVID-19 was concerned, the invitation was good; however, bringing in the Chinese doctors to practice in Nigeria was retrograde.162 In a country that was never short of conspiracy theories, cynics existed that reckoned that because COVID-19 had imposed the absence of medical tourism on Nigeria’s ruling class, and because the members of this class had grown used of medical tourism in Asia and Europe, the Chinese doctors and medical supplies were to treat their own if they caught the virus, having lost confidence in the local doctors and the decayed healthcare system. However, this policy of the Nigerian government inviting the Chinese doctors at a time the Chinese government was stigmatizing Nigerian citizens over COVID-19 163 had questioned Nigeria’s diplomatic commitment to its citizens; just as philosophically, the Chinese government’s stigmatization of Nigerians and other Africans that were being evicted from their homes and hotels in China164 apparently confirmed China’s racism towards Africans,165 contradicting its Confucianism.166 This racism, especially in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, reportedly affected the AfricanAmerican community; which was, of course, in the heat of the rivalry between China and the United States in Africa; and it obviously politically condemned by Beijing on the heels of diplomatic protests by African countries167 as the racism tasked the honeymoon between China and African countries that began when China became an emerging global power.168 Washington could not have been taken unaware in such 161 See Adelani Adepegba and Olaleye Aluko in “Chinese doctors arrive today, to spend one month

—Minority Reps reject Chinese doctors”, The Punchonline, Wednesday, April 8, 2020, available at https://punchng.com/chinese-doctors-arrive-today-to-spend-one-month/ (last visited on April 8, 2020), loc. cit; see also “Air Peace flight back in Abuja with Chinese Doctors, COVID-19 Medical supplies”, available at https://www.sunnewsonline.com/breaking-news-chinese-medical-team-arr ives-nnamdi-azikiwe-international-airport/ (last visited on Thursday, April 9, 2020), loc. cit. 162 Argument by interlocutors in Sunrise Daily Channels Television (Lagos) programme, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Tuesday, April 7, 2020, between 7 and 9am. 163 See Chima Nwokoji in “COVID-19: Dabiri urges Nigerians thrown out of Chinese hotels to report to Embassy”, Nigerian Tribune, Thursday, April 9, 2020, available at https://tribuneonlineng.com/ covid-19-dabiri-urges-nigerians-thrown-out-of-chinese-hotels-to-report-to-embassy/ (last visited on Friday, April 10, 2020). 164 See Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu in “After enduring months of lockdown, Africans in China are being targeted and evicted from apartments”, Quartz Africa, available at https://www.yahoo.com/tech/m/ 963d75cf-b819-3ae4-acea-dcec8d15948d/after-enduring-months-of-html (last visited on Sunday, April 12, 2020). 165 See Sanu (2016), pp. 311–314, op. Cit. 166 See Agwu (2009), pp. 497–502, 503–504, op. Cit. 167 See Abdur Rahman Alfa Shaban and Daniel Mumbere in “Conoravirus: US backs Africa in China racism saga; Beijing begs, vows probe”, Africa News, April 13 and 14, 2020, available at https:// www.africanews.com/2020/04/13/coronavirus-updates-across-africa-africanews-hub/ (last visited on April 14, 2020). 168 See Simon Marks in “Coronavirus ends China’s honeymoon in Africa”, Politico, April 15, 2020, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-ends-chinas-honeymoon-africa-205 217380.html (last visited on Saturady, April 18, 2020).

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a germane geopolitical development on the African continent where it needed to do anything to leverage its standing in the rivalry. So, realizing the political implication of this racism in terms of it undermining the Chinese diplomatic gains in Africa, the United States deplored the behavior169 ; perhaps, not knowing that in relation to the racism’s contradiction of the Chinese philosophy of Confucianism, what the Chinese racism did was reminiscent of the democratic American government’s use of poisonous weapons to eliminate crops in South Vietnam in contradiction to its own democratic philosophical outlook or conviction.170 But as this COVID-19 policy contradictions concerned the West, it must be noted that in the relatively self-reliant West, the healthcare system had also been massively overwhelmed; and that it was this overwhelming or weakness, especially in their neoliberal health and free market system, that warranted Spain’s nationalization of hospitals because additional responsibilities that had long been ceded to the market had become restored to the national government.171

9.4 COVID-19: Between Life and Livelihood Another important aspect of the debates around COVID-19, particularly in the neoliberal countries, is the imperative of balancing the exigencies of lives and livelihoods, especially as the global economy became turned on its head by the pandemic.172 Consequently, the head of the OEDC, Angel Gurria, declared that it is a “false dilemma to say to have to choose between lives and livelihoods”, and that dealing with both the virus and the economic consequences are interlinked.173 The choice between lives and livelihoods had led to some countries like India, realizing that COVID-19 might wipe-out a huge part of their population, prioritizing lives over livelihoods by instituting lockdowns that spanned weeks and even months.174 India was not alone in the enactment of these lockdowns. 169 See Abdur Rahman Alfa Shaban and Daniel Mumbere in “Conoravirus: US backs Africa in China

racism saga; Beijing begs, vows probe”, Africa News, April 13 and 14, 2020, available at https:// www.africanews.com/2020/04/13/coronavirus-updates-across-africa-africanews-hub/ (last visited on April 14, 2020), op. cit. 170 See Yakhot and Spirkin (1971), p. 6, op. cit. 171 See Ani Maitra in “COVID-19 and the neoliberal state of exception”, Aljazeera.com, March 29, 2020, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/covid-19-neoliberal-state-except ion-200325161722610.html (last visited on March 30, 2020), op. cit. 172 See Stephen Carroll in “The Interview: COVID-19: OECD chief says it’s a false dilemma to say choice between lives and livelihoods”, France24.com, available at https://www.france24.com/en/ business/20200518-covid-19-oecd-chief-says-it-s-a-false-dilemma-to-say-choice-between-livesand-livelihoods (last visited on June 30, 2020). 173 Loc. Cit. 174 See Gagan Deep Sharma and Mandeep Mahendru in “Lives or Livelihood: Insights from lockdown India due to COVID-19”, sciencedirect.com, available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/sci ence/article/pii/S2590291120300255 (last visited on June 30, 2020).

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Many countries in the world favoured lives more than livelihoods, and encouraged by the WHO, strictly instituted the lockdown of their countries, closure of land borders as well as the restriction of international of travels by air. But the domestic lockdown of cities was not even popular amongst some populist leaders like Donald Trump of the United States and Jair Bolsanario of Brazil who were COVID-19 skeptics and who favoured livelihoods more than lives and even strongly resisted the wearing of face masks.175 Jair Bolsonario, like Donald Trump, refused to comply with the regulations of wearing masks, despite his country’s deepening COVID-19 crisis, so much so that he was told by a judge that he faced a huge daily fine if he continued to disobey instructions to wear a face mask.176 But the economy-driven or livelihood-neoliberal complacency in the COVID-19 pandemic was also demonstrated by the Chinese government that was reluctant to impose a lockdown because it did not want to slow its industrial productions the same way that in the United States, it was not so much the number of deaths as it was “the multiple historic dips of the stock market” that awoken President Trump to the dangers of the virus, particularly as he was seeking re-election.177 Even when it was thought that the fatalities in COVID-19 had worried President Trump much more than dips of the stock exchange, the United State President began to controversially think about a second coronavirus task force that would focus on the re-opening of the country’s economy—to get our country open because “the cure [lockdown] cannot be worse than the problem itself”.178 This distrust in the lockdown as a cure that was capable of hurting the economy much more than the COVID-19 problem itself was a partisan political consideration that was endorsed by 8 Republican state Governors for the same neoliberal reasons.179 The endorsement of this partisan political consideration was particularly compelled by the need not to inculcate disillusionment in the GOP political leadership, something that was confirmed by The Economist in its considered view that there was a risk in an economic collapse that could be caused by shutting away much of the population because shutting them away was a disillusionment that “can seem

175 See

Sam Elliott in “Brazil’s ‘Donald Trump style’ president threatened to wear mask”, mirrow.co.uk, June 25, 2020, available at https://www.mirrow.co.uk/news/world-news/brazils-don ald-trump-style-president-22242178 (last visited on June 30, 2020). 176 Loc. Cit. 177 See Ani Maitra in “COVID-19 and the neoliberal state of exception”, Aljazeera.com, March 29, 2020, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/covid-19-neoliberal-state-except ion-200325161722610.html (last visited on March 30, 2020), op. cit. 178 See Jason Hoffman and Kelly Mena in “Trump considering second task force on reopening economy”, CNN politics, April 5, 2020, available at https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/politics/trump-eco nomy-task-force-coronavirus/index.html (last visited on April 5, 2020). 179 See Sarah Mervosh and Jack Healy in “Holdout States resist calls for stay-at-home orders: What are you waiting for?”, The New York Times, April 3, 2020, available at https://www.nytimes.com/ 2020/04/03/us/coronavirus-states-without-stay-home.html (last visited on Sunday, April 5, 2020); see also CNN Newsroom on New Day Sunday, by Christi Paul and Victor Blackwell, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Sunday, April 5, 2020 at 11am local time.

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almost as dire as the virus itself”.180 It was in this inherent partisan nature that President Trump almost repudiated science and used politics and cronyism to deal with COVID-19; he clearly discredited the capacity of public policy to incentivize people to stay at home during the COVID-19 pandemic; thus, attributing the lockdown to a betrayal of the US economy and throwing his weight behind those who demonstrated against the lockdown—urging them to liberate Michigan (with a GOP recalcitrant congress and a Democratic Governor) and Virginia (including Ohio, Kentucky, North Carolina and Utah) because the restrictive order was taking away their fundamental civil liberties and freedoms.181 However, the lesson from COVID-19, according to O’Connell—quoting Patricia Espinosa, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations on Climate Change—is that it has provided “a chance for nations to recover better, to include the most vulnerable in those plans, and a chance to shape the twenty-first century economy in ways that are clean, green, healthy, just, safe and more resilient”.182 In a number of ways, the pandemic showed the interconnectedness of everything in the value chain of human existence—“from biology to economics, technology, trade, investment, race, culture, identity and everything else.183 For instance, economically for Nigeria, a country that has about 80% of its foreign exchange dependent on oil revenue, COVID-19 and the oil dispute between Saudi Arabia and Russia had caused a crash in oil prices, prompting Nigeria’s 2020 Budget to be turned upside down.184 This situation was not helped by the OPEC + production cuts that had further reduced Nigeria’s production quota185 ; even when domestically, that production cuts had been forced on Nigeria by the militant threats in the Niger Delta. Although Nigeria had vowed that it would not re-open its economy fully until it was able to strike a delicate balance between safety and economic considerations,186 a neoliberal economic pull made it to prioritize livelihood over life when it decided to lift

180 See

“Troubling symptons: The peril of politics in a pandemic”, The Economist online, April 13, 2020, available at https://www.economist.com/international/2020/04/13/the-perils-of-politicsin-a-pandemic?fsrc=newsletter&utm-campaign=the-economist-today&utm-medium=newslette r&utm (last visited on April 16, 2020). 181 See “Protests against stay-at-home orders break out in US”, Punchng.com, available at https:// punchng.com/protests-against-stay-at-home-orders-break-out-in-us/#more-725950 (last visited on Saturday, April 18, 2020). 182 See Mary Ellen O’Connell in “We can ‘recover better’ through the art of law in the international community”, EJIL: Talk!, April 27, 2020, available at https://www.ejiltalk.org/we-can-recoverbetter-through-the-art-of-law-in-the-international-community/ (last visited on Tuesday, April 28, 2020), op. cit. 183 See Tuesday with Reuben Abati in “Coping with Coronanomics”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, April 28, 2020, back page and page 22. 184 Loc. Cit. 185 Loc. cit. 186 See Omeiza Ajayi in “COVID-19: We won’t re-open economy fully until … FG”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, May 20, 2020, pp. 1, 6.

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the national lockdown with the resumption of domestic flights on July 8, 2020,187 even when the COVID-19 infectious cases in the country had risen to 26,484, with 603 deaths.188 The reality of COVID-19 had become obvious. And as The Economist put it: Covid-19 is here for a while at least. The vulnerable will be afraid to go out and innovation will slow, creating a 90% economy that consistently fails to reach its potentials. Many people will fall ill and some of them will die. You may have lost interest in the pandemic. It has not lost interest in you.189

Thus, across many parts of the world, the tanking of economies (despite the spiking cases of COVID-19) was to compel the imperative of livelihood over life, thus, leading to the lifting of the hard lockdowns against the realization that COVID19 had come to stay; and that what was needed were for people to adapt to it.190 The EU, thus, prioritized livelihood over life when it opened its borders to tourists in exclusion of those from the United States.191 Even in the United States itself, some states (in apparent consideration of the fact that COVID-19 had become a ‘new normal’ that would always live with humanity afterwards) considered livelihood over life and lifted the lockdowns, even though they stressed the imperative of physical distancing and the other safety measures that aimed to combat the virus.192 At the 75th birthday anniversary of the United Nations, the Kazakhstan President reminded the world that COVID-19 exposed the world’s past ‘mistakes and failures’; as he argued that what the world needed to do was to build a strong global health system; reach a global agreement to protect global production and supply chains; increase the WHO’s capacity; and develop a network of regional centers for disease control and biosafety as well as an international agency for biological safety under the auspices of the United Nations.193 The development of a network of regional centers for disease control and biosafety that is envisaged here is different from the 187 See Johnbosco Agbakwuru and Dirisu Yakubu in “FEC okays #20.4bn for Lagos airport runway

extension: FG okays July 8 for resumption of domestic flights”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, July 2, 2020, p. 7. 188 See “COVID-19 update: Lagos records 120 new infections as confirmed cases rise to 26,484”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, July 2, 2020, p. 1. 189 See “The way we live now: Covid-19 is here to stay. People will have to adapt”, economist.com, July 4th 2020 edition, available at https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/07/04/covid19-is-here-to-stay-people-will-have-to-adapt?fsrc=newsletter&utm-campaign=the-economist (last visited on July 4, 2020). 190 Loc. cit. 191 See Matina Stevis-Gridneff in “EU may bar American travellers as it reopens borders, citing failure on virus”, The New York Times, June 23, 2020, updated July 1, 2020, available at https://www. nytimes.com/2020/06/23/world/europe/coronavirus-EU/American-travel-ban.html (last visited on July 2, 2020). 192 See “More US states begin lifting virus lockdown orders”, BBC News, April 27, 2020, available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52435648 (last visited on July 2, 2020). 193 See “COVID-19 has exposed our past mistakes and failures” says Kazakhstan President”, UN News, September 23, 2020, available at https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/09/1073322?utm_sou rce=UN (last visited on September 24, 2020).

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African Center of disease control (CDC) that China built for Africa.194 The ChinaAfrica CDC in Addis Ababa is unilateralist rather than multilateralist; more so when it has the unacceptable consequence of fostering Africa’s dependency. The fact that the center that was advocated by the Kazakhstan President should be under the United Nations certainly underlines the imperative of multilateralism rather than the populists’ inclination to advocate that nativism and unilateralism should be the norm in the world we live in today. Sadly, the divide between the United States and China still riled the United Nations’ COVID-19 Meeting at the organization’s 75th Anniversary.195 As the United States, China and Russia fought bitterly at the Security Council’s meeting, the United Nations’ Secretary-General lamented that it was “a lack of global preparedness, cooperation, unity and solidarity” that led the COVID19 to spread out of control and cause deaths that had neared one million globally.196 In the said Security Council meeting, the US President Trump who had felt that his re-election had been stymied by COVID-19 challenged the disease’s spread across the world, demanding that China should be held to account for spreading the “plague” of COVID-19 across the world.197 China angrily rebutted the Trump’s accusation, regretting that the US “with the most advanced medical technologies and system in the world” ought to have contained the virus, urging that “if someone should be held accountable, it should be a few US politicians [including President Trump] themselves”.198 Thus, for China, President Trump should solve his own problems rather than embarking on a blame game that would only create divisions instead of engendering a global solidarity to solve it. For this altercation at the UN Security Council meeting (amongst other reasons), President Trump “failed to deliver the expected American video speech [a pre-recorded video speech for the virtual UN General Assembly meeting]; it was rather the acting Deputy United States’ Ambassador, Cherith Norman Chalet, that addressed the General Assembly “live from UN headquarters”.199

194 The

Chinese disease center (CDC) for Africa is headquartered in Addis Ababa, the opening of which was officiated by the African Union Commissioner for Social Affairs, H E, Amira Elfadi Mohammed Elfadi; see “AU commends China for continued support to building Africa’s capacity of disease control, prevention”, Xinhua, July 29, 2020, available at http://www.xinhuanet.com/eng lish/africa/2020-07/29/c-139249467.htm (last visited on July 31, 2020); see also Peter Fabricius in “Ethiopia: Nation urged to stop China building Africa Disease Control Center HQ in Addis Ababa”, allafrica.com, June 9, 2020, available at https://allafrica.com/stories/202006090127.html (last visited on July 31, 2020), op. cit. 195 See “World in disarray: Angry exchanges at top UN meeting on COVID-19: UN chief warns he fears the worst if world handles climate in the same way as it has the coronavirus pandemic”, Aljazeera, September 25, 2020, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/09/25/world-indisarray-angry-exchanges-at-top-un-meeting-on-covid-19 (last visited on September 25, 2020). 196 Loc. Cit. 197 Loc. Cit. 198 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 199 See Owei Lakemfa in “UN at 75 holds lots of hope and hopelessness”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, September 25, 2020, p. 17.

References

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References Agwu, F. A. (2009). National interest, international law and our shared destiny. Ibadan: Spectrum Books Limited. Bolton, J. (2020). The room where it happened: A white house memoir, former national security advisor of the United States. New York: Simon & Schuster. Dash, K. C., Cronin, P., & Goddard, C. R. (2003). International political economy: State-market relations in a changing global order. 2nd (edn.), Boulder (Colorado). London: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Sorensen, M. (1968). Manual of public international law. London: Macmillan. Sanu, O. O. (2016). Audacity on the bound: A diplomatic odyssey. Ibadan: Mosuro. Wisner, B. (1988). Power and need in Africa: Basic human needs and development policies. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd. Yakhot, O., & Spirkin, A. (1971). The basic principles of dialectical and historical materialism. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Chapter 10

Multilateralism in the Age of Neoliberalism, Globalization, Populism and Nationalism

10.1 Nigeria and the Burden of Neo-liberalism [Developing] countries that decided to globalize … were those that seem to be having better economic performance not only in terms of growth but also in fighting poverty (Ernesto Zedillo).1

This is an argument on the challenges that some African countries like Nigeria face on the contest between efficiency and ethics in the overarching issue of neo-liberalism. The West is certainly bacon in the fostering of democratic ethos, particularly at the political level; but the same West also scientifically insists on the neo-liberal economic approach and its attendant Washington Consensus that foists the capitalist ethos and the attendant market economic liberalization values on hapless and vulnerable nations like Nigeria. As a developing country, Nigeria is one of the victims of this imposition. When the federal government embarked on a downstream sector deregulation (with a hike in oil prices) and tariffs adjustment in the power sector that caused the Nigerian Labour to threaten a nation-wide strike and a national lockdown (beginning from Monday, September 28, 2020), the government was unequivocal that “it would incur the wrath of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and other international lending institutions to which Nigeria is indebted, should it reverse the hike in electricity tariff and petrol pump price to the old prices”.2 1 Quoted

in “This Week: Trump’s Golan Fiasco, How the US Misunderstands Russia, and More”, Brookings Foreign Policy, available at http://connect.brookings.edu/this-week-trumps-golan-fia sco-how-the-us-misunderstands-russia-and-more?ecid=ACsprvu1S4rUN12TawsuzYuWKbx38G D1mLziuMCh4Juacu-7imY968T4AWYxYGSuOZ1KwZPA4N8Y&utm-campaign=Foreign% 20Policy&utm-source=hs-email&utm-medium=email&utm-content=71051346 (last visited on Monday, March 25, 2019). 2 See Victor Young, Demola Akinyemi, Perez Brisibe & Boluwaji Obahopo in “Anger as labour leaders abort strike, mass protest”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, September 29, 2020, p. 5.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0_10

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Ostensibly, the “government’s hands were tied by international financial institutions that the country is indebted to”; so, the government refused to discuss the issue of price reversal because it had no mandate from the Bretton Woods institutions to do so, preferring rather to ask the leabour leaders to discuss palliatives that would soften the hardship for the citizenry.3 Even China with its so-called “steroidal state capitalism” … “grossly distorting markets at home and abroad”,4 is also a victim of this Western scientific approach to the principles of economics and neo-liberalism. Unfortunately, it is evidently hard to reconcile a commitment to democratic values with the scientific insistence on the myth of a value-free economics in the ideology of liberalism; more so because “economics embodies ethical judgments” that when introduced into policy under the guise of science, “one set of values prevails without public debate, violating the principles of a democratic society.5 The maintenance of the scientific status of neo-liberalism minimizes public dissent and citizenry participation in democratic societies because it promotes one set of values and minimizes the scope of public input in decision-making.6 Thus, “by sealing important decisions from democratic input, “scientific” policymakers offer little incentive to develop citizenship skills or to engage in public dialogues concerning competing visions of the good society”.7 This is more so because “scientific analysis of social issues contains an inherent bias”.8 In fact, the “policymakers relying on scientific methods will inevitably focus on observable aspects of an issue while de-emphasizing or ignoring intangible or ethical considerations”—the tangible of which “tends to limit the scope of analysis to that which can be measured”.9 In other words, because neo-liberalism moves modern liberalism closer to classical liberalism by reducing the role of government in economic affairs—it, thus, concentrates efforts on the tangible issues of efficiency and growth, rather than the ethical issues of “equity and redistribution of income”.10

10.2 In Neo-liberalism and Corruption The guiding question to be interrogated here is this, acknowledging that there are internal contradictions that foster corruption in Nigeria, why should external variables rooted in neo-liberal countries or political systems aid, abet or promote the 3 Loc.

Cit. “Can pandas fly?: If Xi Jinping reforms the economy, he could both calm the trade war and make China richer”, The Economist, February 23-March 1st 2019, p. 11, op. cit. 5 See Clark (1998); Political Economy: A Comparative Approach, Second Edition, London, Praeger Publishers, Westport, Connecticut, p. xii. 6 Loc. Cit. 7 Loc. Cit. 8 Loc. Cit. 9 Loc. Cit. 10 Ibid, p. 126. 4 See

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malaise of corruption in Nigeria, even despite the latter’s clear commitment to neoliberal values. This investigation is predicated on the hypotheses or assumptions that market-oriented economic policies are associated with lower levels of political corruption, and state interventions in the economy with higher levels—that is, the neo-liberal argument that open trade and investment policies and low, effective regulatory burdens do correlate with lower levels of political corruption.11 Unfortunately, “corporate fraud is not just present [in neo-liberal orders] … it is widespread in many neo-liberalized economies of both income-rich and income-poor countries”.12 As a matter of fact, cheating and scandals (whether in the US, UK or Germany) have become so commonplace that “certain practices and norms that many people in the global North considered shocking only a while ago have become routine in public life”.13 It was because of the corruption in the UK that an acute care crisis erupted in an “infant mortality” that went on a rise “while life expectancy for both men and women stalled and was drooping in some areas; so much so that in 2017, “the number of homeless families and individuals placed in temporary accommodation rose by nearly 80,000, a 60% increase since 2012”.14 The care crisis in the UK was inextricably linked to the entrenchment of neo-liberalism, which “remakes everything into the image of the market” and encourages things to be perceived through the lens of profitability.15 The United States has also compromised on corruption in the West African nation of Equatorial Guinea by forcing Teodorin Nguema Obiang Mangue, the son of the country’s leader, to turn over $31.3 million ill-gotten money, instead of putting him on trial and using the opportunity to expose corruption in that country.16 In addition, an EU Commissioner for Home Affairs had equally been quoted to have said that “there are no corruption-free zones in Europe”, and that “corruption in the 28 countries of the EU [that was before Brexit] is costing European tax-payers about 120bn … a year, the equivalent of the Union’s annual budget”.17 Western countries willingly accept loots from the developing countries because these loots help them in building their own economies. This was the reason that Major Hamza Al-Mustapha, Nigeria’s former Head of State’s (the late General Sani Abacha) Chief Security Officer was

11 See

Thacker and Gerring (2005), pp. 233–254; also available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/387 7884?seq=1 (last visited on Friday, January 17, 2020. 12 See Jorg Wiegratz and David Whyte in “How neo-liberalism’s moral order feeds fraud and corruption, The Conversation, available at https://theconversation.com/how-neoliberalisms.moral-orderfeeds-fraud-and-corruption-60946 (last visited on January 17, 2020). Parenthesis mine. 13 Loc. Cit. 14 See Catherine Rottenberg in “Neo-liberalism has led to a crisis in care—and we urgently need to solve it” The Conversation, available at https://theconversation.com/amp/neoliberalism-has-ledto-a-crisis-in-care-and-we-urgently-need-to-solve-it-107920 (last visited on January 18, 2020). 15 Loc. Cit. 16 See Agwu (2016), p. 725, op. Cit. 17 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine.

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amazed at the way the late former Head of State was being blackmailed for his so-called loots he allegedly stashed abroad in overseas.18 Al-Mustapaha argued that General Abacha never stole Nigeria’s money because the usual practice was that when one was opening a bank account (both domestically and in overseas), the person must go to the bank for biometric capture, which General Abacha never did because he never travelled to those Western countries at the heat of the economic sanctions against Nigeria.19 For Al-Mustapha, General Sani Abacha did not append his signature or thumb print that would suggest that the money belonged to him; rather, the billions stashed in banks overseas during the Abacha regime was not a unilateral decision; it was a decision taken after a meeting with relevant stakeholders and monarchs from all over the country.20 Al-Mustapha insisted that: We gathered Emirs and Chiefs from the South and from the North together with VIPs of that time, those in government and those outside government. We met at a place called Camp Bassey Officers’ Mess in the Brigade of Guards. It was there we deliberated on the threat to sanction Nigeria. Many decisions were taken. The meeting was also attended by the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Planning, the CBN etc.21

Whatever may be the merits or demerits of Major Al-Mustapha’s account on this matter, he was, nevertheless, attacked by critics for defending the late General Abacha.22 In fact, in Nigeria, corrupt practices have broken bounds by particularly, as exemplified in the corruption in the Niger Delta Development Commission,23 gathering societal supports.24 In the EFCC, a supposedly anti-corruption agency, 18 See Henry Ojelu and Ibrahim Hassan Wuyo in “Looting: Al-Mustapha under attacks over comments on Abacha: Don’t vilify Abacha, query those who stole billions he left, says Al-Mustapha; says Emirs, chiefs were consulted when money was kept overseas”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, June 12, 2020, p. 7. 19 Loc. Cit. 20 Loc. Cit. 21 Loc. Cit. 22 Loc. Cit. 23 See Victor Oluwasegun and Tony Akowe in “NDDC spent #4.2b in one day, Akpabio tells Reps”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, July 21, 2020, pp. 1, 8; see also Tuesday with Reuben Abati in “NDDC and other stories”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, July 21, 2020, back page. 24 According to Karl Maier, corruption in Nigeria starts from the expectations people themselves because if an honest aspirant to a political office comes along, his village and his family will say, ‘no, not that one because he won’t eat and he won’t let us eat’; see Maier (2000); This House has Fallen: Nigeria in Crisis, London, Penguin Books, p. 302. This corruption sentiment extends to its justification in the controversial societal maxim of ‘Monkey no good, but em mama like-am’, a maxim that was ostensibly behind Asari Dokubo’s assertion that the alleged #81bn theft at the NDDC was a mere pickpocketing (in “we are talking about #81 billion being pickpocketed from Niger Delta while the bulk of our money, our resources, is being carted away and we are not talking); see Jamilah Nasir in “Asa Dokubo: #81bn theft at NDDC mere pickpocketing”, The Cable, July 26, 2020, available at https://www.thecable.ng/asari-dokubo-n81bn-theft-at-nddc-mere-pickpocketing (last visited on July 27, 2020); see also Emma Amaize, Dapo Akinrefon, Johnbosco Agbakwuru, Tordue Salem & Chioma Onuegbu in “Tension, as N-Delta groups plot siege to NNDC: … #81bn theft at NDDC mere pickpocketing—Asari Dokubo”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, July 27, 2020, p. 7. This was also the

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some information got to the Presidency about some of the dealings of its Chairman, Ibrahim Magu, both in and outside Nigeria, a situation that prompted a presidential panel led by Justice Ayo Salami to investigate him.25 The allegations against Magu were mind-numbing and of an unimaginable proportion of greed, comprising, amongst others,26 his accounting for 380 houses that had been seized, seven vessels loaded with crude oil, and the disposal of assets worth #37 billion27 —the case of the seven vessels loaded with crude oil aforementioned being one of the onshore contradictions that promote offshore criminality or piracy in the Gulf of Guinea maritime area.28 The alleged corruption cases against the EFCC’s boss were quite incredible—so much so that some members of the team/panel investigating him were primed to be “dispatched abroad [presumably to Western countries] to comb banks where it was alleged that Magu stashed huge sums of money29 :” But as the situation concerned Major Al-Mustapha and monies stashed by Nigerians to the West, it is worthy of note that the instruction in his narrative is simply that the West accepted the money coming from Nigeria for the West’s own selfish ends, more so when General Abacha allegedly never travelled to the West for a biometric capture. This prevalence of corruption was essentially because everything in the Western world is judged by market categories. And this is probably because everything is also judged by market categories in the entire neo-liberal North30 that, unfortunately, there has been some resistance abroad to Nigeria’s bid to recover its national wealth that was stashed to the place. This resistance informed President Muhammadu Buhari’s reiteration for the umpteenth time at the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly of his commitment on the need for other countries to support the agitation for Nigeria’s recovery and return of its stolen wealth; during which he reminded all the Heads of State and Governments (especially of the neo-liberal North) in attendance that Nigeria context in which the Annang Foundation, a foremost socio-cultural association in Annagland (Akwa Ibom state) warned, in a statement by its President, Professor Ibanga Akpan, that those harassing Senator Akpabio should “tread with caution so as not to overstep their bounds and draw the ire of his kinsmen”; see Emma Amaize, Henry Umoru, Brisibe Perez, Chioma Unuegbu & Tordue Salem in “NDDC: Reps tackle Akpabio, Senate walks Ojougboh out … Those After Akpabio must tread with caution—Annang Foundation”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, July 22, 2020, pp. 1, 5, 35. For more cases of the Nigerian society legitimatizing corruption, see also Agwu (2016), p. 730, op. Cit. 25 See Emma Nnadozie, Kingsley Omonobi and Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Day 4: Panel grills ‘Magu’s 7 untouchables”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 10, 2020, pp. 1, 5. 26 Ibid, p. 34. 27 See Kingsley Omonobi, Ikechukwu Nnochiri, Johnbosco Agbakwuru and Dirisu Yakubun in “Day 3: More posers for Magu”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, July 9, 2020, pp. 1, 5. 28 See Agwu (2016), p. 708, op. Cit. 29 See Emma Nnadozie, Kingsley Omonobi and Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Day 4: Panel grills ‘Magu’s 7 untouchables”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 10, 2020, p, 5, op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 30 See Catherine Rottenberg in “Neo-liberalism has led to a crisis in care—and we urgently need to solve it” The Conversation, available at https://theconversation.com/amp/neoliberalism-has-ledto-a-crisis-in-care-and-we-urgently-need-to-solve-it-107920 (last visited on January 18, 2020), op. cit.

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would continue to advocate the recovery of illicit financial assets notwithstanding the reluctance of some states.31 Even in President Buhari’s bilateral meeting with the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the sidelines of the UK-Africa Investment Summit that held in January 2020 in London, he called for Britain’s cooperation in Nigeria’s anti-corruption war by facilitating through its National Crime Agency, the extradition of Nigerians that sought haven in the UK (and other European countries) when he assumed office in 2015 and vowed his anti-corruption campaign.32 This was happening when, in its international corruption index of 2014, Transparent International (TI) had ranked Nigeria the 136th most corrupt country out of the 178 ranked countries; even when the African Union had declared President Buhari its anti-corruption champion—the champion declaration that happened not minding the fact that it was at a time the country had also been “ranked 148th out of 180 countries surveyed”.33 And this was also notwithstanding the fact that Nigeria in the 2019 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) that was released by TI revealed that the country had further slipped down in the global rating, scoring 26 out of 100 percent—having been ranked 146 out of 180 countries analyzed.34 With the CPI report, the TI “ranked Nigeria the second most corrupt country in West Africa”.35 Nigeria and many African countries have lost much more to Illicit Financial Flows (IFFs) or cross-border movement of capital that serve to conceal illegal activities or evade tax than the corruption on the continent.36 But Nigeria under President Buhari, as reported by the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) was deeply immersed in the recovery of the country’s stolen and illicitly transferred funds, which, according to him, “contributed to the African Union selection of President Mohammadu Buhari as Africa’s Champion on Anti-Corruption”.37 So, when the British Prime Minister David Cameron briefed the Queen at an anticorruption summit he was hosting in London and described Nigeria and Afghanistan 31 See Professor Bolaji Owasanoye in “War Against Corruption and Nigeria’s Foreign Policy”, paper at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) One-Day Conference on Nigeria’s Foreign Policy under the Admistration of President Muhammadu Buhari (2015–2019), Thursday, January 31st 2019. p. 8. Unpublished. 32 See “Buhari seeks extradition of fugitives from UK”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, January 21, 2020, pp. 1, 7; see also Johnbosco Agbakwuru in “Anti-Corruption war: Buhari seeks help from UK”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, January 21, 2020, p. 13. 33 See Femi Aribisala in “The leadership Nigeria desperately needs”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, July 3, 2018, p. 40, op. cit. 34 See Soni Daniel, Ikechukwu Nnochiri and Dirisu Yakubu in “Nigeria drops point in global corruption index, ranked 146 out of 180 countries”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 24, 2020), p. 12. 35 See Abbas Jimoh, Ronald Mutum and Idowu Isamotu in “FG kicks as TI ranks Nigeria 2nd most corrupt ECOWAS nation”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Friday, January 24, 2020, p. 54. 36 See Professor Bolaji Owasanoye in “Interogating International Law and Global collective action against Corruption: Return of Stolen Assets in Perspective”, Keynote Address by the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), at the opening ceremony of the 42nd NSIL Annual Conference, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) on November 13th 2019, p. 7. Unpublished. 37 Ibid, p. 17.

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as “fantastically corrupt”—“two of the most corrupt countries in the world”,38 President Buhari fired back that that Cameron should facilitate the return Nigeria’s stolen assets/funds to Abuja.39 The West’s imposition of conditionalities for Nigeria to fulfill to facilitate the return of stolen funds was exemplified by the United States, which, in the wake of an agreement that Nigeria signed with Washington for the return of General Abacha’s looted $308 million that was stashed away in Jersey, tied the return of the money to three major projects spread across Nigeria’s three recognized regions after independence—the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the Abuja-Kano Road, and the Second Niger Bridge.40 This suggestion, which smacked of Nigeria’s loss of its sovereign power, may have been informed by the US insistence that the money would not diverted for other purposes,41 especially in the light of Nigeria’s dysfunctional national questions in which President Buhari was blamed for not accepting South-east region of the country as a part of Nigeria,42 which prompted his government’s decision to exclude the region from a $22.7b loan request.43 But the aforementioned notwithstanding, in the Panama Papers that was the biggest leak in the history of data journalism, it was obvious that the Western world would not claim ignorance of the fact that many world and African leaders, celebrities, athletes, FIFA officials and other criminal elements hid money by using anonymous shell corporations across the world, including the opening of secret offshore Swiss bank accounts.44 A shell corporation “is a corporation without active business operations or significant assets”; which, though “not all necessarily illegal, but they are sometimes used illegitimately, such as to disguise business ownership from law 38 See Joseph Jibueze and Adebisi Onanuga in “Nigeria rejects Cameron’s ‘fantastically corrupt’ label”, The Nation (Lagos), Wednesday, May 11, 2016, p. 1. 39 See Chris Iwara, Ndubuisi Orji, Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye and Romanus Ugwu, Wole Balogun in “Buhari fires back at Cameron: Yes, Nigeria is corrupt, but return stolen funds in UK”, Daily Sun (Lagos), Thursday, May 12, 2016, pp. 1, 6; see also Muyiwa Adeyemi, Mohammed Abubakar, Saxone Akhaine and Tunji Omofoye in “Return Nigeria’s stolen assets, Buhari tells Cameron: President says he doesn’t need apology from British PM”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, May 12, 2016, pp. 1, 7. 40 See Anote Ajeluorou, Seye Olumide and Olawunmi Ojo in “Why US attached conditions to return of $308 m Abacha loot”, The Guardian (Lagos), Thursday, February 6, 2020, pp. 1, 6. 41 Ibid, p. 6. 42 See Lawrence Njoku in “How Southeast is responding to exclusion from FG’s $22.7bn loan”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, March 18, 2020, pp. 14–15. 43 See John Akubo, Azimazi Momoh Jimoh, Segun Olaniyi and Femi Adekoya in “Uproar as Senate approves Buhari’s $22.7b loan request: PDP, rights group, others, condemn approval; OPS expresses worry over nation’s ability to pay …”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 6, 2020, pp. 1, 6, op. Cit.; see also Henry Umoru in “$22.7bn loan: S-East NASS Caucus kicks, bemoans exclusion of the zone; Meets Senate President, Speaker”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 13, 2020, p. 15, op. Cit; and Azimazi Momoh Jimoh in “Ekweremadu, others kick over South East’s exclusion from $22.7b loan”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, March 13, 2020, p. 3, op. cit. 44 See John Alechenu, Sunday Aborisade, Eniola Akinkuotu, Adelani Adepegba and Oladimeji Ramon in “#PanamaPapers: Saraki, Ibori in fresh controversy over secret assets”, The Punch (Lagos), Tuesday, April 5, 2016, p. 8.

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enforcement or the public”.45 In other words, a shell corporation is a corporation that exists only on paper and has no office and no employees, may have a bank account or hold passive investments or be the registered owner of assets, such as intellectual property or ships that are used for tax evasion, tax avoidance, money laundering and IFFs.46 As a matter of fact, the IFFs “include money laundering, offshore bank deposits to conceal the proceeds of crime or simply to avoid taxes (tax evasion), trade misinvoicing, transfer pricing, false invoicing, base erosion and profit shifting, bribery by international companies, smuggling of artifacts and minerals”.47 Both corruption and IFFs are a threat to global peace and security because they undermine governance, economies, cause poverty, undercut public thrust in institutions and encumber the ability of states to deliver infrastructure, public education, health and other social services.48 In Africa: It is estimated that IFFs cost Africa billions annually. The continent was reported as at 2010 to have lost $1 trillion within 50 years to IFFs. This is enough to fill the financing gap of US$68- $108b Africa’s infrastructure as estimated by the African Development Bank 2018. Nigeria is estimated to have lost US$140b to illicit financial flows between 2002 to 2011, which is sufficient to equip basic education facilities and train teachers in all the 774 local government councils in Nigeria, going by the current education sector allocation of 7.04%, a mere USD1.725b in the 2019 budget.49

The above reality explains why in the international legal instruments against corruption and IFFs, particularly at the signing of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, reportedly made a remarkable statement about the destructions of corruption and the IFFs.50 According to Annan, the provision of UNCAC on asset recovery obligates member states to return assets obtained through corruption to the countries from whom they were stolen is a major breakthrough that “will help tackle a pressing problem for many developing countries where corrupt elites have looted billions of 45 See “Shell corporation”, available at https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/03gmgn& hl=en-NG&q=Shell+corporation&kgs=2e4b9a72c1ffa27b&shndl=o&source=sh (last visited on Saturday, March 21, 2020). 46 See “Shell corporation” in Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell-corpor ation (last visited on March 21, 2020). 47 See Professor Bolaji Owasanoye in “Interogating International Law and Global collective action against Corruption: Return of Stolen Assets in Perspective”, Keynote Address by the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), at the opening ceremony of the 42nd NSIL Annual Conference, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) on November 13th 2019, p. 7, op. Cit. 48 Ibid, pp. 2–3. 49 Ibid, p. 7; see also Agwu (2016), pp. 226–228, op. Cit. 50 See Professor Bolaji Owasanoye in “Interogating International Law and Global collective action against Corruption: Return of Stolen Assets in Perspective”, Keynote Address by the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), at the opening ceremony of the 42nd NSIL Annual Conference, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) on November 13th 2019, p. 3, op. Cit.

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dollars that are now desperately needed by new governments to address the social and economic damage inflicted on their societies”.51 The prevalence of corruption and IFFs in developing countries is explained by the fact of the rent-seeking nature of African capitalism52 —the fact in Africa, for example, where the clientele or “gatekeeper states that controlled access to foreign aid, receipts from natural-resource exports and taxes on trade”, who are mainly “authoritarian rulers used patronage [or stomach infrastructure] networks to woo pliant elites, especially those of their own ethnic group”.53 Nigeria is demonstrative of one of these “gatekeeper states” in Africa where the oil major giant—the Britishowned Shell Corporation—a private company from the neo-liberal UK that, despite the claim that it “attaches the greatest importance to business integrity”54 —has made fetish of corruption and the IFFs, especially through bribery. In the company’s statement on business integrity, it argued with respect to integrity that: It’s one of our core values and is a central tenet of the business principles that govern the way we do business. Shell has clear rules on anti-bribery and corruption; and these are included in our code of conduct for all staff. There is no place for bribery or corruption in our company.55

Despite this pretension about its integrity, Shell and Eni (Eni being an Italian oil giant) were accused of corruption in the purchase of OPL245, a Nigerian “offshore oil block estimated to hold nine billion barrels of crude, for $1.3 billion”; an oil block that reserved an estimated 9.23 billion barrels of crude oil56 and the controversial sale of which had been in contention for decades.57 In 1998, the oil block was awarded by the then Petroleum Minister Dan Etete to Malabu Oil and Gas, followed by years of legal wrangling between Malabu, the Nigerian government and Shell.58 The cause of the legal tussle was that the oil majors allegedly “altered the terms of the agreement in their favour, through the removal of ‘profit oil’, which was caused by the exclusion of the federal government in the signing of the Production Sharing Agreement, PSA”.59 This alteration was “designed to favour only the oil companies as the arrangement would have given the nation a poor share of 41 percent as against the International 51 Loc.

cit. Nicholas Norbrook in “Rebooting African Capitalism: From rent seeking to business building”, The African Report, No. 111, April–May-June, 2020, pp. 49–58. 53 See “Democracy in Africa: Generation game; across the continent, young protesters are standing up to aging autocrats”, The Economist, March 7th–13th 2020, p. 32. Parenthesis mine. 54 See Ejiofor Alike in “Shell, Eni to stand trial in Italy over Malabu deal”, ThisDay (Lagos), Thursday, December 21, 2017, p. 8. 55 Loc. Cit. 56 See “OPL 245: Nigerian witness testifies in Italian court”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, January 30, 2020, p. 8. 57 See Ejiofor Alike in “Shell, Eni to stand trial in Italy over Malabu deal”, ThisDay (Lagos), Thursday, December 21, 2017, p. 8, op. cit. 58 Loc. Cit. 59 See “Malabu scandal cost Nigeria $6bn revenue—Report”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, November 27, 2018, p. 8. 52 See

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Monetary Fund, IMF’s recommendation of 65 to 85 percent revenue”.60 The consequence of the resolution of this legal wrangling was that ultimately, Shell won the right to the oil block in a partnership with Eni.61 The deal that followed the resolution of the legal wrangling was negotiated62 or brokered by the President Goodluck Jonathan administration in 2011, in which the government acted as an intermediary between the oil majors (Shell and Eni) and the Malabu Oil and Gas, the Nigerian company allegedly controlled by the then Petroleum Minister, Dan Etete.63 The bribery and corruption allegation in the Malabu deal was that Shell and Eni never acquired their rights over the lucrative oil block in line with the Nigerian law.64 In other words, the oil majors were said to have given out bribes in their bid to acquire OPL245, one of Nigeria’s riches oil blocks65 ; and that the money was funneled to individuals, including Etete and Jonathan (which Jonathan denied.66 The deal, struck in 2011, became a subject of cross-border investigations that spanned over six countries; and “several Nigerian government officials were believed to have received several million dollars in bribes for the enabling roles they played”.67 After a preliminary investigation, a Tribunal in Milan (Italy) indicted the oil majors for the mind-boggling sums that had been stolen from Nigeria’s public purse and recommended them for trial for the alleged offences.68 The Shell and Eni’s deal for Nigeria’s OPL 245 oil block had reduced the country’s expected revenue by nearly $6 billion.69 The expectation was Nigeria would revoke the OPL 245 license rather than allow the oil majors to make enormous profit from it; but from all indications, the federal government allowed the oil firms to begin processing Zabazaba, one of the oil fields in the block until the probe of the deal began.70 As in the case of Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke—Nigeria’s former Petroleum Resources Minister in President Goodluck Jonathan administration—she was not just an oil Minister under the Jonathan administration, she reported to have stolen so 60 Loc.

cit. Ejiofor Alike in “Shell, Eni to stand trial in Italy over Malabu deal”, ThisDay (Lagos), Thursday, December 21, 2017, p. 8, op. cit. 62 See “Malabu scandal cost Nigeria $6bn revenue—Report”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, November 27, 2018, p. 8, op. cit. 63 See Ejiofor Alike in “Shell, Eni to stand trial in Italy over Malabu deal”, ThisDay (Lagos), Thursday, December 21, 2017, p. 8, op. cit. 64 Loc. Cit. 65 See “OPL 245: Nigerian witness testifies in Italian court”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, January 30, 2020, p. 8, op. cit. 66 See Ejiofor Alike in “Shell, Eni to stand trial in Italy over Malabu deal”, ThisDay (Lagos), Thursday, December 21, 2017, p. 8, op. cit. 67 See “Malabu scandal cost Nigeria $6bn revenue—Report”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, November 27, 2018, p. 8, op. cit. 68 See Ejiofor Alike in “Shell, Eni to stand trial in Italy over Malabu deal”, ThisDay (Lagos), Thursday, December 21, 2017, p. 8, op. cit. 69 See “Malabu scandal cost Nigeria $6bn revenue—Report”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, November 27, 2018, p. 8, op. cit. 70 Loc. Cit. 61 See

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much money,71 including the alleged missing $2.5 billion in her Ministry,72 for which the Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu, was to argue that she was “under protective custody” by the international community; otherwise, she would have long been arrested and returned to Nigeria for prosecution.73 According to the EFCC Chairman: I was in London this year; we did investigation together with the UK team, and anywhere I go, I always call for extradition of corrupt Nigerians to return back the money … We are in touch with the international community; she is under protective custody, otherwise, we have arrested her, return her to Nigeria.74

In Nigeria, the head of the British Council’s Rule of Law and Anti-corruption Programme had alleged that the country’s anti-corruption fight had been frustrated by the EFCC; but the EFCC Chairman, Magu, posited that it was the British government that was frustrating the EFCC, having unduly accommodated and protected Diezani under the guise of investigating her for four years without any idea of when the British probe would end.75 The most unfortunate issue with the international legal instruments (Conventions) against corruption and the IFFs, including the UNCAC,76 is that all the instruments are the United Nations General Assembly Resolutions, including those of the regional organizations (like the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption, the Southern African Development Community Protocol against Corruption, and the Organization of American States Inter-American Convention against Corruption77 ). Although these Conventions are a Soft Law that has a high degree of legal potency,78 the mere fact that the Conventions are bereft of the Security Council engagement—a fact that could have given them an inescapably peremptory legal strength that the decisions of the Security Council carry79 —renders them virtually impotent and incapable of deterring the developed countries of the West from 71 See Abdul Gafer Aalabelewe in “Missing $2.5b: Magu urges UK to extradite Diezani; EFCC secures 1,266 convictions in 2019, 2020”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, February 18, 2020, p. 8. 72 Loc. cit. 73 Loc. Cit.; see also “Magu begs UK to extradite Alison-Madueke”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, February 18, 2020, p. 12. 74 See “Magu begs UK to extradite Alison-Madueke”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, February 18, 2020, p. 12, op. cit. 75 See Dirisu Yakubu in “UK frustrating Diezani’s graft trial—EFCC”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 8, 2019, p. 8. 76 See Professor Bolaji Owasanoye in “Interrogating International Law and Global collective action against Corruption: Return of Stolen Assets in Perspective”, Keynote Address by the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), at the opening ceremony of the 42nd NSIL Annual Conference, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) on November 13th 2019, pp. 3–5, op. Cit. 77 Ibid, p. 4. 78 See Agwu (2007), pp. 253–259. 79 See Article 27, paragraph 3 of the United Nations Charter on decisions on all other matters.

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flouting their obligation to return the IFFs and deter the depredation that is corruption. The abrogation of corruption and the return of stolen assets are “increasingly discussed at various global fora on international law and corruption because of the implicit nexus between stolen assets, illicit financial flows and [the] attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”.80 In the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, for instance, each High Contracting Party is required to: Adopt, to the greatest extent possible within their domestic legal systems, such measures as may be necessary to enable confiscation of (a) proceeds of crime derived from offences covered by the Convention or property the value of which corresponds to that of such proceeds; and (b) property, equipment or other instrumentalities used in or destined for use in offences covered by the Convention. For this purpose, each state party is to empower its courts or other competent authorities to order that banks, financial or commercial records be made available or be seized.81

The same rule regarding the abrogation of corruption and the return of IFFs is also available in the UNCAC framework, which specifies how cooperation and assistance are to be rendered; including the fact that: In particular, in the case of embezzlement of public funds, the confiscated property is to be returned to the state requesting it; in the case of proceeds of any other offence covered by the Convention, the property is to be returned providing proof of ownership or recognition of the damage caused to a requesting state; in all other cases, priority consideration is to be given to the return of confiscated property to the requesting state, to the return of such property to the prior legitimate owners or to compensation of the victims. Effective provisions on asset recovery are to support the efforts of states to redress the worst effects of corruption while, at the same time, sending a message to corrupt officials that there is no place to hide their illicit assets.82

Unfortunately, the absence of the United Nations Security Council’s input in the global and regional Conventions that tackle corruption and IFFs has conjoined the lack of confidence and trust between the requesting and requested states for asset recovery to deprive the international community of a studied, sustained and strengthened political will for a culture of mutual legal assistance and cooperation.83 Hence, 80 See Professor Bolaji Owasanoye in “Interogating International Law and Global collective action against Corruption: Return of Stolen Assets in Perspective”, Keynote Address by the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), at the opening ceremony of the 42nd NSIL Annual Conference, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) on November 13th 2019, p. 1, op. Cit. 81 Ibid, p. 5; see also UNODC, Compendium of International Legal Instruments on Corruption, Second Edition, New York, United Nations, pp. 3–4. 82 See Professor Bolaji Owasanoye in “Interrogating International Law and Global collective action against Corruption: Return of Stolen Assets in Perspective”, Keynote Address by the Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), at the opening ceremony of the 42nd NSIL Annual Conference, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) on November 13th 2019, pp. 6–7, op. Cit; see also UNODC, Compendium of International Legal Instruments on Corruption, Second Edition, New York, United Nations, p. 2, op. cit. 83 See Professor Bolaji Owasanoye in “Interrogating International Law and Global collective action against Corruption: Return of Stolen Assets in Perspective”, Keynote Address by the Chairman of

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the functions of these Conventions as instruments of global collective commitment to the fight against corruption and IFFs84 remain eerily or uncannily reminiscent of mere political weapons that ultimately depend on how the developed and more powerful world define their economic and national security interests.85 As it concerns Nigeria’s request that the Western nations should return stolen assets or repatriate the suspects for prosecution, this fight against corruption remains ineffective because it is never perceived with these Western nations as a shared security concern that poses risks for collective prosperity, democracy and good governance, etc.86 On the contrary, and because the legal cost of returning laundered assets are huge while African nations lack a common position that affects the gravitas of their demands, the developed nations become uncomfortable and even uncooperative (as in the case of Britain and Diezani Alison-Madueke aforementioned).

10.3 The Exchange Rate Cul-De-Sac Another problematic, controversial or vexatious issue that a country like Nigeria faces in today’s environment of populism, nationalism and protectionism is the West’s toleration of economic nationalism and the selective application of neo-liberalism in the monetary management question. Because of the West’s scientific commitment or approach, Nigeria’s burden with neo-liberalism has seen it through tortuous paths that eventually wind up in a cul-de-sac. After resisting the pressure to devalue the nation’s currency when he took office in 2015 in the wake of a global oil glut,87 the President Muhammadu Buhari ate the humble pie. Not being able to resist the West in the manner of Malaysia after the 1997 Asian Tigers financial crisis,88 President Buhari succumbed to the implementation of the flexible exchange rate policy for the naira, a euphemism for devaluation, only to turn round in no time to lament the policy.89 Meanwhile, it was the same policy that allowed the flexibility of the exchange rate that President Buhari lamented that the United States’ President Barack Obama lauded him for embarking upon when the two leaders met on the sidelines of the 71st United Nations General Assembly in New York.90 The leadership of a more confident the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), at the opening ceremony of the 42nd NSIL Annual Conference, Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) on November 13th 2019, p. 9, op. cit. 84 Ibid, p. 4. 85 Ibid, p. 9. 86 Loc. Cit. 87 See Agwu (2016), pp. 152–159, 194–238, op. cit. 88 Ibid, p. 89 See Olalekan Adetayo in “No benefit in naira devaluation, Buhari insists”, The Punch (Lagos), Tuesday, June 28, 2016, p. 10. 90 See “Obama hails exchange rate flexibility at talks with Buhari”, The Nation (Lagos), Wednesday, September 21, 2016, pp. 1, 6.

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nation that is convinced about the importance of persistent, energetic and nationalist interventions in the economy whenever the need arises, should have realistically told the American President that this neo-liberal policy hurts badly; that it was not cute for Nigeria in the complex task of balancing the national interest with the demands of the forces of globalization, populism, nationalism and protectionism around the world. Taking this hurting flexible exchange rate without any expression of displeasure to those that imposed it was truly a huge irony! But the situation illustrates the trite knowledge that the Breton Woods institutions are united with Western “nationalist” governments in defence of globalization and neo-liberal interests, which the timid or unwary nations, especially the developing and the underdeveloped ones easily fall prey to. Evidently, President Buhari went to sleep after declaring his resistance to the devaluation of the naira in the sense that his government did not immediately, like Malaysia, embark on the requisite nationalist economic programmes (including the necessary fiscal and monetary policies) like encouraging the necessary productive activities that would ensure that the economy worked and that foreign exchange earnings did not continue to depend on the volatile or depleting oil revenues. The fact that the Nigerian President reportedly said during the breaking of the 2016 Ramadan fast with members of the business community that “he did not see any benefit that the country could derive from the devaluation of the naira”91 was an indication that he approved the policy against his wish, that the Western governments that cozily embraced him as soon as he won the election (in conjunction with the pressure from the IMF92 ) had certainly railroaded him into the devaluation of the naira. But there are some parts of the world where nationalism thrives and for political or strategic reasons, the West do not insist on rigid application of the capitalist ethos of globalization—the foisting of, say, neo-liberal economic reforms within the ambit of the ethos of capitalism or the application of the “shock therapy”.93 When Egypt, a strategic Western partner in the Middle East, came under the stranglehold of Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, a military General that seized power from the civilian Muhammad Morsi and metamorphosed into a civilian President; al-Sisi, amid the country’s economic challenges, insisted, as did Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari earlier, “on defending the Egyptian pound”.94 Despite “sitting astride the Suez Canal, one of the great trade arteries of the world” where it was supposed to be benefitting from global commerce (and despite squandering Western aid in running “an ossified bureaucracy and a knuckle-headed [al-Sisi] leadership” that was impervious to Western diktats and advice from the fellow Arab Gulf states), The Economist, a neo-liberal megaphone, still advised that the West should treat al-Sisi “with a mixture of pragmatism, persuasion and 91 See Olalekan Adetayo in “No benefit in naira devaluation, Buhari insists”, The Punch (Lagos), Tuesday, June 28, 2016, p. 10. 92 See Agwu (2016), pp. 152–159, 516–530, 1030, op. cit. 93 Ibid, pp. 264–269. 94 See “The ruining of Egypt: Repression and incompetence of Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi are stoking the next uprising”, The Economist, August 6th 2016. P. 7. Parenthesis mine.

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pressure”, and the clearly socialist policy of allowing the poorest to “be compensated through direct payments” because “Egypt is too fragile, and the Middle East too volatile for shock therapy”.95 Meanwhile, this is the shock therapy that the neoliberal Washington Consensus endorsed and insisted should be rammed down the throats of less strategic countries and regions where the attendant upheavals (as a result of mass poverty and suffering) would not affect Western interests. Although Egypt is an African country, it is trans-Saharan and ostensibly not treated like any sub-Saharan African nations.

10.4 Africa Ill-Stared by the Backlash of Populism and Nationalism Africa finds itself in a powerful position as the New World Order begins to solidify. It has all the ingredients needed to make the big leap into sustainable prosperity – but it must read the tea-leaves accurately to be able to do so.96

The tea-leaves aforementioned that Africa must read accurately in order to reclaim its future or position through a “big breakthrough” in the global community or “stand toe-to-toe with the big guys” in North America, Europe97 and even the emergent economies around the world is in its capacity to confront the odd world, especially in terms of migration and xenophobia (even in South Africa, one of its own), a world that is, thus, skewed against them by the backlash of nationalism and populism.98 For Africa, “the current global movement of widespread nationalism, ongoing trade war between the US and China, and a destabilizing Middle East among a myriad of seismic geopolitical shifts has created a certainty only of economic stability abroad”.99 In fact, Patrick Smith editorialized in the African report that the condition of nationalism, protectionism and populism thriving on the international stage has illstared or wrought “some echoes in Africa” while the World Trade Organization that should play a key role in its resolution has been marginalized by the US and other big economies.100 It is this prevalence of the climate of nationalism, protectionism and populism that made Nigeria, despite the ECOWAS and the AfCFTA, to “shut its land borders to protect its local producers against smuggling”; … “to block Thai or Vietnamese rice relabeled as local produce” in neighbouring Benin Republic or 95 Loc.

Cit. words of Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/ January 2020, p. 54, op. cit. 97 Loc. Cit. 98 Ibid, p. 55. 99 Ibid, p. 54. 100 See Patrick Smith in “All the Angles”, The African Report, No. 110, January/February/March, 2020, p. 3. 96 The

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Togo.101 This was the purpose of Nigeria’s extensive border closure, having been “losing billions from contraband imports and illegal exports of its subsidized fuel”—a situation that prompted the country to insist that “its diplomats … now [start] working with neighbouring states to step up cooperation over these high-stakes problems”.102 There is today, a “current global movement of widespread nationalism, ongoing trade war between the US and China, and a destabilizing Middle East”, among a myriad of seismic geopolitical shifts that have created a certainty only of economic instability abroad, especially in Africa.103 It is this sway of nationalism, populism, protectionism and the discriminatory treatment from the West that has tremendously contributed to Africa’s lack of capacity to rise, the capacity for a single voice, and “the potential for greater intercontinental collaboration, its commitment to market liberalization, internal trade, and its embrace of Fourth Industrial Revolution-inspired technological innovation”.104 For these and other reasons, “many [African] countries lack a basic capacity to properly provide the security and economic development enjoyed in other areas of the world”, thus, “economically fractured—splintered into 16 trade zones due to geographic challenges—leading to an enduring lack of policy coordination”.105 As a matter of fact, the “deepening conflict between the US and China threatens to depress global demand, while instability in the Middle East has knock-on effects in several crisis-prone areas of Africa”.106 Africa is not just crisis-prone, its historical reputation as “a battleground” has equally witnessed the so-called “new scramble”, which has truly become “a form of economic colonization” because “foreign direct investment (FDI) initiatives have historically included the infamous ‘China Safari’— [that are] multilateral projects in resource extraction and infrastructure development, which have led to a debt trap for many of the continent’s potential power players”.107 This “new scramble” or re-colonization [exemplified by resource extraction, debt trap and massive control of Africa’s economies]108 is illustrated by the fact that: In 2012, the IMF found that China owned 15% of Africa’s external debt; three years later, roughly two-thirds of all new loans were coming from China. Or take Germany’s ‘Marshall Plan for Africa’, an agenda which includes the development of controlled production chains and the diversification of Africa’s resources, all accomplished under foreign control and disproportionate benefit.109

Although Ivor Ichikowitz has argued that “the continent’s leaders are starting to rise to the challenges presented by this New World Order [apparently defined by the 101 Loc.

Cit. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 103 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/January 2020, p. 54, op. cit. 104 Loc. Cit. 105 Ibid, pp. 54–55. 106 Ibid, p. 55. 107 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 108 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 109 Loc. Cit. 102 Loc.

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new scramble and pervasive nationalism, populism and protectionism], driving for ‘win–win’ partnership while addressing global challenges such as climate change, international trade barriers, and inequality”; that “their voices today carry increasing weight and resonance”; and that “today, philanthropic efforts are becoming more effective, especially when sourced domestically”,110 this is clearly a contestable assumption; more so when Ichikowitz himself acknowledged the fact that “it is further critical that the philanthropic community, particularly those with vested interest in Africa’s future, follow suit”,111 which means that this “philanthropic community” is not working for the benefit of Africa.. It is true that “Africa is self-addressing the critical challenges of its time, investing in financial inclusion, renewable energy, and intercontinental security”112 [especially collectively through the AU113 ]; it is also true that “leaders across the continent are striving to address poaching, terrorism, human and drug trafficking, and the arming of militias”114 ; but the solutions to some of these problems—including terrorism and corruption115 do not have the sufficient support of the so-called “philanthropic community”, including the United States of America.116 As illustrated by the AfCFTA that the United Nations Economic Council for Africa (UNECA) said would increase intra-regional trade from $50bn to $70bn by 2040 due to the removal of tariffs alone (a remarkable jump for such a short time-frame117 ) and which was to be fully launched in July 2020, it was still obvious that African government found it difficult “to reconcile national and continental interests” and, thus, “develop economic synergies”.118 110 Loc

cit. Parenthesis mine. Cit. 112 Loc. Cit. 113 The African Union is seriously facing the challenges of international peace and security through its creation of the African Union Peace and Security Council in addition to an early warning system, the panel of the wise, the military staff committee, and numerous civil society organizations, amongst other institutions, see Murithi and Lulie (2012, ed.); The African Union Peace and Security Council: A five-year appraisal, Addis Ababa, Institute for Security Studies (ISS) Monograph, Number 187, pp. 1–268. 114 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/January 2020, p. 55, op. cit. 115 See Nigeria is so awash with corruption that so many controversial corruption-related things happen. For instance, a non-governmental organization, the Socio-Economic Rights and Accountability Project (SERAP), had to sue the Federal Government over its failure to disclose information and specific documents on the total amount of money it paid to contractors from the $460 million loan obtained in 2010 from China to fund the apparently failed Abuja Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) project; see Olasunkanmi Akoni in “SERAP drags FG to court over failed Chinese $460 m Abuja CCTV project”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, December 2, 2019, p. 10. 116 See, for instance, Agwu (2013), pp. 404–429, 649, op. Cit.; see also Agwu (2016), pp. 490, 595–597, 928, 698–700, op. Cit. 117 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/ January 2020, p. 55, op. cit. 118 See “What to watch in 2020: AfCFTA: The trade take-off”, The African Report, No. 110, January/February/March, 2020, p. 38, op. cit. 111 Loc.

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This is more so at the level of the rules of origin and other crucial elements of the trade deal where there were still some hard work to be done by policymakers.119 In the rules of origin in particular, African countries were on the cross-roads because, as stated by the UNCTAD Secretary-General (Mukhisa Kituyi): Rules of origin are situated at the nexus of trade and industrial policy. Make them soft and a free trade zone runs the risk of not spurring the creation of local values. Make them too strong and countries risk being considered too protectionist, and firms may find them too difficult to comply with.120

In the AfCFTA as well as the ECOWAS, Nigeria and Benin Republic are in the rules of origin tango because “the border battle between Nigeria and Benin shows the high costs of Buhari’s economic nationalism” as Buhari “wants neighbouring President Talon to change his economic strategy and stop seeking to supply Nigeria with goods it [Nigeria] can produce at home”.121 The goods include rice that Benin Republic imports from the Asian countries of Malaysia and Indonesia. As stated by Ivor Ichikowitz himself, it is trite knowledge that these challenges facing Africa if “left unaddressed, these problems would imperil the stability and economic growth of the continent”.122 Ivor Ichikowitz statement above is a self-evident reality.

10.5 Africa in ‘Bilateral [Unilateral] Multilateralism’ Writing under the rubric “Of Gulliver and the Lilliputians: What does unilateral multilateralism mean for Africa” in the report of the 2019 TANA Forum, the authors defined “Unilateral Multilateralism” as a form of multilateralism “in which relatively newer global powers such as the United States, China, India, Russia, Brazil, are unilaterally creating hybrid institutional platforms that are at once bilateral as they are multilateral”.123 But despite referring to the phenomenon as “unilateral multilateralism” by the authors of the 2019 TANA Forum report, this peculiar or abnormal multilateralism can also be called a “bilateral multilateralism”. It is a peculiar or abnormal multilateralism because, according to the authors of the report of the 2019 TANA Forum, it is not part of the “exemplars of classical multilateralism”124 ; rather, it was unilaterally amplified by the “newer global powers”125 as the ability of classical

119 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 121 See Paul Melly, Ruth Olurounbi, and Patrick Smith in “Inquiry: Buhari Vs Benin”, The African Report, No. 110, January/February/March, 2020, pp. 76, 77, op. cit. 122 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/January 2020, p. 55, op. cit. 123 See Toga et al. (2018), p. 49, op. cit. 124 Ibid, p. 48. 125 Ibid, p. 49. 120 Loc.

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multilateralism “to work collectively towards tackling some of the most intractable global security challenges, including those in Africa” appeared in doubt.126 But the United States is not a “newer global power”; so, its inclusion in this etiological conceptualization indicates that this peculiar bilateral or unilateral multilateralism was not exclusive to the “newer global powers” because the US, though not a colonial power in Africa, has been a classical global power since the end of the Second World War and has been involved in this hybrid institutional platform that is bilateral or ‘unilateral multilateralism’. It was in this bilateral or unilateral multilateralism context that the over a decade old African Land Forces Summit—a US-Africa partnership held a 4-day summit in Addis Ababa, which saw the record attendance of top military officers from 42 African countries to the 8th summit.127 This security summit was typically premised on the lopsidedness of power between African countries and the United States. It is why there is the US Army Africa (usaraf) that was established in 2008, and the US army’s Africa command (USAFRICOM) that has 2,000 army personnel across the continent.128 It is also the reason for the US regular deployments to Africa for advisory and training purposes.129 Although bilateral or unilateral multilateralism had been championed in Africa since colonial times by the French in Francophone Africa in 1973; and the British in Anglophone Africa, using in particular, the Commonwealth of Nations since 1931,130 the United States joined the practice since the end of the Second World War and the emergence of the Cold War when it fought wars abroad, decidedly using proxies.131 The dilemma in the logic of bilateral or “unilateral multilateralism” was illustrated using the fabled experience of Gulliver and the Lilliputians in “Gulliver’s Travel” by the Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift that was published 293 years ago in 1726.132 On one of Gulliver’s voyages to the South Sea, his boat capsized and he was washed ashore on a lonely island that “was inhabited by short people so afraid, perhaps even bemused, that they held the giant down with strings”.133 Thus, in the bilateral or “unilateral multilateralism”, the “relatively newer global powers” captures the imagery of Gulliver—that is, the giant “new external powers” that have found “themselves in Africa for several economic, geopolitical and strategic reasons while all of the continent’s 54 independent countries are the Lilliputians: relatively small and weak 126 Ibid,

p. 48. Addis Getachew in “Top military leaders of 42 African countries, US meet”. Aa.com, available at https://www.aa.com.tr/en/africa/top-military-leaders-of-42-african-countries-us-meet/ 1737370 (last visited on February 19, 2020). 128 Loc. Cit. 129 See Jared Szuba in “US to deploy specialized military advisors to Africa amid strategic review”, thedefensepost.com, available at https://thedefensepost.com/2020/02/12/us-deploy-sfab-advisorsafricom/ (last visited on February 16, 2020). 130 See Toga et al. (2018), p. 49, op. cit. 131 Loc. Cit. 132 Ibid, p. 50. 133 Loc. Cit. 127 See

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in political, economic and military terms, and without exceptions, overwhelmed by their prevailing circumstances”.134 The broad goal of the “newer global powers” in this bilateral or unilateral multilateralism was “to facilitate direct access to and engagements with African countries”, not individually but collectively, “on a wide range of economic, political and security issues”.135 As a matter of fact, they swiftly become ‘game-changers’ not only in view of how they have become prominent actors making inroads across the continent, but also how they are giving the long-established colonial powers of France and the UK stiffer competition.136 As things have gradually turned out, “there has been a quantum leap in the number of such relatively newer external actors showing visible interests in Africa”—from the more obvious ones like China, India, Russia and Brazil, to countries in the Middle East like Turkey, Qatar and the UAE that are becoming key players in the Horn and North of Africa.137 The fact is that even Egypt, a fellow African country of trans-Saharan origin, also went ahead to institute its own bilateral or ‘unilateral multilateralism’ in its Aswan Forum for Sustainable Peace in Africa that held in December 2019, and in which, as many of the initiators countries of bilateral or unilateral multilateralism like China’s practice of arbitrariness in governance, President Buhari unilaterally announced his visa on arrival for African countries without any internal consultation.138 This is an exemplification of manipulative multilateralism that is colluding with extreme nationalism and authoritarianism simplicita. The era of Bilateral or unilateral multilateralism is actually another period of the so-called new scramble for Africa—an era of “great power competition” that has special implications for the continent.139 As it were, even if the unfolding order does not lead Africa back to the era of cut-throat competitions in the old scramble for Africa and the Cold War, it is actually an exemplification of the so-called “New Scramble” for Africa that has a potential to cause visible shifts and realignment of economic, geopolitical and strategic relationships not only in the whole world, but especially in Africa where the consequent disruptions can affect peace and security efforts.140 This new scramble has seen major world powers jostling for political and economic influence on the African continent without the continent ostensibly cohering and doing anything to significantly benefit from it.141 Behind the issues in the renewed interest for Africa in the new scramble are the mixtures of the continent’s rich mineral resources, the unexploited agricultural land, Africa’s influential 54 votes at the United Nations, the 134 Loc.

Cit. p. 49. 136 Loc. Cit. 137 Loc. Cit. 138 See The Visa on Arrival Policy”, Sunday Comment, ThisDay, The Sunday Newspaper, December 15, 2019, p. 10, op. Cit. 139 See Toga et al. (2018), p. 49, op. cit. 140 Loc. Cit. 141 See “How Africa hopes to gain from the ‘new scramble’, BBC.com, available at https://www. bbc.com/news/world-africa-51092504 (last visited on February 24, 2020). 135 Ibid,

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stemming of the growing threat of Islamic militancy, “the economic migration, and anxiety, some say racist, about the burgeoning population”.142 But some of the issues in these renewed interests in Africa concern threats; and against this background, it is believed that “the world needs to engage and solve Africa’s problems, which, sooner, rather than later, will become global problems”.143 However, the Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyaatta has reportedly argued that “Africa is more than just a continent producing security threats or unregulated migration that must be contained”.144 So, some of the perceived opportunities (investment) for engaging Africa abound. It must be noted that apart from the BRI that many African countries have signed on to, there is also the FOCAC that was earlier inaugurated in Beijing in 2011, and which witnessed the attendance of many African leaders or their representatives, including its subsequent meetings where China made substantial commitments to the peace and security of the African continent, plus the $60 billion loan.145 The India-Africa Forum is another form of this bilateral or unilateral multilateralism that has seen “the President, Vice-President and Prime Minister of India collectively visiting 25 African countries while a total of 40 Head of African states (out of 54) attended India’s third edition of its bilateral or unilateral multilateralism in 2015 (up from the 14 African leaders that participated in its 2008 maiden edition in New Delhi.146 As already indicated above, Russia has also held its bilateral or unilateral multilateralism in the October 23, 2019 Russia-Africa Summit at the Black sea resort of Sochi—sequel to which it wrote off African debts to the tune of over $20 billion and landed two nuclear-capable strategic bombers in South Africa in a strict military and security calculation.147 But despite the perceived benefits that some of its adherents in both Africa and outside the continent assert, the characteristic new scramble nature of this bilateral or unilateral multilateralism essentially arises from its inherent dysfunctions. One of these dysfunctions is in the “infamous China Safari” and Germany’s “Marshall Plan for Africa”—that is, China’s multilateral projects in resource extraction and infrastructural transformation that breeds debt peonage on the African continent; and Germany’s agenda that “includes the development of controlled production chains and diversification of Africa’s economies, all accomplished under foreign control and disproportionate benefit”.148 It is important also not to be unmindful of what France used its bilateral or unilateral multilateralism in Francophone Africa to do to the ECOWAS plan for a common currency—the truncation of the Eco common 142 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 144 Loc. Cit. 145 See Toga et al. (2018), p. 49, op. cit. 146 Ibid, p. 50. 147 See “Russia lands nuclear bombers in Africa as Putin hosts continent’s leaders”, Vanguard (Lagos), October 24, 2019, p. 39, op. cit. 148 See Ivor Ichikowitz in “Africa can stand toe-to-toe with the big guys”, New African, December 2019/ January 2020, p. 55, op. cit. 143 Loc.

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currency project—when it got the eight Francophone countries in West Africa to betray the scheme with the arbitrary renaming of the CFA franc the Eco without consulting the Anglophone countries.149 As the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) observed, the eight ECOWAS Francophone countries’ so-called abandonment of the CFA franc with the attendant nondeposit of their 50% reserves with the French Treasurer and government represented an end of an era, but it was controversial, not only with respect to its mere symbolism than substance because the Francophone Eco was still pegged to the euro,150 but it was an upset to the common currency apple-cart of the ECOWAS, which the Anglophone West African countries resoundingly rejected.151 Despite President Emmanuel Macron’s promise in 2017 to end the “Francafrique” (its sphere of influence in its former African colonies), it “is still up to its old games” as President “Macron has thrown his lot behind the renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar, secretly supplying arms and training despite the UN and Libya’s former colonial power, Italy, backing the government in Tripoli”, all allegedly for the lure of oil.152 With the sabotage of the ECOWAS eco, France’s bilateral or unilateral multilateralism has, therefore, tremendously immobilized the development trajectory of West African countries as far as the quest for a common currency was concerned. It has continued to give the new external powers a considerable direct access to and leverages in Africa without safeguards to secure the continent’s interests.153 It was partly in advancement of this lopsided multilateralism that (while preparing for Brexit) Boris Johnson reportedly missed the 2020 Davos Forum—the World Economic Forum (WEF).154 The British Prime Minister hosted the African “boys” from the former British colonies, during which one of his claims was to “create new lasting partnerships that will deliver more investment, job and growth”.155 A Nigerian critic wrote as follows: Smart Britain, hoping to further exploit its former colonies, claimed that [the] single January 20 meeting had “laid the foundations for new partnerships between the UK and African nations based on trade, investment, shared values and mutual interest”. The African leaders who attended the so-called Investment Summit seemed to have forgotten that Britain’s wealth was gleaned mainly from its exploitation of the continent and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. So, at such meetings, rather than sit listening to Boris Johnson rabble-rousing, they should 149 See

also Ibrahim Apekhade Yusuf and Charles Okonji in “Rage over Eco currency”, thenationonlineng.net, January 26, 2020, available at https://thenationonlineng.net/rage-over-eco-cur rency/ (last visited on January 27, 2020). 150 See Peter Fabricius in “Is West Africa’s Eco currency just an echo of the colonial past?”, issafrica.org, available at https://issafrica.org/iss-today/is-west-africas-eco-currency-just-an-echoof-the-colonial-past (last visited on January 25, 2020). 151 Loc. Cit. 152 See “France in Africa: Is it all about the oil?”, Aljazeera.com, available at https://www.aljazeera. com/programmes/coutntingthecost/2020/02/france-africa-oil-200208135802152.html (last visited on February 9, 2020), op. cit. 153 See Toga et al. (2018), p. 51, op. cit. 154 See Owei Lakemfa in “Clowning in Davos, being good boys in UK”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 24, 2020, p. 31. 155 Loc. Cit.

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demand reparation from the UK. In any case, it will be difficult for them to have any collective agenda when they do not meet before jetting out to such meetings while their host might even have written the communiqué before their ‘Excellencies’ arrival.156

Certainly, as indicated by this critic, African leaders never meet to discuss their common agenda before jetting out to this bilateral or “unilateral multilateralism”. The so-called African leaders are a mere disparate junk that is seeking regime interests and personal glories, which are quite antithetical to the national interests of their individual countries; not to talk of African collective interest in the comity of nations. So, the questions have been posed: to what extent can African countries hold down the new Gulliver that is represented by the newer global powers and prioritize the continent’s interests or be accountable for the implications of their growing commitments?; Is it, in fact, possible for the 54 Lilliputians [African countries] to muster what it takes, especially uniformity of purpose and goals, given how they typically approach the new Gulliver with competitive—sometime symbolic or grandiose demands?157 Again, given that the basket of issues that the Lilliputians put before the new Gulliver is almost always full of desperate—and competitive demands, how can they expect to exercise policy autonomy on critical peace, security and development priorities facing Africa?; and why are the Lilliputian [African countries] happy to be present at every invitation and line-up for handshake and photo opportunities with the Gulliver?158 The main summation here is that while the new Gulliver might see the prospective messes in dealing with the individual Lilliputians with discordant voice and interests, very little major steps have been taken by the latter to put their respective homes and the continent in order to negotiate better terms and agreements with the external powers.159 At this moment of the bilateral or multilateral multilateralism, “Africans have become used to seeing their leaders accumulate air miles while honouring invitations to attend a series of Africa-themed summits held around the world, often advertised as win–win partnerships”.160 While Japan, Russia and China hosted these Africathemed summits in their countries in 2019, the UK equally did one in London also in 2019, while France, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were equally expected to hold the same bilateral or unilateral multilateral conferences in 2020 in their various countries.161 This frenzied contest between China, the US and other countries in Africa provided African leaders with a greater need for constructive international engagements because the global economy could reap significant rewards from positive

156 Loc.

Cit. Toga et al. (2018), p. 51, op. cit. 158 Loc. cit. 159 Loc. Cit. 160 See “How Africa hopes to gain from the ‘new scramble’, BBC.com, available at https://www. bbc.com/news/world-africa-51092504 (last visited on February 24, 2020), op. cit. 161 Loc. Cit. 157 See

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engagements; but unfortunately, these Western countries and their Eastern (especially Asian) counterparts were, according to Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta, “behaving like Africa is for the taking”.162 This bilateral or unilateral multilateralism has potentially undermined classical multilateralism because, bolstered by the populism and nationalism that actuates them as well as the leadership of the global powers vying for Africa, these powers, especially the new global powers, find themselves less constrained to take alternative windows of opportunity to engage Africa in their own terms.163 A few days to the UK-Africa Summit, Nigeria’s own President Muhammadu Buhari, in an Opinion/Editorial (OPED) opinion article, solicited the British prioritization of the Commonwealth in their trade relations after Brexit164 ; and, indeed, expressed delight in Boris Johnson’s optimistic view about this Commonwealth partnership idea in an address he delivered at Greenwich.165 In the OPED article under reference, the Nigerian President wrote that: I – like many other Commonwealth leaders – also seek a new settlement: not only of closer relations between the UK and my own nation, but of unleashing trade within the club [Commonwealth] in which we together shall remain. Relations between Nigeria and the UK are close and longstanding, most recently reiterated in our 2018 bi-lateral security pact and our collaboration in anti-trafficking. .. A new free trade agreement would reconfigure this, presenting new opportunities for both. As the largest economy in Africa, my country of nearly 200 million people has a great deal to offer: Nigeria’s vast natural energy and mineral resources … could help supply growth for companies in all corners of the UK. Greater access would also be forthcoming to one of the world’s fastest expanding groups of consumers – the Nigerian middle classes.166

The above statement is purely supplicatory. It does not embody any significant indication that Nigeria, like many African countries, has taken any major industrial step to put its house in order so as to enable it negotiate better terms and agreements with the external powers. The above statement does not indicate Nigeria’s industrial capacity. It is replete only of Nigeria’s penchant for consumerism, which emphasized the country’s natural resources that had hardly been invested with additional values. As it also applies to other African countries, this statement is patently indicative of Nigeria’s underdevelopment and penchant for submission to the exploitative tendencies in bilateral or unilateral multilateralism. Africa remains in groveling supplication. Although in 2013, the African Union had decided in its Agenda 2063 on an agenda to tackle the myriad challenges facing the continent—like, amongst others, silencing (or shutting down) the booming guns (ending all wars) on the continent, developing infrastructure, and allowing freedom 162 Loc.

Cit. Toga et al. (2018), p. 51, op. cit. 164 See “Brexit: Buhari excited over Johnson’s stance on Commonwealth trade”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, February 4, 2020, p. 44. 165 See Muhammadu Buhari in “A new case for a Commonwealth based on trade”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, January 20, 2020, p. 37, op. Cit. 166 Loc. Cit. 163 See

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of movement on the continent, the flagship of the latter challenge of which is the AfCFTA—the surmounting of these challenges is a herculean task.167 For instance, the AfCFTA that was billed to go into effect in July 2020 had no promise of being a panacea because of the many protectionist policies (like Nigeria closing its borders for a long period of time) and lack of infrastructure (especially on account of poor networks of transportation) in Africa.168 The implementation of the AU’s Agenda 2063 had been greatly marred by the fact that the organization “lacks the carrot-andstick” capacity “to corral member countries to focus on the agreed plans”.169

10.6 Ill-Fated by Foreign Interests Africa is a highly exploited, poverty-stricken and stereotyped continent. Much as Africa is stereotyped for its underdevelopment and poverty, Africans themselves stereotype foreigners as neo-colonial exploiters that are interested only in the continent’s natural resources instead of its people—foreigners that are ever “ready to bribe local bigwigs in shady deals that do nothing for ordinary Africans.170 The stereotype of foreigners is true because: Far too many oil and mineral ventures are dirty. Corrupt African leaders, of whom there is still an abundance, can always find foreign enablers to launder the loot. And contracts with firms from countries that care little for transparency, such as China and Russia, are often murky. Three Russian journalists were murdered last year [in 2018] while investigating a Kremlin-linked mercenary outfit that reportedly protects the President of the war-torn Central African Republic and enables diamond-mining there. Understandably, many saw a whiff of old-fashioned imperialism.171

The painter of the foregoing scenario is The Economist, a foremost defender of the West and neo-liberalism.172 The above scenario is a striated-circumstance that Africa is now finding very difficult to survive. But to survive this so-called “new scramble”, The Economist posited four conditions (as precedent and unassailable) as follows173 : first, Africa needs to institute transparency by striking away crooked deals in which countries like China advance loans to dangerously indebted African countries in a very secretive way; second, that African leaders should think more strategically in 167 See “How Africa hopes to gain from the ‘new scramble’, BBC.com, available at https://www. bbc.com/news/world-africa-51092504 (last visited on February 24, 2020), op. cit. 168 Loc. Cit. 169 Loc. Cit. 170 See “The new scramble for Africa: This time, the winners could be Africans themselves”, The Economist, March 9th 2019, p. 9, op. cit. 171 Loc. Cit. Parenthesis mine. 172 See “Why They’re Wrong: Globalization Critics SayIt Benefits Only the Elite. In Fact a Less Open World Would Hurt the Poor Most of All”, The Economist, October 1, 2016, p. 9. 173 See “The new scramble for Africa: This time, the winners could be Africans themselves”, The Economist, March 9th 2019, p. 9, op. cit.

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order to engineer unity amongst the 54 countries on the continent because even if it attains a population that is more than China, a heterogeneous continent with many “anarchic battle zones” can never strike a good deal with foreign interests. Africa needs a strategic thinking. This strategic thinking was what the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was out to achieve, even when not initially supported by many countries, including Nigeria. Third, African leaders must not collude or take sides with the foreign interests—be it with the West or the East (especially with China); and fourth, Africans should take what some of their new foreign friends tell them with a pinch of salts, particularly as it concerns the Chinese that argue that democracy is a Western idea—a message that conveniently appeals to African strongmen.174 But the notion of democracy being western may not be totally bunk as The Economist proposed that some critics allege175 because democracies are thoroughly rigged in Africa, as demonstrated in the December 2018 Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) elections and the Nigerian general elections of February/March 2019.176 In the wake of the Nigerian 2019 elections aforementioned, President Buhari expressed his frustration with the democratic process, stating that it was “too slow for my likening”, vowing to use security agencies to deal ruthlessly with election riggers in 2023,177 the same way he did in the 2019 general elections.178 It was for this susceptibility to foreign interference that Nigeria was sold on the IMF’s socalled approval of the closure of its borders in violation of its obligation in international law.179 And it was the same way that the incompatibility of foreign assistance had ruined the development of many African countries180 as well as their active sovereignty.181 Foreign enticements or encouragements had also continued to encourage the Nigerian government to continue on a borrowing spree despite local oppositions, particularly when the country’s “debt-to-revenue ratio (as opposed to the debts to the GDP)

174 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 176 See, for instance, Kehinde Olatunji in “U.S. ex-ambassador, Campbell, says Nigeria’s Presidential Election bad news for democracy”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, March 20, 2019, p. 7. 177 See Innocent Oweh in “Democratic process ‘too slow for my likening’, says Buhari at 77”, Daily Independent (Lagos), Wednesday, December 18, 2019, pp. 4, 39. 178 See Innocent Anaba, Charles Kumolu, Omeiza Ajayi, Johnbosco Agbakwuru, Dirisu Yakubu, Henry Ojelu and Peter Okutu in “Ballot Box Snatchers: I’ve ordered Army, Police to be ruthless— Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, February 19, 2019, pp. 1, 5, 41; see also Adamu Abuh, Chijioke Nelson and Emeka Nwachukwu in “Outrage as Buhari orders ruthless action over polls”, The Guardian (Lagos), Tuesday, February 19, 2019, pp. 1, 6, 10. 179 See Why IMF ‘supported’ border closure, by minister”, The Guardian (Lagos), October 21, 2019, p. 4, op. cit. 180 See Agwu (2016), pp. 226–238, op. Cit. 181 Ibid, pp. 533–535. 175 Loc.

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“is currently about 54 percent, a level not too good for the country”.182 With respect to Nigeria’s debts, a critic was of the candid view that “we are servicing vested interests, and increasing debts to foreign creditors”.183 According to this critic: With a strange “plan” to borrow another $29 billion with very little domestic revenues, our revenue to debt-service ratios will head north of 70%! This will be nothing short of slavery! Nothing will be left for real development spending when we combine this reality with our humongous recurrent expenditures … Massive foreign borrowing has never been beneficial to Nigeria. A $29 billion loan package will not be different. And please don’t tell me about [the so-called crazy domestic infrastructural development] the $500 million to “digitize” the Nigerian Television Authority, any more than you will tell me about the #37 billion to “renovate” the National Assembly. Cry, the beloved country!184

Nigeria was actually negotiating a $29.96 billion external or foreign loan185 ; but the above “cry the beloved country” lamentation was compelled by the fact that the loans actually evoked some pity because of the crazy infrastructural spending that the federal government claimed were justifications for the massive foreign borrowing; infrastructural spending like the cost of building or revamping the Nigerian railway system, a project for which many Nigerian governments had borrowed from China since the country’s First Republic. Sadly and tragically, all the money borrowed ends up in the pockets of politicians and the bureaucrats; and in such controversial projects as the #37 billion National Assembly renovations.186 It is because of the exploitation by foreign interests that the African continent has remained continuously immiserated. For instance, supported by Western nations (particularly the United States), the apartheid South African regime, Zaire, French and American mercenaries invaded Angola in October 1975 (close to the country’s independence on November 11, 1975) ostensibly to ensure that a pro-Western nationalist movement was installed in that country at independence or there would be no independence for Angola.187 But for the counter-intervention of the Cuban revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro, the nationalist government in the United States and some other Western countries would have realized their ant-African people 182 See Zakariyya Adaramola & Simon Echewofun Sunday in “Daily Trust Board of Economists to

FG: stop borrowing, strengthen revenue mgt”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Monday, December 23, 2019, p. 17. 183 See Kingsley Moghalu in “My take on Francophone countries’ Eco”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 3, 2020, p. 43, op. cit. 184 Loc. Cit. 185 See “$29.96b loan bid: I can’t sit and watch Buhari squander our children’s future—Atiku”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, December 18, 2019, p. 9; see also Henry Umoru in “Senate begins consideration of Buhari’s $29.9bn loan: Refers it to committee”, Vanguard (Lagos), ibid, p. 14. 186 See Levinus Nwabughiogu in “Reps justify plans to spend #37bn on NASS complex renovation: SERAP, BudgIT, others file court action against Buhari, Finance Minister, Lawan, Gbajabiamila”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, December 30, 2019, p. 41; see also Henry Umoru in “#37bn renovation of NASS: It has nothing to do with NASS, Senate spokesperson”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, December 31, 2019, p. 19. 187 See Owei Lakemfa in “Thank you Fidel, Africa is free!”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, December 2, 2016, p. 31.

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mission in Angola and other Southern African countries like Namibia.188 It is in this frightful situation that the election of Trump in the United States and the rise of extreme right nationalists in Europe and around countries like Russia and China pose a grave risk to African countries once again. This fright in Africa is particularly acute with the Presidency of Donald Trump because of America’s global status.189 Although President Trump was explicitly concerned about the NAFTA, the TransPacific Partnership (TPP), and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) for orchestrating job losses in America (because these jobs are shipped overseas as a result of the trade deals), but his avowal that he would renegotiate all American trade deals that were one-sided would really be apocalyptic for Africa.190 This is more so in the light of the African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) that (with Africa’s clamour in 2013 at the 12th yearly AGOA forum in Addis Ababa191 ) was renewed and extended to 2015.192 The AGOA reputedly “gives much more advantage to African countries exporting into the United States than it does the other way round”, raising the fear that it might be in jeopardy in the Trump Presidency.193 Thus, it was argued that “if Trump takes the path of being consistent with renegotiating trade agreements”, a review of the AGOA “could have a negative impact on Africa”.194 But it is not all a forlorn scenario as the Trump Presidency is, nevertheless, also expected to challenge the African nations to up their game and entrain a robust diplomatic engagement with Washington in order to maximize their individual and collective interests, which many of them began with congratulating the President-elect and expressing their optimism to work with him as time went on.195 The expectation here is that if the African countries could in their engagement with the United States under President Trump, up their diplomatic ante, “if Africa does a better job of articulating its opportunities, then, it could increase trade” with the AGOA under Trump.196 Of course, the core of the US national interest and the structures of its foreign relations will certainly subsist under Trump as it had over the years because of the reality of policy and structural institutionalization that has taken root in America. This policy and structural institutionalization was clearly imposed on Washington by “geopolitical strategic interests” that revolve “around national security”; and they are of serious concern to both Africa and the United States,197 irrespective of the 188 Loc.

Cit. “What a Trump Presidency means for Africa”, a CNBC Africa’s interview with Charles Stith and Steven Gruzd, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, December 2, 2016, p. 33. 190 Loc. Cit. 191 See Agwu (2016), p. 715, op. cit. 192 See “What a Trump Presidency means for Africa”, a CNBC Africa’s interview with Charles Stith and Steven Gruzd, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, December 2, 2016, p. 33, op. cit. 193 Loc. Cit. 194 Ibid, p. 34. 195 Ibid, p. 33. 196 Ibid, p. 34. 197 Loc. Cit. 189 See

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personality occupying the White House. The interest of the United States is always supreme. This is the reason it is strongly believed that the Trump administration cannot afford to be insensitive to “the extent to which China is investing in Africa”; for it must be rationally concerned about America’s status vis-à-vis China and, thus, be inspired “to take a more aggressive posture in terms of encouraging US investment in Africa”.198

References Agwu, F. A. (2007). World peace through World War: The dilemma of the United Nations Security Council. Ibadan: University Press Plc. Agwu, F. A (2013). Themes and perspectives on Africa’s international relations. Ibadan: University Press Plc. Agwu, F. A. (2016). Nations among Nations: Uneven statehood, hegemony and instrumentalism in international relations. Ibadan: HEBN Publishers Plc. Clark, B. (1998). Political economy: A comparative approach, 2nd (edn.). Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Publishers. Lulie, H., & Murithi, T. (2012). The African union peace and security council: A five-year appraisal. Addis Ababa, Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS) Monograph, Number 187. Maier, K. (2000). This house has fallen: Nigeria in crisis. London: Penguin Books. Thacker, S. C., & Gerring J. (2005). Do neoliberal policies deter political corruption?. International Organization, 59, Winter. Toga, D., Boukhars, A., & Ukeje, C. (2018). State of Peace and Security in Africa 2019–TANA Forum Report. Addis Ababa, Institute of Peace and Security Studies (IPSS).

198 Loc.

Cit.

Appendix

Postscript

A.1 Solving Globalization, Populism and Nationalism A.2 The Defence of Globalization The best way to solve the problems of globalization and the resultant populism and nationalism is to defend globalization. In full consciousness that globalization has come under attack by many detractors, Dambisa Moyo—while acknowledging that globalization has the reputation of enriching the few and leaving many behind—came up in its stout defence, arguing that globalization cannot be abandoned wholesale, except the world can put up with endangering “the very existence of an international agenda”.1 What Moyo has argued is that the fact that some people have immensely benefited from globalization while a large pocket of others in both developing and industrialized countries are frustrated by it has nothing to do with the ideal of globalization itself; rather, the frustrations are as a result of “the elite version that politicians have implemented over recent decades”—politicians or governments that have pivoted lesser and lesser toward “political and economic models” of globalization.2 The danger in the politicians’ implementation or version of globalization, according to Moyo, is that, though a “quick win” it may be, it, “over the long term will reduce growth, increase poverty and spur more political and social unrest”,3 which are things that isolationists, populists, nationalists and protectionists tend to exploit because they are shortcomings that “only entrench the inferior form of globalization”.4 Dambisa Moyo argued that if isolationism and protectionism persists, either of three things would happen: one, businesses would be localized in both funding and structure, which though may seem beneficial in the short-term, but will in the 1 See

Dambisa Moyo in “Protectionism’s False Promise”, Time (New York), June 4, 2018, pp. 15. p. 16. 3 Loc. Cit. 4 Loc. Cit. 2 Ibid,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0

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long-term, “will be less able to access the global capital that is necessary to fund investment and grow companies—reducing their opportunities to hire people and invest in communities”; two, though a short-term deflation may be witnessed, but in the long-term, there will be inflation because “rising trade tariffs and protectionism will increase prices of imported products” that will eventually “undercut the actual value of wages being forced higher by a relatively closed economy with reduced movement of labour”.5 And three, “governments will likely favour national champions—companies that enjoy regulatory protections, tax breaks and subsidies that offer an advantage in their home markets against foreign competitors”, resulting in “corporate monopolies rather than competitive markets” with the government becoming “a bigger arbiter of who wins and who loses”.6 The latter situation will result in “these companies gaining “outsize pricing power, which promotes larger and less efficient companies while disadvantaging consumers”.7 The summation here is that “public policy has not allowed full globalization a genuine chance to “lift all boats”; and that if protectionist policies are “left unchecked, the result will be more destruction of the global economy and greater despair as well as unrest and a sense of utter hopelessness world”8 —a clear recipe for the growth of populism and nationalism. Ironically, attacking globalization and embarking on egregious policies of protectionism are exactly what the Trump administration is reputedly doing in the United States. In fact, President Trump is seemingly upending the very liberal world that the United States helped to build at the outset of the twentieth century. The President of the United States was seen clearly, not only courting populist and nationalist and hence protectionist governments but also calling the EU a foe of the United States on trade the same way he called Russia an economic foe too.9 It will be recalled that apart from his trade war with China that did not only threaten but actually escalated10 in a space of two weeks in June 2018, “President Trump baited the EU and Canada into a trade war; argued that Russian President Vladimir Putin—still under EU and US sanctions for the annexation of Crimea—should be invited back into the G-7; and branded Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “dishonest” and “weak”; while,

5 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 7 Loc. Cit. 8 Loc. Cit. 9 See Michael Walsh in “Trump calls the European Union a foe of the United States”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-calls-european-union-foe-united-states-153830446. html (Last visited on July 16, 2018). This was the utterance of President Trump when he visited the United Kingdom, particularly in the countdown to his Helsinki (Finland) Summit with President Putin; reported on CNN and monitored in Lagos on Sunday through Monday, July 15 and 16, 2018, between 4 and 7 pm respectively. 10 See Justin Worland in “A China trade war could escalate quickly”, Time (New York), July 2, 2018, p. 8. 6 Loc.

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on the other hand, he had “met with North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un, calling him a “very talented leader”.11 In other words, President Trump was perceived by US allies to be blackmailing and arms twisting them while cozying up to adversaries. Recall that the anchorman for Global Public Square (GPS)—Fareed Zakaria—had told Jake Tapper on CNN that in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, part of the efforts of the United States to turn the successor Russia away from taking to rogue ways was to grant it an aid of almost US$500 billion as well as inviting it to join the G-7, which explained why the G-7 morphed into the G-8. It was as part of the United States and other Western nations’ sanction against Russia in the wake of its annexation of Crimea that it got expelled from the G-812 ; now reverting the organization to the G-7. This is the Russia that President Trump—as part of his wittingly or unwittingly upsetting of the applecart—is now cozying up to; so much so that in the wake of his Helsinki (Finland) Summit with President Putin where the Russian meddling into the US’ 2016 elections was discussed, he was implicitly seen to be taking side with Putin over the matter.13 Earlier on June 12, 2018, President Trump had summited with the North Korean leader in Singapore—a summit where the denuclearization of North Korea was the key issue—but which turned out to be “largely symbolic” if not shambolic because “the U.S. President offered an unexpected concession to the North, saying he would halt joint military exercises with South Korea”, America’s traditional ally, because it was provocative, a term that was until now habitually deployed by North Korea itself to condemn those military exercises.14 The June 8 and 9, 2018 gathering of the leaders of the G-7 countries—the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada—a platform that used to be interesting and “extraordinarily valuable because it’s an opportunity for like-minded nations to come together and talk about shared challenges”—had lost that value because President was reputed for seeing allies as constraints and preferring to do things “by twisting arms and making threats”.15 Despite the warnings by foreign policy experts across the globe, President Trump backed out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—otherwise known as the Iran Deal—a recalcitrant withdrawal that was an ill-portent for the denuclearization deal with North Korea because it made it hard to convince North Korea that the United States would stick to any commitment it made in denuclearization

11 See Charlotte McDonald-Gibson in “Is NATO Trump’s next target?”, Time (New York), July 9, 2018, p. 6. 12 Fareed Zakaria to Jake Tapper on CNN “Newsroom” monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on July 16, 2018 at 8 pm local time. 13 See David Knowles in “Trending: Trump and Putin at the #TreasonSummit”, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-meeting-putin-dubbed-treason-summit-173450979. html (last visited on July 17, 2018). 14 See “Trump to end Korea war games after historic summit”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, June 13, 2018, p. 41. 15 See Ian Bremmer in “The limits of being the world’s bully”, Time (New York), June 18, 2018, p. 16.

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talks.16 President Trump’s chaotic approach to America’s foreign policy in the face of Congress’ impotence (because the President is the operations or operational person, the field officer handling the day-to-day issues with negotiations, summits and press conferences, etc. while Congress has limited responsibilities in only, for instance, tightening economic sanctions) was a demonstration of the theory that populism is a threat to democratic institutions.17 This chaotic approach earned President Trump an epithet in a story The Economist ran on “America’s foreign policy” in which he was described as a “demolition man”.18 Eventually, it was President Trump’s populist lawlessness, especially in his foreign policy unruliness in pressuring Ukraine to investigate the Bidens and his obstruction of Congress that earned him an 19 impeachment.President Trump’s chaotic approach to foreign policy, particularly his stigmatization of China and inability to provide global leadership and unite global institutions (including America’s cherished transAtlantic institutions) for the fight against COVID-19 was clearly evident. It is also evident in this book that President Trump nationalistically moved against COVID-19 in the United States because of neoliberal considerations rather than the massive loss of human lives.

A.3 Addressing the Double-Standards of Globalization The best way to address the double standards of globalization is to learn some lessons from the problems of Brexit and trumpism that populism and nationalism had created. The European Union, in its foreign policy and global security strategy, pointed out that the global environment is now characterized by “a more connected world”, “a more contested world”, and “a more complex world”.20 Thus, it recognizes the interconnectedness, complexity and the fact that the world as it is now is highly contested. In terms of contestation, the document states that: Nation states are under unprecedented strain. Fragile states and ungoverned spaces are spreading. Ideology, identity and geo-political ambitions drive tensions that can lead to 16 See Brian Bennett in “Trump’s risky game of deal or no deal”, Time (New York), May 21, 2018, p. 18. 17 See Jordan Kyle and Yascha Mounk in “The Populist Harm to Democracy: An Empirical Assessment”, Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, available at https://institute.global/insight/renewingcentre/populist-harm-democracy (last visited on September 16, 2019), op. Cit. 18 See “Demolition man: Even if Donald Trump strikes a deal with North Korea, his foreign policy will harm America and the world”, The Economist, June 9th—15th 2018, p. 13. 19 See Massimo Calabresi, Vera Bergengruen and Simon Shuster in “Guardians of the Year: The Public Servant serving country over self”, Time (New York), December 23/December 30, 2019, pp. 52–64; see also Molly Ball in “Pelosi’s Play: From impeachment to Iran, the House Speaker is taking on President Trump”, Time (New York), January 20, 2020, pp. 22–31. 20 See “A Global Strategy for the European Union”, available at https://europa.eu/globalstrategy/en/ global-strategy-foreign-and-security-policy-european-union (last visited on Wednesday, May 25, 2016).

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instability and violence. To the East, the EU’s neighbours are vulnerable through economic, political and energy supply fragilities. In North Africa and the Middle East, ungoverned spaces enable criminals and terrorists to thrive. In Europe and beyond, new narratives challenge democratic values. Demographic trends, climate change and growing inequalities also threaten more tensions, while the rapid development of new technologies is changing the nature of conflict.21

The above characterization of the phrase of “a more contested world” is fraught with assumptions; for there is in it, no explicit or clear-cut delineation of the concept of contestation under reference. As in warfare (which is both a condition and a contestation), terrorism is a contestation with arms, the same way that dialogue is a contestation with ideas. But in the EU’s deployment of contestation under reference— although the two possible ways of interpreting the word contestation are apparently mixed up—it is tilted more towards armed contestation and outright hostility rather than contestation with dialogue. But then again, the question here is why this atmosphere of contestation in which the deprived have taken objection to globalization with fear, distrust and xenophobia in even very developed countries like the United Kingdom, many European countries and the United States? The answer to the above question apparently lies in the paradox that despite globalization and the complexity of the world (as the EU global strategy acknowledges); and beyond rhetoric, there is so much double-standards, marginalization, illiberalism and lack of genuine contestation of ideas. Those who benefit the most from globalization root for the imposition of their privileges and ways of life on the rest of the world. This imposition is particularly and overtly on the underdogs of this world. Internationally, the beneficiaries insist, for instance, on democratization as a condition for meaningful engagements; even though they sometimes do it very subtly, with their soft power strategy, against even some emerging powers like China. In international relations, the very countries that are privileged by globalization, in addition to their oppression of the deprived at home, adopt policies that lack post-modernist traits—policies that under-develop or de-industrialize other nations. An illustration of this can be found in the Henry Morgenthau plan that tried “the removal or destruction of other key industries [industrial plants and equipment] basic to military strength” of Germany.22 The “Morgenthau policy” was “a catastrophic plan for the postwar treatment of Germany”—to “de-industrialize Germany and diminish its people to a pastoral existence once the war was won”; a “blueprint for the permanent elimination of Germany as a world power”.23 Although the Morgenthau plan was later ditched for the Marshall Plan, it was to be distressfully discovered later in the 1950s (apparently during the Senator Joe

21 Loc.

Cit. “Hans Morgenthau”, available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Morgenthau (last visited on Tuesday, September 6, 2016), op. cit. Parenthesis mine. 23 See Anthony Kubek, “The Morgenthau Plan and the Problem of Policy Perversion”, available at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v09/v09p287_Kubek.htmlLLLL (last visited on Tuesday, September 6, 2016), op. cit. 22 See

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McCarthy revelations24 ), that the main inspirer (Dr. Harry Dexter White) belonged to “a network of communist espionage” which real goal in the recommendation for the “communization” of the defeated German nation “was for the United States to stand forth as the champion of indiscriminate and harsh misery in Germany”, which was seen by the communists as “the best way for the German people to be driven into the arms of the Soviet Union.25 Thus, the Henry Morgenthau policy was a Cold War ideological attitude or weapon that should not have found space in an increasingly globalizing and presumably post-modernist world. The Western world in particular insists on dealing (most of the time) with the rest of the world in its own terms and as dictated by its own modernism-oriented values. Their attitude is shorn of post-modernist considerations, which still perpetuates international divisiveness and the ability of the weak nations to industrialize. This situation was made worse with the rise of populism and the election of President Trump in the United States, who implicitly renounced the post-modernist attitude in his dealings with the rest of the world, including even American allies (despite America’s treaty commitments); so much so that Carl Bildt, the former Swedish Foreign Minister, confessed “the end of the West as we know it”.26 In fact, it was because of this absence of the culture of post-modernism by the post-industrial Western nations that are favoured by globalization that much of the arguments of liberalism lost its fervor and stood in dire need of reinvigoration by 2016—that is, the growth of populism and nationalism, the loss of faith in globalization that have been expressed poignantly in Europe and North America.27 But characteristic of the defenders of globalization, Christine Largarde was economical with the truth as she did not lay the blame for the distrust in globalization where that blame ought to belong—the fact that globalization inherently failed to deliver on its promises but instead became creative of poverty and global inequality. Rather than acknowledging this fact, Ms. Lagarde laid the blame for the failure of globalization on the doorsteps of those governments around the world that used their corrupt practices to fuel the double-edge reputation and distrust for globalization; even though, according to her, globalization is achieving its “mandate of promoting economic prosperity and financial stability—through international cooperation and an open system for the free flow of goods and investments”.28

24 Agwu (2013), Themes and Perspectives …, pp. 152–153, op. cit.; see also “Art of the lie: Politicians

have always lied. Does it matter if they leave the truth behind entirely?, The Economist, September 10th–16th 2016, p. 11, op. cit. 25 See Anthony Kubek, “The Morgenthau Plan and the Problem of Policy Perversion”, available at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v09/v09p287_Kubek.htmlLLLL (last visited on Tuesday, September 6, 2016), op. cit. 26 Carl Bildt made this remark on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN programme, “Amanpour”, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Wednesday, November 16, 2016, between 8 and 9 pm local time. 27 See “The year of living dangerously: Liberals have lost most of the argument in 2016. They should not feel defeated so much as reinvigorated”, The Economist, December 24th 2016, p. 11. 28 Loc. Cit.

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But except as seen in the case of the “Panama Papers” where globalization has tremendously leveraged corruption (using offshore tax havens around the world29 ), any attempt at exclusively putting the blame for the failure of globalization on the corruption practices of governments (governments that would rather skew public spending “toward areas with greater opportunity for graft—such as public procurement for construction projects”30 ) is not totally tenable because it does not fully paint the whole picture or explain the role, in the entire saga, of capitalist manipulations in the pursuit of greater profit, both locally and internationally. Although the factor of corruption is part of the woes of globalization, but this does not diminish the factor of capitalist manipulations, the fact that globalization subjugates the vulnerable and deepens poverty and global inequality both locally and internationally. The woes of globalization in its use of capitalist manipulations in causing hardship locally and internationally are supreme in its organization of economic multilateralism. Stiglitz summed up his position on the euro with this seeming dirge: … there are plenty of ways for countries to come together without having a single currency … Many would be saddened by the death of the euro. But it’s not the end of the world. Currencies come and go.31

It was because of their objection to this form of globalization that the British were averse to the Euro. But the British were, however, not alone in their Euroskepticism. There were also, in Eastern Europe, countries that were “unenthusiastic about the deeper-integration mantra of the founding clique” of the European Union—countries like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia that “have all resisted policy diktats from the European Commission”.32 The existence of these lukewarm Eastern Europe Euroskeptics had triggered “a Brexit domino effect” in the rest of Europe in the wake of the British vote to leave the European Union, particularly as some voters’ hostility against the EU had been triggered in countries like the Netherlands and France—a hostility comparable to that felt by Britain’s leave voters.33 But what has happened to the EU with the Brexit betrays the fault-line in international organizations, particularly in the increasingly globalized world. Extreme nationalism as manifested in Brexit and the election of Trump in the United States has underlined the failure of globalization, especially as expressed in the place of international organizations as (in the Marxists’ thinking) a mere “superstructural froth on bourgeois society”, a “superstructure of bourgeois society”,34 in which the nation-state and bureaucrats (like the Eurocrats) place more emphasis on 29 See John Alechenu, Sunday Aborisade, Eniola Akinkuotu, Adelani Adepegba and Oladimeji Ramon in “#PanamaPapers: Saraki, Ibori in fresh controversy over secret assets”, The Punch (Lagos), Tuesday, April 5, 2016, p. 8. 30 See Chijoke Nelson in “Globalization is double-edge sword—IMF admits”, The Guardian (Lagos), Wednesday, September 21, 2016, p. 26, op. cit. 31 See Joseph Stiglitz talking about his new book, The Euro, in “Questions”, Time (New York), August 29, 2016, p. 48. 32 See Charlotte McDonald–Gibson in “EU might not be so bad: After Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the continent’s leaders are debating whether it’s wise to beat up on their departing partners”, Newsweek, August 5 (08/05/2016), 2016, p. 15, op. cit. 33 Loc. Cit. 34 See Clive Archer (1983); International Organizations, London, George Allen & Unwin, p. 104.

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vertical relations in international relations, rather than on the horizontal or “transnational relations in international relations—relations between the proletarians of all countries”.35 An emphasis on transnational rather than international relations will mean that class instead of state relations will be accentuated with a view to lifting the oppressed from poverty and misery.36 However, international relations (as opposed to just mere transnational relations) must thrive because of a number of supernational, supranational or transnational agendas like “climate change, pandemics, terrorism, organized crime, and cyber crime”.37 But, it is the situation of neglecting the human security-centered transnational relationships (by international relations) in this age of globalization that led to what has happened to the EU with the turbulence of Brexit, which was long predicted in the assertion that in international relations, “strains and fractures” would be “caused by persistent nationalism, economic recession and changes in the membership of the organization”.38

A.4 Havoc of the Neglected by Globalization It is in this post-industrial economy of internationalism or globalizationthat liberalism and capitalism became complaisant,39 abandoning the indigenous people in such a way that brought about the “rural revolution” in the United States, the “whitelash” that brought Donald Trump to the American presidency with all his antitrade, anti-globalization and anti-immigration antics. In attacking globalization in his extreme nationalism, President Trump termed Angela Merkel’s liberal acceptance of migrants, especially the refugees from strife-torn Syria a “big mistake”; and he expressed preference to “smart trade” over and above free and fair trade, lauding Brexit and saying that Britain was “so smart in getting out” of the EU, while calling NATO obsolete and rebuking members for not contributing enough for the running of the alliance.40 Now, the anti-establishment and anti-internationalism President Trump has since joined the Russian nationalist Vladimir Putin and equally nationalist (ass already seen in this book and elsewhere, Han-centric is nationalism too41 ) China’s Xi Jiping

35 Ibid,

p. 106. Cit. 37 See Joseph S. Nye Jr. (2015); Is American Century Over?, Malden, MA, USA, Polity Press, p. 68. 38 See Clive Archer (1983); International Organizations …, p. 123, op. cit. 39 This is the perspective of Janet Delay of the Sunday Telegraph while speaking on the BBC’s Dateline programme, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on December 25, 2016, at 9.30am local time, op. cit. 40 See “Donald Trump says Merkel made ‘big mistake’ on migrants”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, January 16, 2017, p. 12. 41 Agwu (2018), Armed Drones and Globalization …, p. 286, op. cit. 36 Loc.

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to constitute “the three most powerful people in the world” who ironically make liberalism seem out of place with the sundry attacks on the norms or ethos of international cooperation42 —the abandonment of the legal framework for both intervention and non-intervention; unless (as seen in Syria, Ukraine, Georgia and even Croatia) such intervention or non-intervention serves very restricted or narrow national interest as dramatized by President Trump in his histrionic proclamation of his policy of “America First”, even if this might quixotically turn out to not only mean America abandoning its treaty or international law obligations (be it in NAFTA, NATO or the Iran nuclear deal) but also ultimately endangering its national security with an ostrich isolationist attitude to the outside world. The rise of poverty, the lessening of hopefulness and the increase in despair that arise from marginalization and disconnection are very critical because they are both predisposing as well as facilitating factors in making nations or individuals prone to populism and extreme nationalism that may manifest in toxic rhetoric and inflamed narratives that extremists foist in the name of religions, fear of strangers and other forms of fanaticism. Because xenophobia and other forms of extremism that arise from populism and nationalism are now substantially internalized by their parishioners, eradicating them has become a herculean task in the conduct of statesmanship, locally and internationally. Recall that President Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric in the United States was so severe that his son equated refugees with “a bowl of the colored candy that included some pieces that had been poisoned”; an equation that was not amusing and, hence, caused some serious “blowback” as many critics, including the “maker of Skittles rebuked him”, arguing that “the message belittled refugees and was bigoted”.43 The fear of refugees and asylum seekers was also rife in the UK where people voted for Brexit over fears of “the loss of sovereignty and jobs to the EU and other EU nationals”; and in Europe where there was ultra-right ascendancy because of “fears of immigrants coming from Syria and other conflict zones”; and in the United States, where Trump swept to power not only on the strength of the white vote (primarily the white working class), but also on the significant white majority’s fear of the threat of immigrants to the white demographic.44 There were also fears that it was not only the deindustrialization of America that was caused by globalization, globalization was also causing the white working class to be unemployed as jobs were shipped overseas; and that owing to increased immigration into the United States as a result of globalization, Americans were not only scared of the terrorists that mix with the genuine refugees, they were afraid of losing the demographic “ascendancy they have always enjoyed”.45 So, there is no 42 See Matt McAllester in “Davos lone stars”, Newsweek, January 20 (01/20/2017), 2017, pp. 20, 21. 43 See Sean Sullivan in “Donald Trump Jr. sparks outrage after likening Syrian Refugees to poisoned Skittles”, available at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-donald-trumpjr-skittles-refugees-20160920-story.html (last visited on Wednesday, September 21, 2016), op. cit. 44 See J. Boima Rogers in “Nationalism trumps liberalism and globalization”, The Guardian (Lagos), Friday, December 2, 2016, p. 16. 45 Loc. cit.

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disputing the fact that part of the reasons Donald Trump got his stunning victory at the American presidential election was because the American voters had been sold on his toxic xenophobic narrative that immigrants take jobs; and that the Syrian refugees were a security threat to the United States. Thus, the fear was that if Donald Trump’s opponent (Hillary Clinton) were elected, she would open the floodgate for these refugees to overwhelm the country.46 Matters were not helped by the perceived partisanship of the FBI Director, James Comely, who reopened the email case against Hillary Clinton late in the campaign47 ; in addition to the spate of lone-wolf terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe—with the attackers in Europe believed to have embedded and smuggled themselves into Europe amongst the heavy refugee flows from Syria, Iraq and Libya where ISIS had its stronghold.

A.5 The Protection of the Neglected by Globalization The lesson to be learned from Brexit and the Donald Trump victory in the American presidential election is that although the globalizing world is inevitable and unstoppable, one of the greatest challenges in moving forward is the imperative of devising the correct speed and direction of globalization in a way that would not be totally dismissive of or disregard the strong currents of nationalism that had developed over the centuries from Westphalia; in other words, to preserve national sovereignty within globalization in such a manner that would continue to protect the vulnerable that feel left out of globalization.48 Globalization is an important rhythm of nationalism and internationalism. An era of internationalism or globalization had set in, in which the world had become so interconnected that certain technological innovations like Internet connectivity now drives economies. In fact, with globalization, the Internet-powered businesses and transactions had grown to represent an increasing significant portion of global economic activities, so much so that any disruption of connectivity can be severely damaging.49 According to Darrel West, the Vice-President and Director of Governance Studies at Brookings Institution (and this is a thoroughly bred globalization or liberalist perspective), “internet disruption slows growth, costs governments tax revenue, weakens innovation, and undermines consumer and business confidence in a country’s economy”.50 The world of internationalism or globalization is a post-industrial economy; in which, 46 Loc.

Cit. Cit. Hillary Clinton described this as “the unprecedented intervention in our election by the director of the FBI”; Clinton (2017); What Happened, New York, Simon & Schuster, p. xii. 48 See the argument by Jibrin Ibrahim in “Brexit, Eurocrats, Europeans and others”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Monday, June 27, 2016, p. 68. 49 See “Ethiopia internet shutdowns take toll on economy”, The Nation (Lagos), Monday, January 2, 2017, p. 28. 50 Loc. Cit. 47 Loc.

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with the globalization of the economy and labour, the young, educated and technologically savvy populations move round the whole world with active employment, while the indigenous populations with little or no education are left behind.51 As a post-industrial economy, the era of globalization has, in addition, witnessed the dominance of the virtual economy, the middle-man-oriented economy that is characterized by the crisis of manufacturing (Casino Capitalism) and the dominance of robots.52

A.6 Globalization Sans International Regulation Although dialectical contradictions are a necessity of nature and the human society, the existence of the process of “creative destruction” in globalization is a strong affirmation of the fact that globalization, according to Robert Went, has a little or no international regulatory framework or control.53 And it was in confirmation of the fact that there is an absence of regulation or control in globalization that, at the outset of COVID-19, the former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, called for the establishment of a temporary form of a global government (essentially consisting of the G20, the G7 and the United Nations Security Council) that would exercise executive powers and help to tackle and combat the virus.54 It was this temporary form of a global government that would carry out “a coordinated global response” because COVID-19 was not something that could be unilaterally dealt with within one country.55 It was in this context of the absence of an international regulation or control that, writing under the rubric, “globalization under fire”, Robert Went scathingly indicted globalization and attacked its dominant paradigm that the market principle solved all problems, and that globalization had risks that were not as great as its critics anticipated.56 Unfortunately, the Mexican crisis of 1994 and the Asian Tigers financial crisis of 1997 that were founded on “traders’ sheep-like behavior and short-term

51 This is the perspective of Janet Delay of the Sunday Telegraph while speaking on the BBC’s Dateline programme, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on December 25, 2016, at 9.30am local time. 52 Loc. Cit. Casino Capitalism is the term a Nigerian columnist used to describe this crisis of manufacturing in which the global finance market has taken over as productive activities dwindle; Agwu (2009), National Interest, International Law …, pp. 515–519, op. cit. 53 See Robert Went (2003), “Globalization under fire”, in C. Roe Goddard, Patrick Cronin, Kishore C. Dash (2003, ed.); International Political Economy …, p. 195, op. cit. 54 See Larry Elliott in “Gordon Brown calls for global government to tackle coronavirus”, The Guardian (London), March 26, 2020, available at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/ 26/gordon-brown-calls-for-global-government-to-tackle-coronavirus (last visited on Monday, April 13, 2020), op. cit. 55 Loc. Cit. 56 See Robert Went (2003), “Globalization under fire”, in C. Roe Goddard, Patrick Cronin, Kishore C. Dash (2003, ed.); International Political Economy …, pp. 191, 195, op. cit.

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thinking”, which led to the “self-fulfilling crises” and overblown exchange rate fluctuations, all (like the neoliberal crisis created by COVID-19) contradicted the position that financial markets were always efficient.57 The problem with globalization here is that while the IMF and the World Bank preached and imposed neoliberal structural adjustment policies that led to deregulation, privatization and market liberalization that widely opened doors to foreign capital,58 it became problematic when “little or no international regulation or control” were “put in place to replace the national regulatory and control mechanisms eliminated by deregulation, privatization and, particularly, financial innovations”.59 Because the inherent problems in these financial innovations that required international actions were myriad while the responsibilities and authorities of international organizations like the OECD, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, the G7, the EU, and even the UN, were “being continually reshuffled”, none of these international organizations had the resources, the facilities, the room and the “authority to impose international regulations and controls”.60 The consequence is that, like COVID-19, what goes on domestically in places like the financial market or the stock market crash spreads internationally “like an oil spill around the world”.61 It was in this context of local crises destabilizing the international community because of the absence of international regulations and controls that: … the October 1987 stock market crash; the European Monetary System crises; the dollar crises of 1977–79 and 1986–87; the Barings Bank scandals in Singapore and England; the various Japanese banking scandals; and the collapse of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998; … the bond market crashed in 1994; the Mexican crisis occurred late in the same year; East Asia went into turmoil in 1997; and Russia’s default and associated shock waves shook the world in 1998”.62

The above instability in the increasingly neoliberal globalizing world remarkably contrasts from what happened in “the 1960s, when the Bretton Woods system kept exchange rates within narrow margins and capital flows were regulated”, thus, reducing the volatility of the financial market; unlike now that financial crises seem to happen with almost a “monotonous regularity”.63 As a matter of fact, before the Mexican crisis in particular, “hardly anyone dared predict that neoliberal globalization would lead to such turmoil” as the Asian financial crisis because the Mexican crisis was “widely seen as the first crisis of the new globalized world”.64 Before the crisis broke in 1994, Mexico was reputedly “the Rolls Royce” among “emerging markets” as “in 1994, it was the first Third World country to be admitted into the OECD”—the same year that it joined the US and Canada to form the free-trade zone 57 Ibid,

p. 196. cit. 59 Ibid, p. 195. 60 Loc. Cit. 61 Loc. Cit. 62 Loc. Cit. 63 Loc. Cit. 64 Ibid, p. 196. 58 Loc.

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NAFTA—and an example of a successful neoliberal structural adjustment that the IMF and the World Bank preached to the rest of the world.65 Suddenly, that hitherto acclaimed IMF and World Bank’s fairy tale tumbled on December 20, 1994, when the Mexican currency, the peso, lost over 40% of its value, the stock market collapsed and the government failed completely to stop capital flight despite a tough austerity package, thus, heralding the crisis without any end in sight.66 Under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment prescriptions, Mexico deregulated, privatized and liberalized, opening its doors wide to foreign capital, increasing its exports as its imports even increased much more, resulting in balance of payments deficit.67 But inside NAFTA Mexico was not a “premiere capitalist country” comparable to the United States; it was “a Third World country”, an underdog for which, although the balance of payment deficit was covered by capital imports, much of the capital flowing into Latin America was into shell corporations; the capital was speculative or used to buy companies that were being sold cheap as a part of the privartization schemes; thus, creating extreme volatility, uncertainty and an unstable inward flow that, with a little upset, turned the inward flow into an outward flow.68 In fact, the Mexican crisis alongside the Asian crisis certainly showed how well disaster exploitation worked because, “at the same time, the destructiveness of the market crash and the cynicism of the West’s response sparked powerful counter movements”.69 The West should have pursued the crises from the point of view of what was best for the global economy—that is, the fact that the afflicted countries needed more resources so that they would not bring down their neighbours—the stoppage of a global slowdown, which was the philosophy of Breton Woods, the 1944 founding conference of the IMF and the World Bank.70 On the contrary, the policies that were crafted by the IMF in response to the Mexican and Asian crises of the 1990s were focused “on saving the Western creditors than on helping the countries in crisis and their people”.71 What the West did was the direct opposite of the economic analysis that was the basis of the founding of the IMF—going to the financial crisis-ridden countries and telling “them to be more contractionary than they wanted, to increase interest rates enormously”—“in order to make sure that [the Western] creditors got paid”.72 In other words, “there was money to bail out Western banks but not for minimal food subsidies for those on the brink of starvation”; so much so that “countries that had turned to the IMF for guidance failed in sustained growth, while countries like China, which followed its own counsel, had enormous success”,.73 65 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 67 Loc. Cit. 68 Loc. Cit. 69 Klein (2007, p. 351). 70 Rourke (2005, p. 281). 71 Stiglitz (2006, p. 18). 72 Rourke (2005, p. 281), op. Cit. 73 Stiglitz (2006, p. 18), op. Cit. 66 Loc.

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Unlike in the early 1960s when the Breton Woods institutions still had some modicum powers to keep exchange rates within narrow margins and regulate capital flows74 the continued reshuffling of the responsibilities and authority of these international organizations led to their loss of capacity or authority to impose international regulations or control75 ; so much so that debates were consequently propelled about some of them (including the WTO)—debates that entered into the consciousness of the public.76 The results of this public consciousness or unease with the effects of unbridled market forces in globalization—the reign of the liberal market-oriented ideology—were street protests, some of which were against the 1999 ministerial meeting of the WTO in Seattle, Washington.77 The “disparate mélange of protestors” against globalization in the streets of Seattle included “unionized workers fearful of losing more jobs in the name of free trade, environmentalists condemning the WTO for putting trade ahead of nature, and activists calling for global labour standards—all demanding that the WTO be abolished even though there were those demanding that it be strengthened.78 What the protestors in Seattle were saying was that the West uses the Bretton Woods institutions to go around the world preaching liberalization and urging the developing countries to “open up your markets to our commodities, but we aren’t going to open our markets to your commodities”.79 Thus, the Seattle protests “was a wake-up call to much of the world” that the developed countries “had taken the advantages of globalization for granted”, that globalization is “for the benefit of special interests—banks, businesses, and the rich”.80 The frustration and unhappiness in the streets of Seattle were matched by the frustration of the delegates inside the WTO meeting rooms, with the trade Ministers unable to agree on any agenda for negotiations, resulting in the meeting breaking up with fingers pointing over who was to be blamed.81 Under the Marrakesh Agreement that established the WTO, the Ministerial Conference that is the top decision making body of the organization meets at least once every two years, out of which between

74 See Robert Went (2003), “Globalization under fire”, in C. Roe Goddard, Patrick Cronin, Kishore C. Dash (2003, ed.); International Political Economy …, p. 195, op. cit. 75 Loc. Cit. 76 See Kishore C. Dash, Patrick Cronin, and C. Roe Goddard (2003); Introduction, in C. Roe Goddard, Patrick Cronin, Kishore C. Dash (2003, ed.); International Political Economy …, p. 1, op. Cit. 77 Loc. Cit. 78 Loc. Cit. 79 Rourke (2005, p. 281), op. Cit. 80 Loc. Cit. 81 See Kishore C. Dash, Patrick Cronin, and C. Roe Goddard (2003); Introduction, in C. Roe Goddard, Patrick Cronin, Kishore C. Dash (2003, ed.); International Political Economy …, p. 1, op. Cit.

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1996 and 2017, eleven Ministerial Conferences had held.82 But after the last meeting on December 2017 in Buenos Aires (Argentina), the one that was to be hosted by the government of Kazakhstan in June 2020 in Nur-Sultan was postponed.83 The 2017 Ministerial meeting of the WTO in Argentina was filled up with officials and experts that were pessimistic and skeptical about the success of that 11th meeting because of the surge of economic nationalism, political nativism and radical protests against globalization.84 The crises of globalization are immense and enduring; but these crises of globalization do not exist without some apologetic defences. Meanwhile, the reform or solution to the problem of globalization has continued to be dogged by disagreements. At both Mumbai and Davos, this disagreement had lingered. At Mumbai, “the international community was asked to create a fairer form of globalization”; but “at Davos, the developing countries were enjoined to rid themselves of their corruption, to liberalize their markets, and to open up to the multinational businesses” that were so much represented at the same Davos meeting.85 Although at both Mumbai and Davos there was an understanding that something must be done to save the world from globalization, the meeting at Mumbai blamed the entire international community while in Davos, the blame or responsibility was placed squarely on the developing countries.86 Unfortunately, both the developing and the developed countries are complicit in the failure of globalization. Without corruption, the developed countries would have successfully invested in the future and wellbeing of their people; and without the biases of the developed countries, the Bretton Woods and the other globalization institutions they control would have collectively promoted global growth and prosperity without favouring the developed or Western countries at the expense of the developing countries.87 In other words, if the two sides had discharged their responsibilities responsibly, the purpose of the Bretton Woods (the IMF and the World Bank) institutions and globalization itself would have been aptly fulfilled in advancement of global prosperity, global stability and the wellbeing of peoples and nations.

82 See

Ministerial Conference, Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MinisterialConference (last visited on Friday, April 17, 2020). 83 See “Twelfth WTO Ministerial Conference postponed”, IISD, available at http://sdg.iisd.org/eve nts/twelfth-wto-ministerial-conference/ (last visited on Friday, April 17, 2020). 84 See Shuaihua Cheng in “We can still save the World Trade Organization. Here’s how”, Weforum.org, October 6, 2017, available at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/10/save-worldtrade-organization-ministerial-meeting/ (Last visited on Friday, April 17, 2020). 85 Stiglitz (2006, pp. 6–7), op. Cit. 86 Ibid, p. 7. 87 Ibid, pp. 6–7, 13–19.

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A.7 Downing of Trumpism: Advent of Trump’s Second Impeachment Although populists were surfeit and warping agendas even when not in power in many countries of the world, especially in America and Europe88 —like the exaggerative Matteo Salvini of Italy89 Victor Orban (the Hungarian Prime Minister), Geert Wilders (the Dutch—Holland nationalist), and Marine Le Pen of France— Trumpism was quintessentially representative of the consummate form of populism, encapsulated in the so-called rhetoric of Making America Great Again (MAGA), the trade war with China, the withdrawal from global international institutions (like the Paris Climate Change agreement), the defunding of the WHO, the withdrawal from the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA or Iran nuclear deal), the so-called restructuring/renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into and the trilateral accord that is the United States, Mexico and Canada (USMCA,90 ) trade, etc. This was including President Trump’s inability to make the WTO functional by resuscitating its leadership and rebuilding its trade dispute resolutions (illustrated by the WTO’s inability to elect an interim Director-General and the United States’ cancellation of the November 11, 2020 meeting to confirm the election of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala that the US had vetoed).91 It was not until the election of President Biden when “a group of influential Americans wrote …; urging him to endorse Okonji-Iweala’s candidacy”, a letter in which “they didn’t refer to her as a Nigerian”; instead, the letter reckoned that her selection would be the case of the “first American

88 In fact, Ms Le Pen was vowing to erect ruinous economic barriers and cause mayhem by proposing to leave the euro; while Viktor Orban of Hungary vowed to build an ‘illiberal state’, looking to Vladmir Putin of Russia as a model; see “Playing with fear: In America and Europe, right-wing populist politicians are on the march. The threat is real”, The Economist, December 12th 2015, p. 13. 89 In a toast at a dinner with the German leader, populist Matteo said he would follow the example of the Renaissance sculptor, Michelangelo, who, after he began working on his statue of David, took a block of marble and chipped away “whatever was in excess”. In other words, Matteo Renzi exaggerated that in terms of fixing the Italian economy (Europe’s fourth largest), he would, after cutting “away all the things that are in excess”, bureaucratically and fiscally, what will come out would be more beautiful than the David before shifted from his exaggeration and said “as beautiful as David”; see Stephan Faris in “The Italian Job: How Matteo Renzi is trying to fix Europe’s fourth largest economy—and why his ambition might not be enough”, Time (New York), May 19, 2014, pp. 27–28. 90 See Andrew Chatzky, James McBride and Mohammed Aly Sergie in “NAFTA and the USMCA weighing the Impact of North American Trade, Backgrounder, Council on Foreign Relations, available at https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/naftas-economic-impact (last visited on November 13, 2020). 91 See Richard Partington in “Appointment of WTO chief in doubt after key meeting cancelled”, The Guardian online, available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/08/appointmentwto-chief-doubt-meeting-cancelled-ngozi-okonjo-iweala (last visited on November 9, 2020).

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and woman of colour to serve as the WTO’s Director-General, [which] will send a clear message of inclusion to the rest of the world”.92 In fact, the recognition of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as an American rather than a Nigerian was an inadvertent punishment of Nigeria for what a critic termed “Buhari’s government’s entrenched protectionalism”—a symbol of the irony that “President Buhari’s nomination of Agah and Okonji-Iweala as Director-General of the WTO is” because “he doesn’t share their economic views”.93 The expectations from OkojoIweala were so high that she was expected to fix the WTO in a fractured international trading system that thrives on goods, services and intellectual property. Since the WTO took over from GATT on January 1, 1995 on rule making adjudication for the international trading system, its roles in the promotion of free market principles through a free and fair trade has improved from the concern on solely trade in goods to trade in services, creative innovation and intellectual property, the transformation of the legality of the international trading mechanism in such a way that apart from tariff negotiations, states would be discouraged from the erection of trading barriers that are non-tariff related. Unfortunately, states have expanded the non-tariff means of trade restrictions in such a manner that governments now use trade as a leverage to extract political concessions from other governments.94 The international trading system is now illustrated by tensions—aptly demonstrated by the tension between Washington and Beijing, for which the BRICS bemoaned the Trump administration’s tariff threats, unilateralism, protectionism and crooked efforts to rebalance trade multilateralism that it deemed unfair to the United States95 ; a tension-soaked trading system in which China itself (a member of the BRICS), had imposed its hegemonic powers on Australia by restricting the importation of Australian red wines just because Australia decided to ban Huawei from the rollout of 5G, including its call for an investigation into the origins of COVID-1996 — a call that was supported by an Australian (Dominic Dwyer) representative in the WHO team that travelled to Wuhan (China) and discovered in its investigation into the viral origins of the SARC-C0V-2 virus that COVID-19 was a zoonotic disease of animal origin in the Hubei Chinese province that “crossed over to humans from bats, via an as-yet-unknown intermediary animal at an unknown location”.97 92 See Olu Fasan in “WTO: Kudos to Okonjo-Iweala and Agah for making Africa proud”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, February 25, 2021, p. 16, op. cit. 93 Loc. Cit. 94 See Lois Maskiell in “Explained: Why is China imposing tariffs on Australian wine and barley?”, SmartCompany, November 30, 2020, available at https://www.smartcompany.com.au/business-adv ice/importing-and-exporting/china-tariffs-australian-wine-barley/ (last visited on March 1, 2021). 95 See BRICS emerging economies reaffirm support for multilateral trade under WTO rules”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 27, 2018, p. 23. 96 See Lois Maskiell in “Explained: Why is China imposing tariffs on Australian wine and barley?”, SmartCompany, November 30, 2020, available at https://www.smartcompany.com.au/business-adv ice/importing-and-exporting/china-tariffs-australian-wine-barley/ (last visited on March 1, 2021), op. cit. 97 See Domnic Dwyer, originally published in The Consevation as “I was on the WHO team that went to Wuhan to study the origins of coronavirus. Here’s what we found”, Scroll.in, February 23, 2021, available at https://scroll.in/article/987599/i-was-on-the-who-team-that-went-to-wuhanto-study-the-origins-of-coronavirus-heres-what-we-found (last visited on March 6, 2021).

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It is, therefore, very difficult to envisage Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala repairing the WTO in a world in there is an endemic state inequality and the lack of capacity by the developing or under-developed countries involved in international trade with the developed and now populist countries—these obvious inequality and lack of capacity are illustrated by the fact that whereas Nigeria, the “giant of Africa” with an estimated 200 million people punches below its weight, Israel with a population that is between 8 and 9 million people punches 200 times above its weight. This is also an international trading world in which because of populism and nationalism, the hegemonic countries like the United States and China are not playing or plying international trade according to the agreed rules of the game. In terms of the populism and nationalism that rift apart the international trading system, the fall of President Trump was truly indicative of the fact that the choice of dismantling this populism ultimately falls on the United States’ “voters, most of whom do not subscribe to right-wing populism”; even though President Trump had the backing “of just 30% of the 25% or so Americans who say they are Republicans”.98 Trump held on to power and refused to concede victory to Presidentelect Joe Biden, even when the Electoral College had on Monday, December 14, 2020, confirmed Biden’s 306 to 232 electoral votes against him.99 But President Trump’s disruptiveness got an alarming new height immediately after the November 3, 2020 presidential election when, apart from failing to concede and allow Emily W. Murphy, the US General Services Administration (GSA), to disburse transition money to President-elect Biden’s transition,100 he embarked on a sweeping change in the Pentagon (firing people and replacing them with his loyalists) and announced that the US would withdraw thousands more of its troops from Afghanistan and Iraq by January 15, 2021—just days before President-elect Joe Biden would take office.101 This withdrawal policy that did not possess any strategy would leave approximately 2,500 troops in Afghanistan and roughly the same in Iraq, thus, endangering the safety of the remaining American troops there, the safety of the Afghan government as well as a provision of the Taliban’s return and conversion of Afghanistan into the safe-haven that could re-enact another 9/11.102 In Iran, President Trump was believed to have also tacitly used the Israeli to upset the diplomatic apple-cart for Biden. Just like in the killing of General Qassem Soleimani, the physics scientist that 98 See “Playing with fear: In America and Europe, right-wing populist politicians are on the march. The threat is real”, The Economist, December 12th 2015, p. 13, op. Cit. 99 See Owei Lakemfa in “Trump: Leaving world politics worse than he met it”, Vanguard, Friday, December 18, 2020, p. 17. 100 See Michael D. Shear, Maggie Habberman and Michael Crowley in “Trump Appointee Stands Between Biden’s Team and a Smooth Transition”, The New York Times, November 9, 2020, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/politics/emily-murphy-trump-biden-html (last visited on November 23, 2020). 101 See Barbara Starr, Ryan Browne and Zachaary Cohen in “US announces further drawdown of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq before Biden takes office”, available at https://www.cnn.com/ 2020/11/17/politics/afghanistan-iraq-withdrawal-pentagon/index.html (last visited on November 20, 2020). 102 Loc. Cit.

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was the “father of Iran’s nuclear programme”, Mohsen Fathrizadeh, was assassinated on November 27th in Absard, a city that is 80 km (50 miles) on the outskirt, east of Tehran by supposedly Israeli agents.103 The slaying of Mohsen was believed to be capable of complicating Joe Biden’s effort to rebuild the crumbling Iran nuclear deal that Trump had abandoned.104 Trumpism was reputedly an embarrassment to the United States in a globalised world because President Trump was deemed by critics as “racist [and] tax-dogging, [a] playboy with questionable deals” who regarded the media as devils that reported falsehood as well as lacking respect for women, having regarded women as “play objects” and spoke of the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the sexual term of “if Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?”.105 There was also Trump’s populist hostility toward the United States’ allies—making no distinction between allies and enemies106 —particularly those allies that used to be key to the maintenance of the balance of power between the West and its rivals around the world, and which was necessary to ensure collective global security. Apart from Trump pushing the opposition in Venezuela into a dark alley by quixotically declaring the country’s Senate President Juan Guaido as President and encouraging that opposition to boycott Venezuela’s December 6, 2020 parliamentary elections that gave the socialist party a clean victory, President Trump also started a trade war with its rival China, as he also did with America’s Canadians and European allies.107 Because of his partisan political interest, he practically withdrew the United States from the WHO at the critical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic by withdrawing America’s funding to that global health108 institution. President Trump, in his characteristic brinkmanship or “un-statesmanly” manner, re-drew the map of other countries by awarding to others, “non-American territories”—he recognized the Israeli settlements in the seized Syrian Golan Heights, moved the American Embassy to Jerusalem and campaigned for international support for the movement of the Israeli capital from Tel Aviv to the disputed Jerusalem, including East Jerusalem that some opponents of Zionism considered as indigenous to the Palestinians.109 With all he did in the Middle East, President Trump was considered to be repudiating the fundamental human rights of the Palestinians in his apparent determination

103 See

“A Killing in Absard: The Father of Iran’s nuclear programme is assassinated”, economist.com, November 27th 2020, available at https://www.economist.com/middle-eastand-africa/2020/11/27/the-father-of-irans-nuclear-programme-is-assassinated?utm_campaign= the-economist-today&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source (last visited on November 28, 2020). 104 Loc. Cit. 105 See Owei Lakemfa in “Trump: Leaving world politics worse than he met it”, Vanguard, Friday, December 18, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. Parentheses mine. 106 Loc. Cit. 107 Loc. Cit. 108 Loc. Cit. 109 Loc. Cit.

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to ditch their right to a homeland and self-determination, especially as he also recognized the Israeli settlements in the West110 Bank. President Trump also practically re-drew the map of Africa from 55 to 54 states by inserting the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (Western Sahara) into Morocco; just as he defied scientific realities by describing Climate Change as a hoax.111 In fact, The Economist reckoned that: Joe Biden’s victory has come as a great relief. Under his presidency, there will be no more bullying and threats to leave NATO. America will stop treating the European Union as a “foe” on trade, or its forces stationed in South Korea as a protection racket. In place of Donald Trump’s wrecking ball, Mr. Biden will offer an outstretched hand, working so cooperatively on global crises, from coronavirus to climate change. Under Mr. Trump, America’s favourability ratings in many allied countries sank to new lows. Mr. Biden promises to make America a beacon again, a champion of lofty values and a defender of human rights, leading (as he put it in his acceptance speech) “not only by the example of our power, but by the power of our example.112

After President Trump had inspired an insurrection on the Capitol building and was forced to discredit the insurrectionists that he had earlier applauded, he rhetorically whitewashed himself in self-praises, lauding his controversial domestic and foreign policy “achievements” with an emphasize on how: We passed the largest package of tax cuts and reforms in American history. We slashed more job-killing regulations than any administration had ever done before. We fixed our broken trade deals, withdrew from the horrible Trans-Pacific Partnership and the impossible Paris Climate Accord, renegotiated the one-sided South Korea deal, and we replaced NAFTA with the groundbreaking USMCA—that’s Mexico and Canada—a deal that’s worked out very very well. Also, and very importantly, we imposed historic and monumental tariffs on China, made a great new deal with China. But before the ink was even dry, we and the whole world got hit with the China virus. Our trade relationship was rapidly changing, billions and billions of dollars were pouring into the US; but the virus forced us to go in a different direction.113

The job-killing regulations and Paris Climate Accord (that involves reduction in greenhouse emission and the decarbonization of the global economy) under reference above comprised the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project that President Biden cancelled with an executive order the moment he assumed office as President and took the United States back to the Paris Climate Change Accord114 —which were some of 110 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 112 See “America and the world: America’s allies should share the burden with Joe Biden”, economist.com, available at https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/11/14/americas-allies-sho uld-share-the-burden-with-joe-biden?utm_campaign=the-economist-today&utm (last visited on November 14, 2020). 113 See Henry Ojelu with agency report in “I’ll heal America, says Biden at inauguration as 46th US President: I fought the hardest battles, it’s time for America to unify, rise above rancour—Trump … As world leaders react”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, January 21, 2021, p. 26. 114 See Kristie Pladson in “With a pen stroke, President Joe Biden cancels Keystone XL pipeline project”, Deutsche Welle, January 21, 2021, available at https://www.dw.com/en/with-a-pen-strokepresident-joe-biden-cancels-keystone-xl-pipeline-project/a-56285371 (last visited on February 1, 2021). 111 Loc.

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the controversial policies that Donald Trump embarked upon the moment he became the United States President. Characteristically, President Trump’s descriptions of his policies were in superlative terms. But most of his policies were controversial and contested. It was, indeed, in that controversial context that the argument went that Biden’s toughest foreign policy may be regaining allies’ trust.115 Of course, it is anticipated that President Biden would “adopt a more traditional foreign policy approach” even when facing the usual menu of foreign policy challenges—“from the near-peer competitor China to a nuclear-armed and unpredictable Kim Jong Un—but as he works to rebuild and rejoin alliances, his greatest hurdle could be convincing the rest of the world and even the US’ closest allies that once again, America really can be116 trusted”. President Trump’s populism in MAGA was later seen not to be about making America Great Again as it was rather about President Trump himself since “Trump is Trump”; having, according to John Bolton, been initially poorly served by the “axis of adults” in such a way that he saw conspiracies behind rocks and was, thus, always attempting to second-guess people’s motives.117 Because of his enormous conspiratorial bent, suspicions and massive ego, President Trump alleged frauds in the 2020 Presidential election and refused to concede defeat or allow the GSA to begin the mandatory transition processes, the presidential transition that enables the intense and interesting “completion for high-level jobs”, which only ends after the inauguration.118 Trump’s recalcitrance was inadvertently supported by some populist leaders in Russia (“Putin’s holdout diplomacy” on Biden119 ), China, Brazil120 and even the Philippines that initially refused to congratulate Biden as the President-elect. It was not until Monday, November 23, 2020—over two weeks after the election—that Emily Murphy of the GSA acknowledged Biden as the President-elect and extended to him and his transition team, the access to current agency officials, briefing books and other government resources, including 115 See

Nicole Gaouette, Kylie Atwood and Jennifer Hansler in “Biden’s toughest foreign policy challenge may be regaining allies’ trust”, CNN politics, available at https://edition.cnn.com/ 2020/11/14/politics/biden-foreign-policy-challenges-ahead/index.html (last visited on November 14, 2020). 116 Loc. Cit. 117 Bolton (2020, p. 2), op. Cit. 118 Ibid, p. 3. 119 See Robyn Dixon in “To Russia’s Putin, President-elect Biden is still a ‘candidate’”, The Washington Post, November 26, 2020, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eur ope/russia-putin-congratulate-biden/2020/11/26/188a92c4-2fe4-11eb-9dd6-2d0179981719_story. html (last visited on November 27, 2020). 120 See “Denial for now: Most Republicans don’t yet dare to cross Donald Trump”, economist.com, available at https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/11/10/most-republicans-dont-yetdare-to-cross-donald-trump?utm_campaign=the-economist-today&utm_medium (last visited on November 11, 2020); see also Martins Ifijeh in “Russia, China, Mexico, Brazil hold-off on congratulating Biden: Trump set to revive campaign-style rallies during litigation”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, November 10, 2020, p. 30.

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the $6 million funding that he needed, grudgingly supported by President Trump, who insisted that he recommended Emily Murphy into that recognition; and that he was not going to concede victory, but would rather carry on with his legal struggle against the phantom frauds he was alleging.121 So, it was clear that although the downing of President Trump was not totally significative of the collapse of populism, his resounding failure in that November 3, 2020 election spoke volume to the weakness of that extremist ideology in the Western world. Two things were very significant in the fall of President Trump in the American November 2020 presidential election (an election loss he denied and characterized as a fraud, a characterization of fraud that critics also described as a fraud itself, as a new birtherism, the birth scandal that gained traction after Donald Trump alleged it against Barack Obama122 ); these were the coronavirus pandemic and the racial tension in that country, the latter symbolized by the “I can’t breathe” slogan in the death of the American-American, George Flyod and others before him that further animated the Black Lives Matter movement.123 On the heels of the flagellation of China for its secrecy and authoritarian control of information on the extent and spread of 124 the COVID-19 pandemic, President Trump appeared, from the revelations of Bob Woodward, to be one of those that China had given the full details of the devastative extent of the disease. Recounting a conversation with the Chinese President Xi Jinping, President Trump had told Bob Woodward in a tape on February 7, 2020, on Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book on the Trump White House that the coronavirus was a deadly stuff, a disease that was more deadly than the strenuous flu125 In an exchange between President Trump and Woodward, Trump revealed that he eagerly downplayed the outbreak of the virus because he did not want to alarm Americans and create panic.126 The

121 See

Jen Kirby in “The Presidential Transition begins as the GSA formally recognizes Biden’s victory”, Vox, November 23, 2020, available at https://www.vox.com/2020/11/23/21611906/bidentransition-gsa-trump-emily-murphy-ascertain (last visited on November 24, 2020); see also Kayode Oyero in “Updated: Trump finally agrees to Biden transition”, punchng.com, November 24, 2020, available at https://punchng.com/breaking-trump-finally-agrees-to-biden-transition/ (last visited on November 24, 2020). 122 Obama (2020, pp. 672–674), op. Cit. The characterization of Trump’s denial of his loss to a new birtherism was also a remark by Fareed Zakaria in his GPS on CNN, monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Sunday, November 15, 2020, between 4 and 5 pm. Birtherism is Barack Obama’s citizen conspiracy theory that was promoted by Donald Trump when the latter alleged that Obama was not born in the United States; see “Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories”, Wikipedai, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories (Last visited on November 16, 2020). 123 See “I can’t breathe”, Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/i_cant_breathe (last visited on November 13, 2020). 124 Bolton (2020, pp. 314–315), op. Cit. 125 See Quint Forgey and Matthew Choi in “This is deadly stuff: Tapes show Trump acknowledging virus threat in February”, Politico, available at https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/09/trumpcoronavirus-deadly-downplayed-risk-410796 (last visited on November 12, 2020). 126 Loc. Cit.

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President demonized Woodward’s revelation of the tape for being “just another political hit job” or partisan hack when queried on why he did not take “more preemptive measures based on his understanding of the virus before the disease spread in the US” and claimed many lives.127 Trump equally quipped that his response showed leadership and that many more would have died if had not shut down the country to foreign visitors.128 Ostensibly, without publicly being open about the virus, and without a national strategy to fight it, President Trump had misled the American people on the COVID19 pandemic; even when Woodward had warned him that the coronavirus would be the biggest national security threat he would face in his presidency.129 The COVID19 pandemic certainly and immediately became a campaign issue in the United States, especially in the Trump Administration’s early and relentless assertion that the disease had been contained; and with the Chairman of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, proclaiming on February 25, 2020, that the United States had contained the virus “pretty close to airtight”, a remark that made market reactions “decidedly negative” because the administration’s reflex to talk its way out of everything was seen as a mere “political damage control” that was undercutting America’s credibility.130 The situation was not helped by the fact that after President Trump was revealed on October 2 to have been infected by COVID-19131 which was just a few weeks to the November 3, presidential election, he was admitted into Walter Reed medical center from where, after a precipitate discharge, he returned to the balcony of the White House for a photo-op without a mask.132 The President was, therefore, more concerned with his immediate return to political campaigns and a subsequent reelection, instead of the containment and control of the virus.133 Obviously, because President Trump had not been able to embed COVID-19 due diligence in governance, the point became clear that he did not model for the United States in terms of adhering to the COVID-19 safety protocol; and so, his defeat in the presidential election was greeted with a ‘schadenfreude’134 —a German word that is an expression of joy and 127 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 129 See William Roberts in “Trump knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’, downplayed it: Woodward book”, Aljazeera, available at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/09/9/trump-knew-cor onavirus-was-deadly-downplayed-it-woodward-book (last visited on November 12, 2020). 130 Bolton (2020, p. 315), op. Cit. 131 See William Gittins in “Coronavirus USA: when did Donald Trump become infected with COVID-19?”, available at https://en.as.com/en/2020/10/08/latest_news/1602174700_362356.html (last visited on October 18, 2020). 132 See Kaitlan Collins in “Infected Trump re-shoots entrance into White House with camera crew, available on https://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/10/05/trump-no-mask-white-house-cam era-crew-balcony-collins-ikiy-ebof-vpx.cnn (last visited on October 6, 2020). 133 Loc. Cit. 134 See Adam Tooze in “Biden will have the presidency. But Republicans still have the power”, theguardian.com, November 24, 2020, available at https://www.theguardian.com/com mentisfree/2020/nov/24/republicans-joe-biden-history-congress-president-democrat (last visited on November 24, 2020). 128 Loc.

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self-satisfaction with the troubles, failures and humiliation (instead of sympathy) of others.135 It was within this and other contexts of President Trump’s political bungling that Bob Woodward wrote that: The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.136

It was also in this context of some members of President Trump’s staff joining to purposely block what they believed were the President’s dangerous impulses that an anonymous or unsigned Op-Ed piece appeared in The New York Times of September 3, 2018, within which an insider in President Trump’s administration doubted the President’s “mental, moral and intellectual fitness for his high office”.137 The identity of the anonymous writer eventually turned out to be Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security Official, who revealed himself in October 2020.138 As liberally quoted by Olatunji Dare in a Nigerian newspaper, Miles Taylor, who identified himself as a “senior official” in the Trump administration, and who also qualified himself as part of a resistance in the White House, also wrote that they were labouring behind the scenes in the White House to save America from Trump by thwarting his “more misguided impulses”.139 The said The Washington Post anonymous writer who turned out to be Miles Taylor man described President Trump’s style of governance as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective”; and spoke of the President’s “preferences for autocrats and dictators, and of his anti-democratic impulses”.140 According to him, senior officials in government, from the White House to the Executive branch departments and agencies, “would privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander-chief’s comments and actions”, and how “most (of them) are working to insulate their operations from his whims”.141 In fact, the writer indicted the American society for its complicity in President Trump’s desecration of American values, insisting that “the bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency, but rather what we

135 See

“Schadenfreude” in Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schadenfreude (last visited on December 1, 2020). 136 See Bob Woodward (2018); Fear, …, p. xxii, op. cit. 137 See Olatunji Dare At Home Abroad in “Beyond Donald Trump”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, November 10, 2020, back page. 138 See Michael D. Shear in “Miles Taylor, a former Homeland Security Official reveals he was Anonymous”, The New York Times, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/us/politics/ miles-taylor-anonymous-trump.html (last visited on November 13, 2020). 139 See Olatunji Dare At Home Abroad in “Beyond Donald Trump”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, November 10, 2020, back page, op. Cit. 140 Loc. Cit. 141 Loc. Cit.

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as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility”.142 But it was not only Miles Taylor that was an insider in President Trump’s administration that rose against his dangerous impulses. Gary Cohn and Rob Porter also reported that President Trump could get in a bad mood over something that was large or small, something like the KORUS, and could be infuriated and say, “We’re withdrawing today”.143 It was President Trump’s transactional behavior and this chaos and lawlessness in his White House that made Gary Cohn (who had a “walkin-privilege to Trump’s Oval Office”) and Rob Porter (the staff secretary that was one of the low-level but critical roles in the White House that organized presidential paperworks) used to at times yank critical documents that had national security concerns off President Trump’s desk so that the President would not see and sign them.144 When the documents were yanked off, President Trump would not see and, thus, would forget to sign them.145 In fact, Rob Porter also reported that in addition to coordinating policy decisions and schedules, and in running the paperwork for the President, he also had a third aspect of his job, which was to try “to react to some of the really dangerous that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas”.146 Thus, Porter delayed, procrastinated, cited legal restrictions, slow-walked things and delayed taking things to Trump by telling him that such things needed some process; that they needed to be vetted, especially by obtaining some legal clearance.147 It was for these reasons that Cohn said privately that “it’s not what we did for the country”; “it’s what we saved him from doing” to America’s national security148 and the security of the rest of the world that he left significantly worse off than he met it.149 But President Trump’s ultimate self-destruct was fully realized on Saturday, January 2, 2021 when he was reported to have aggressively attempted to overturn the Joe Biden election by calling the Georgian Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, and urging him to help “find 11,780 votes”—the number that he would need to defeat the President-elect, suggesting in addition that there was nothing wrong with Brad Raffensperger suggesting that he had “recalculated” the votes.150 This call was as 142 Loc.

Cit.

143 Woodward

(2018, p. xviii), op. cit. p. xix. 145 Loc. Cit. 146 Loc. Cit. 147 Ibid, p. xx. 148 Ibid, p. xix. 149 See Owei Lakemfa in “Trump: Leaving world politics worse than he met it”, Vanguard, Friday, December 18, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. 150 See “Trump call, latest episode in growing rift with Republicans”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, January 5, 2021, p. 15; see also George Back in “Carl Bernstein believes tape of Trump seeking votes from election official is ultimate smoking gun”, Yahoo.com, January 4, 2021, 144 Ibid,

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scandalous as the call President Trump made to the Ukrainian President Zelensky that resulted in his first impeachment.151 The Georgian Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, and the Georgian State Governor (Brian Kemp) were all Republicans (the same political party with President Donald Trump), which made the Trump call all the more seditious and a déjà vu that reminisced not only the call to the Ukrainian President Zelensky but also the Richard Nixon Watergate scandal—which Carl Bernstein termed an ‘ultimate smoking gun’ for his impeachment.152 Apart from Ukraine’s involvement in the promotion of an unsubstantiated allegation that Hunter Biden improperly used his father’s influence as the vice-President under the Obama administration to help Burisma (a Ukrainian energy company on which board he sat), and that his father improperly pressured Ukraine to fire a top prosecutor who had investigated the firm, the Ukrainian government was also reported to be determined to hold responsible, some of the country’s individuals that were accused of an involvement in a Russia-linked foreign influence network associated with the Ukrainian parliament’s that allegedly tried to interfere in the 2020 US election that Biden won.153 Despite the latter allegations of the attempt to subvert the US November 2020 presidential election, President Trump’s self-destruct did not end with it or in his January 2, 2021 call to Georgia to overturn the Biden election. Trump’s self-destruction continued on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, when the President instigated his supporters to storm Capitol Hill and disrupt the “pro-forma ritual that normally marks the joint session of Congress” certifying the victory in the presidential election, which was to certify Joe Biden’s election as the 46th President of the United States.154 Prior to the Congressional meeting to certify the Electoral Votes, the run on Washington and the threat to breach the Capitol building were so intensive that many businesses in Washington boarded up in anticipation of a widespread riot.155 But the President Trump-incited insurrection ended in the White House brutal siege that caused five deaths, including the death of two Capitol Hill available at https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/carl-bernstein-believes-tape-of-trump-seekingvotes-from-election-official-is-the-ultimate-smoking-gun-051034190.html (last visited on January 4, 2021). 151 Bolton (2020, pp. 455–456, 483–487), op. cit. 152 See George Back in “Carl Bernstein believes tape of Trump seeking votes from election official is ultimate smoking gun”, Yahoo.com, January 4, 2021, available at https://www.yahoo.com/ent ertainment/carl-bernstein-believes-tape-of-trump-seeking-votes-from-election-official-is-the-ult imate-smoking-gun-051034190.html (last visited on January 4, 2021), op. cit. 153 See “Ukraine to sanction persons linked to US election meddling”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, January 14, 2021, p. 30. 154 See Mayhem in Washington: Trump’s supporters storm the Capitol to block the transfer of power”, economist.com, January 6th 2021, available at https://www.economist.com/united-states/ 2021/01/06/trumps-supporters-storm-the-capitol-to-block-the-transfer-of-power?utm-campaign= the-economist-today&utm-medium=newsletter&utm-source=salesforce-marketing (last visited on January 7, 2021); see also “Attack on Capitol: Lawmakers mount pressure for Trump’s removal: Facebook, Instagram block Trump’s accounts indefinitely; More top advisers resign; Over 65 attackers arrested”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 8, 2021, p. 33. 155 Report on CNN news on January 5, 2021 between 6 and 7 pm local time.

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policemen.156 The Capitol Hill invasion was a White supremacist insurgency to make “America great for white people”.157 This way obviously why, despite the deaths the protesters had caused, President Trump told a big lie in March 2021 after he had left office in falsely claiming that the Capitol protest posed a “zero threat” because the protesters that were being persecuted were merely hugging and kissing the police.158 But the protest in Capitol hill was an insurrection in which “Donald Trump and Trumpism as an ideology … opened a Pandora’s box of hate into the American mainstream, giving the permission some racists needed to reveal themselves proudly and wreak havoc on symbols of American democracy that had withstood wars and attacks for centuries”, especially “in erecting a hangman’s noose, waving the Confederate flag, and wearing white nationalist paraphernalia, including an Auschwitz Concentration Camp shirt, the domestic terrorists showed America they fundamentally believe in maintaining and enacting white supremacy”.159 At this point, there was no doubt that the Republican Party as well as the avid Trump supporters were responding to the demographic challenge in the United States—that led to the minorities assertion of their voting rights and the Anglo-Saxtion loss of political privilege in America—with the assertion of White supremacy. The State of Georgia was to obviously react to this demographic change by enacting a new controversial voting law, termed a twenty-first century Jim Crow that limited the voting rights of the minorities, especially the black population.160 This White supremacy law made nonsense of the Georgian Governor Brian Kemp’s heroic resistance of President Trump’s attempt to change the Georgian presidential election result. But before the State of Georgia acted that way after the Presidential election and Biden’s assumption of office, the Democratic House-controlled Rules 156 See

“Attack on Capitol: Lawmakers mount pressure for Trump’s removal: Facebook, Instagram block Trump’s accounts indefinitely; More top advisers resign; Over 65 attackers arrested”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, January 8, 2021, p. 33, op. cit. 157 See Rashawn Ray in “How we rise: What the Capitol insurgency reveals about white supremacy and law enforcement”, Brookings, January 12, 2021, available at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ how-we-rise/2021/01/12/what-the-capitol-insurgency-reveals-about-white-supremacy-and-lawenforcement/?utm-camgaign=brookings% (last visited on January 14, 2021). 158 See Michelle Stoddart in “Trump claims Capitol rioters posed ‘zero threat’, says some being persecuted”, abcNews, March 26, 2021, available at https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-claimscapitol-rioters-posed-threat-persecuted/story?id=76702608 (last visited on Saturday, March 27, 2021). 159 See Rashawn Ray in “How we rise: What the Capitol insurgency reveals about white supremacy and law enforcement”, Brookings, January 12, 2021, available at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ how-we-rise/2021/01/12/what-the-capitol-insurgency-reveals-about-white-supremacy-and-lawenforcement/?utm-camgaign=brookings% (last visited on January 14, 2021), op. cit. 160 Amongst other provisions, the 98-page Election Integrity Act of 2021 garnered criticism for the additional ID requirements it added to absentee voting as well as its making it a crime for many volunteers to hand out water of food within 150 feet of the polling precincts; see Jewel Wicker in “Georgia’s governor signed ‘Jim Crow’ voting bill under painting of a slave plantation”, Saturday, March 27, 2021, available at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/27/ georgia-governor-painting-slave-plantation-voting-bill-signing (last visited on Saturday, March 27, 2021).

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Committee had, on Wednesday, January 13, 2021, held a hearing on an impeachment resolution that called on vice-President Mike Pence to “immediately” invoke the 25th Amendment and declare Trump unfit for office and take over as President because President Trump had animated and “widely advertised and broadly encouraged” the mob that on January 6, ransacked the Congress.161 It was in this context that Trumpism joined COVID-19 to make the year 2020 an annus horribilis to the whole world and Americans in particular.162 It was on that Wednesday, January 13, 2021 that the US House impeached President Trump the second time in his single-term on charges of inciting his supporters to insurrection.163 But, although he was for the second time acquitted from conviction in the Senate by a 57 by 43 votes (short of 10 votes when 67 votes were required to convict him and ban him from political life),164 that second impeachment gave Trump the dubious distinction of being the only American President that has historically been impeached twice and holds the prospect of losing the benefits of ex-Presidents if a two-thirds of the Senate convicts him. He had been impeached earlier over his phone call to the Ukrainian President Zelensky seeking the prosecution of Hunter Biden and assistance to boost his re-election that failed in November 2020, even though, as mentioned earlier in this book, the Senate acquitted him of the charges.165 In her contribution to the debate before the impeachment, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, stated unequivocally that President Trump was a “clear and present danger” to the United States; harkening back to Abraham Lincoln and saying that “we hold the power and bear the responsibility”.166 It was not likely that the Senate would take up the article for Trump’s conviction because the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, reportedly said that the soonest the Senate could take up the task was on January 19, 2021, the day before President Trump’s tenure expires on January 20 after the inauguration.167 When President Donald Trump went into oblivion on account of the negative consequences that the insurrection he inspired against Capitol Hill brought to the White House, it was the vice-President Mike Pence that persisted in the limelight with the glorification of the so-called fact that the Trump administration did not incur any new war for the

161 See

Henry Ojelu with agency report in “US House vote to impeach Trump today”, Vanguard (Lagos), Wednesday, January 13, 2021, p. 28. 162 See Reuben Abati in “2020: The Year That Was”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, December 29, 2020, back page, op. Cit. 163 See Henry Ojelu with agency report in “Trump impeached again: May lose benefits of exPresident”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, January 14, 2021, p. 30. 164 See Laurin-Whtney Gottbrath in “McConnell rips into Trump after voting to acquit”, yahoo!news, February 13, 2021, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/mcconnell-rips-trump-voting-acquit220900798.html (last visited on February 14, 2021). 165 See Henry Ojelu with agency report in “Trump impeached again: May lose benefits of exPresident”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, January 14, 2021, p. 30, op. cit. 166 Loc. Cit. 167 Loc. Cit.

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United States.168 But Brian Stelter, the anchor of Reliable Sources on CNN, made the critical and significant reminder that Joe Biden had inherited a war at home that President Trump caused, a “war” that led to the making of a fortress Washington DC—the practical creation of an Afghanistan-like “Green Zone” in Washington as if the United States were actually in war, what with the deployment of over 25,000 National Guard troops to guarantee the swearing in of Biden-Harris government.169 The United States may have been derided for what Trumpism has done to its capacity as an exceptional city on the hill170 but the most redeeming factor for the United States is that despite President Trump’s so-called “coup” with the mobilization of the siege on Washington and Capitol Hill, the American institutions survived the insurrection with the eventual certification of the Electoral Votes,171 the second impeachment of President Trump and the inauguration of the President-elect, Joe Biden. Gossip on the social media was rife with the fact that American institutions largely stood up to the evil of President Trump.172 In Nigeria, the social media bloomed with the assertion that,173 unlike in an underdeveloped Nigerian polity during the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, the US judiciary did not grant meaningless and silly injunctions that could derail the democratic process because as much as President Trump tried to harass, intimidate and blackmail election officials in Georgia, they stood their ground; and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) did not arrest or detain key electoral officials before the election. And despite the Trump mobs’ violation of key democratic institutions like the Capitol, people were not shot in their numbers by the police as key officials in the Trump administration resigned following the insurrection against the Capitol building. The implication of the foregoing is that no matter what, the United States cannot be compared to an underdeveloped country like Nigeria because in America,

168 See

Dustin Gardiner in “Pence, in California speech, praises Trump’s foreign policy with no mention of insurrection, San Francisco Chronicle, January 16, 2021 available at https://www.sfchro nicle.com/politics/article/Pence-in-California-speech-glorifies-Trump-15877056.php (last visited on Monday, January 18, 2021). 169 See “Stelter: Biden inheriting a war at home from Trump”, Sunday, January 17, 2021, circa 5 pm, available at https://edition.cnn.com/videos/media/2021/01/17/stelter-commentary-biden-inh eriting-war-at-home-from-trump-rs-vpx.cnn (last visited January 18, 2021). 170 See Anne Applebaum in “What Trump and His Mob Taught the World About America: The allure of democracy was the nation’s best asset abroad, but the President squandered it by inciting political violence”, The Atlantic, January 7, 2021, available at https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ 2021/01/what-trump-and-his-mob-taught-world-about-america/617579/ (last visited on January 8, 2021), op. cit. 171 See “US Congress formally certifies Joe Biden US president (updated), Vanguardng.com, January 7, 2021, available at https://www.vanguardngr.com/2021/01/breaking-us-congress-formally-certif ies-joe-biden-us-president/amp/ (last visited on January 7, 2021. 172 The cases of America’s institutions withstanding President Trump’s mobs that are listed here are contained in a Whatsapp message that was forwarded to “Professors’ Forum (a Nigerian Professors Whatsapp group platform) by Professor Usman Tar, circa, January 9, 2021. 173 Loc. cit.

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“the law is king unlike [in Nigeria where] the king is the law”.174 There may have been four political parties in the United States—comprising the extreme populist far-right and the moderate Republicans on the one hand, and the extreme far-left Democrats and the moderate Democrats on the other; President Trump may have incited white supremacists—an army of the QANON far-right extremists that were donning MAGA hats—to invade the Capitol building; but these populism and the extremist ideologies did not eventually prevail or extinguish moderation in the United States with the eventual triumph of American institutions in the swearing-in of the Biden-Harris administration.

A.8 Heralding President Biden’s Legacy When, on February 4, 2021, President Biden spoke at the United States Department of State Headquarters in the Harry S. Truman Building at Washington D.C, he made it clear that the message he wanted the world to hear was that America was back and diplomacy would be at the center of America’s foreign policy.175 He reiterated his remark in his inaugural address that he would “repair our alliances and engage with the world once again” because “America’s leadership must meet this new moment of advancing authoritarianism, including the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States and the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy”.176 President Biden was, therefore, out to reinstate the United States’ global leadership. The US leadership of the world was reiterated by President Obama on the eve of the intervention in Libya when President Gaddafi had massed his forces on Benghazi, threatening to go “house by house, home by home, alley by alley, person by person, until the country is cleansed of dirt and scum”, and all Nicolas Sarkozy of France and David Cameron of the United Kingdom could do was a suggestion of a United Nations international coalition to initiate a no-fly zone over Libya, which would damn not stop Gaddafi’s threat to exterminate the Libyan rebels in Benghazi.177 President Obama was “irritated that Sarkozy and Cameron had jammed me on the issue, in part to solve their domestic political problems”178 ; he was equally feeling “scornful of the Arab League’s hypocrisy” that “voted in support in support of an international intervention against Gaddafi”,179 and was conscious “that the minute 174 Intervention

by Prof. Akinyeye to the whatsapp message forwarded to the Professors’ Forum aforementioned. 175 See “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World”, Whitehouse.gov, February 4, 2021, avaibale at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/02/04/rem arks-by-president-biden-on-americas-place-in-the-world/ (last visited on April 23, 2021). 176 Loc. Cit. 177 Obama (2020, p. 656), op. cit. 178 Ibid, p. 658. 179 Ibid, p. 656.

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anything about a U.S. military operation in Libya went south, my political problems would only worsen”.180 But in demonstration of the United States’ global leadership, President Obama later wrote in his memoir that: I also knew that unless we took the lead, the European plan would likely go nowhere. Gaddafi’s troops would lay siege to Benghazi. At best, a protracted conflict would ensue, perhaps, even a full-blown civil war. At worst, tens of thousands or more would be starved, tortured, or shot in the head. And at the moment, at least, I was perhaps the only person in the world who could keep that from happening.181

President Biden was to clearly endorse Obama’s notion of America’s leadership of the world. He could not but endorse Obama’s above assertion on America’s leadership of the world because before the United States rose to globalism in its foreign policy, the country, on the eve of World War II in 1939, was into isolationism—with “an Army of 185,000 men with an annual budget of less than $500 million” in which “America had no entangling alliances and no American troops were stationed in any foreign country” because the country’s physical security, “the sine qua non of America’s foreign policy” was assured, not by America’s military alliances or military strength but because of the distance between America and any potential enemy”.182 But the distance that was created by the oceans between America and any potential enemy could not hold for long because half a century later, America extended her power.183 Although the American Congress believed that World War I was fought for the benefit of big business as it was believed that it was the Wall Street that dragged the country into it184 ; but when World War II broke out, President Roosevelt sought “to avoid the mistakes of Woodrow Wilson and the long controversy over World War I debts”, but he maneuvered the United States into the war by persuading that “the best defence of Great Britain is the best defence of the United States”—hence, the most un-neutral Lend Lease Act in which Roosevelt simply lend or leased to England the supplies she needed—“the idea of lending a garden hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire”.185 By the time of World War II, America had developed a huge standing Army, Air Force, and Navy, and a defence budget of over $300 billion with military alliances with fifty nations, stationing over a million soldiers, airmen and sailors in more than 100 countries and an offensive capability that is sufficient to destroy the world many times over.186 The United States was to subsequently use “military force to intervene in Indochina, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Central America and the Persian Gulf, supported an invasion of Cuba, distributed enormous quantities of arms to friendly governments around the world, and fought costly wars in Korea 180 Ibid,

p. 658. Cit. 182 Ambrose (1988, p. xi). 183 Loc. Cit. 184 Ibid, p. 2. 185 Ibid, p. 8; Williams (1956, pp. 794, 842–843). 186 Ambrose (1988, p. xi), op. cit. 181 Loc.

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and Vietnam”.187 But despite all these—“all the money spent on armaments and no matter how far outward America extended her power, America’s national security was constantly in jeopardy”188 ; especially in threats and harms like the 9/11 attacks that were posed by non-state entities like the al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. It was in realization of all these, in addition to President Biden’s declaration at the United States Department of State Headquarters in Washington to take on China and Russia that he was quick to gigantically begin the recreation or regeneration of a new US global leadership legacy by responding to some of the issues that President Trump had messed up, issues like the tackling of North Korea. President Biden vowed to respond to Pyongyang if they chose to escalate their military threats189 threats like the testing of new weapons that was their knack immediately there was a new American President. There was also an ostensible diplomatic move by President Biden to solve the major economic sources of strain with China, particularly in resolving the disputes over tech and trade.190 The United States held a premier two-day meeting that was led by the Secretary of State (Tony Blinkin) and the National Security Adviser (Jake Sullivan), with their Chinese counterparts led by Wang Yi and Yang Jiechi, in Anchorage, Alaska, with a lot of baggage that included de-escalating the tensions between the two countries that the former President Trump had created, which included a bitter trade war and the punishment of Chinese prominent tech companies with crippling sanctions because he considered that these companies posed a threat to the US national security.191 Apart from China hoping that the Anchorage meeting would decouple politics from trade and eventually lead to a rollback of US tariffs as well as its commitment to buy more US goods, the US seemed hard to make concessions because of Beijing’s crackdown on the democratic institutions that Britain bequeathed to Hong Kong, including the allegations of China’s human rights abuses of the Uyghur in the western Chinese region of Xinjing.192 The Biden administration’s apparent unwillingness for concessions arose partly from “the sharp shift in US public opinion against China” and the “strong demands in Congress from both parties for a hard line on China”.193 Thus, even though trade and technology remained issues, the issue of human rights remained higher on the US priority list; this was in addition to the issue of geopolitics, since the US Secretary of State (Tony Blinkin) had criticized China in a meeting in Tokyo, accusing Beijing of threatening regional stability in South-east Asia.194 187 Loc.

Cit. Cit. 189 See “Biden vows to “respond” to North Korea if situation escalates”, Kyodo News, March 26, 2021, available at https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2021/03/98edfb4dfe3a-urgent-biden-vowsto-respond-to-n-korea-if-situation-escalates.html? (last visited on Saturday, March 27, 2021). 190 See Jill Disis in “US-China talks could end up inflaming trade tensions”, CNN Business, Thursday, March 18, 2021, available at https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/03/18/business/us-chinatrade-alaska-intl-hnk/index.html#aoh=16161200541738&csi (last visited on March 19, 2021). 191 Loc. Cit. 192 Loc. Cit. 193 Loc. Cit. 194 Loc. Cit. 188 Loc.

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President Putin had reportedly called Putin a killer, which prompted Russia to react in fury.195 It was a highly explosive remark that seemed undiplomatic in nature; even though Jen Psaki, the White House Press Secretary, shrugged off the idea of President Biden being undiplomatic and said that “the President gave a direct answer to a direct question” in the interview the President reportedly called Putin a killer.196 President Putin resultantly recalled the Russian Ambassador to the US, even though the American Ambassador to Russia, John J. Sullivan, was still in place.197 It is obvious that President Biden is now resuscitating multilateralism through the rebuilding of the United States’ global alliances, but he doesn’t seem to care about rethinking the bilateral or unilateral multilateralism that has continued to subdue Africa and other underdeveloped nations. President Biden is also, at the same time, being very strong in the “furious exchange of trans-Atlantic taunts”198 with Russia over the Putin killer tension as well as the China trade, human rights and geopolitical tensions in northeast Asia that could lead to the Thucydides trap. There was, indeed, a “war of words between top US and Chinese diplomats” in Anchorage (Alaska) on March 18, 2021—a “verbal salvos between top American diplomats and their Chinese counterparts”, [which] “seemed more like testosterone-driven exchanges between professional wrestlers at the opening session of the US-China high-level meeting in Anchorage”.199 It was the first meeting between China and the United States since President Biden took office200 —President Biden, who was also expected to respond to the BRI by being assertive and not withdrawing its economic and strategic assistance to its allies because if “US allies were to turn to BRI to build critical infrastructure, such as power grids, ports, or telecommunications networks [including China’s sale of the fifth-generation 5G], this could complicate U.S. contingency planning and make coming to the defence of its allies more difficult”.201 Of course, citing the BRI as “inconsistent with Australia’s foreign policy or adverse to our foreign relations”, the Australian federal government had scrapped both the memorandum of understanding and the framework agreement signed between Victoria and China’s National Development and Reform Commission,

195 See Anton Troianovski in “Russia Erupts in Fury Over Biden’s Calling Putin a Killer”, The New

York Times, March 18, 2021, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/world/europe/rus sia-biden-putin-killer.html (last visited on Friday, March 19, 2021). 196 Loc. Cit. 197 Loc. Cit. 198 Loc. Cit. 199 See Bhim Bhurtel in “How China drew a red line in Anchorage”, Asia Times, March 22, 2021, available at https://asiatimes.com/2021/03/how-china-drew-a-red-line-in-anchorage/ (last visited on March 23, 2021). 200 Loc. Cit. 201 See Jenifer Hillman and David Sacks in “China’s Belt and Road: Implications for the United States”, Council on Foreign Relations 100 , Updated, March 2021, available at https://www.cfr.org/ report/chinas-belt-and-road-implications-for-the-united-states/ (last visited on March 23, 2021). Parenthesis mine.

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which the Chinese government, indeed, slammed.202 The foreign relations that Australia adverted to are certainly its relations with the West, especially in the trans-Atlantic relations that the United States champions; including the fact that Australia is a scion of the United Kingdom and a member of the Commonwealth. This was certainly a credit to the election of President Biden. It was also a reflection of the fall of trumpism. It is equally expected that, realizing China’s indifference to human rights in its fallacy of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries—for instance, supplying arms to Zimbabwe amidst the latter’s post 2008 election crises203 —many countries would begin to rethink the BRI in consideration of Beijing’s use of the scheme as a mere economic and strategic weapon of domination; and at the G7 Summit that held on June 12, 2021 in England, and despite President Biden’s protectionist Buy America edict that tightens rules that obliges its government to favour domestic suppliers over foreign ones, the summiteers unfolded many initiatives that include the Build Back Better World Initiative (BW3I) to counter China’s BRI, pledged a $1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the miserly funded COVAX and also Challenged China and Russia’s human rights records.

A.9 Saving the World Through Policy Inclusiveness It is important to begin this rubric by noting the prevalence of the issue of the national interest in international relations. Against this background, a poser can be raised on whether in international relations; there can ever be global policy inclusiveness in the classical sense of it. The answer to this query can be in the affirmative if the international system can permit the prevalence of international interests over and above the national interest because the contrary is a serious threat or danger to international peace and security.204 Unfortunately, the greatest problem is the inherent inequity in the international system, the inability (because of the surge of nationalism, populism and protectionism) to forge a global governance structure that is all-inclusive enough to control, regulate and ensure stability in the international system. The global governance system is inherently rigged and, thus particularly vilified by the poverty-stricken class in both the developed and the developing countries— with the poor class in the developed countries, for instance, viewing outsourcing as a threat to their employment whereas the developing countries themselves see the 202 See Jason Scott in “Poisoned mutual trust: China blasts Australia’s decision to cancel BRI”, Busi-

ness standard, April 23, 2021, available at https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/ poisoned-mutual-trust-china-blasts-australia-s-decision-to-cancel-bri-121042300024_1-html (last visited on April 23, 2021). 203 Agwu (2009), National Interest, International Law …, pp. 43, fn 147, 497–508, op. cit; see also “The G7 Summit: Inoculation, inoculation, inoculation: For all their talk about international cooperation, America and its allies are failing the world”, The Economist, June 12th–18th, 2021, p. 10. 204 See Agwu (2009), National Interest, International Law, Ibid, pp. 455–524.

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developed countries as having tilted the global economic regime against them.205 Some critics see the exclusion of the poor by globalization as a vindication of Karl Marx’s thesis that the fundamental difference amongst men in the human society is neither race, ethnicity, nor faith; rather, it is the class they belong, which, for instance, makes the English billionaire and the Nigerian billionaire belonging to the same class, while the English worker and the Nigerian worker are members of the same excluded working class that sell their physical and mental labour for wages in order to provide themselves and their loved ones with the very necessities of life.206 Unfortunately, this fundamentally held Marxian belief is twisted by social constructs that are in turn shaped by cultural norms that sometimes depend on political orientations that, inclusive of international situations, are constrained by political biases; in which powerful states (even sometimes threatening international institutions like the ICC) sure-footedly dispense with the Newtonian gravity (or grave violation) of class in their authoritative allocation of socio-economic and political resources.207 This rigging of the global economic regime is particularly attributed to the dominance or advancement of corporate interests at the expense of global values. The global division was embodied in the disagreement at the Mumbai and Davos meetings of the WTO in which, for the sickness of globalization, the Mumbai meeting blamed the developed countries and corporate interests while in Davos, the developing countries were blamed and even asked to liberalize the more and adopt the Washington Consensus hook line and sinker without any attention to equity.208 It was in the context of the developed countries asking the developing countries to liberalize their economies and open up to corporate interests (the multinational corporations) that difficulties have arisen over the overarching issue of reform of globalization because these contentious issues are the areas where the developed countries that benefit from globalization resist change, particularly in the issue of foisting or imposing the Washington Consensus that prioritize the “downscaling of government, deregulation, and rapid liberalization and privatization” that do not set stock by equity.209 These over-arching issues of contention include the pervasiveness of poverty around the world as a result of globalization, and the need for foreign assistance and debt relief for the developing countries.210 They also include the aspiration to make trade fair through the mutual opening and access to the markets of both the developed and the developing countries, the limitations of liberalization (that is resisted by corporate interests and the developed countries that gain from globalization), the protection of the environment, and the 205 Stiglitz

(2006), p. 269), op. Cit. Owei Lakemfa in “Racism under pandemic skies” in Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, July 24, 2020, p. 17. 207 See Rachel Lopez in “The Law of Gravity: A Newtonian Proposal for Public International Law”, OpinioJuris, available at http://opiniojuris.org/2020/07/24/the-law-of-gravity-a-newtonianproposal-for-public-international-law/ (last visited on July 25, 2020). 208 Stiglitz (2006, pp. 6–7, 16–17), op. cit. 209 Ibid, pp. 6–7, 13, 16–17. 210 Ibid, p. 13–19. 206 See

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rejuvenation of the flawed system of global governance.211 What the world actually needs is a multilateralist rather than a unilateralist global dispensation. And the United Nations is a very important institution for the dispensation of unilateralism. But although the United Nations is the most inclusive vehicle for multilateralism; under its populist and nationalism Trump government, “the American insistence on unilateralism, including exiting the UNESCO, defunding the WHO, rejecting the Paris Climate Change Agreement and repudiating the Iran international nuclear deal, is a grave threat to its existence” as well as a peacefully stable global world order.212 Politically, the way that international relations are conducted is very chaotic and far removed from the rules of the game. In other words, international relations are practically played as a zero-sum game in violation of the rules—like the rule of sovereign equality and territorial inviolability. The presence of Iran and the United States (two countries that the Sunnis and the Shiites want thrown out) in Iraq has practically converted Iraq into a battlefield that is causing many problems in the Middle East in clear violation of international law, particularly the principles of sovereign equality and territorial inviolability. In the wake of the United States’ droning of Qassem Soleimani (head of Iran’s elite Quds force) and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis (deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, PMF or Hashd al-Shaaabi) at an Iraqi airport, the decision of the Iraqi Parliament to urge an end to the US presence in the country was an indication that Washington’s presence was without Iraq’s consent.213 Although the Sunnis and the Shiites were both disgusted with the US killing of General Soleimani in Iraq, the demands of the Iraqi protesters were divided between the Sunnis and the Shiites—with the Shiites calling for an end to the US presence while the Sunnis were calling for Iran’s exit (which Teheran helped its Iraqi Shiite clients to quell214 )—all indications that both Washington and Teheran “occupation” of Iraq was not wanted; and this was in addition to the Sunni and Kurdish Parliamentarians boycotting the Parliament the day the Parliament called for an end to US occupation.215 The fact here is that both the United States and Iran were wrong in their presence or “occupation” of Iraq. Although the Sunnis and the Kurds were dismissive of the United States’ expulsion from Iraq, the fact is that technically, without the consent of the Iraqi government and invariably all the sectarian groups, Washington and Teheran’s presence in Iraq was a violation of the principle of sovereignty and territorial inviolability of Iraq. 211 Loc.

cit.

212 See Owei Lakemfa in “UN at 75 holds lots of hope and hopelessness”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday,

September 25, 2020, p. 17, op. cit. 213 See Henry Ojelu with Agency Report in “Tension rises as US, Iran face-off escalates”, Vanguard

(Lagos), Monday, January 6, 2020, p. 42. 214 See America, Iran and Iraq undeterred: A miscalculated retaliation shows how not to tame Iran”,

The Economist, January 4th—10th 2020, p. 8. 215 See Henry Ojelu with Agency Report in “Tension rises as US, Iran face-off escalates”, Vanguard

(Lagos), Monday, January 6, 2020, p. 42, op. cit. see also CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper (CNNSOTU), monitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Sunday, January 5, 2020 between 3 and 4 pm local time.

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If arguments were made that the United States violated international law by targeting General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, it is also trite international law that the Iraqi government violated international law by making its territory available to the Iranian General (Soleimani) for hostile activities against the United States.216 It is also trite customary principle of international law, demonstrated by the locus classicus in the Caroline case,217 which also governs the use of drones218 and selfdefence against individuals operating from foreign countries, that, as D. W. Bowett affirmed, the territorial integrity and political independence of a state only subsists or is only contingent upon the condition of the non-existence of any threat to the security of another state within its borders.219 The Shiite Iraqi government’s offer of a haven to the Shiite militia and General Soleimani to menace the United States had precluded the right of territorial inviolability its territory deserved in international law. It was in the same way too that the United States was denuded of its rights to attack because its armed forces in Iraq had even had its temporary status of forces agreement controversially put in ambiguity if not totally withdrawn in 2011 by the Shiite government.220 So, the truth here is that the dynamics of international politics at the United Nations Security Council have rarely permitted the prevalence of international interests. From the Middle East, especially in Iraq, Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria; and in Asia, especially in Myanmar with respect to the Rohingya; or even in the resolution of many other national or international problems like the annexation of Crimea, or the Pakistan and Indian conflict over Kashmir, amongst others, this prevalence of non-international interests at the United Nations have continued to imperil global peace and stability. In the Middle East in particular, tensions have been continually ratcheted-up by the controversial invocation of international law by the bickering if not belligerent parties. The United States’ killing of the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani has heightened this controversial invocation of international law because Washington’s claim that it struck General Soleimani because he was planning an imminent attack on the United States was anything legitimated by international law since the threat of force was not a casus belli; neither did the United Nations system anticipate the use or threat of force by individuals except as later recognized by the Nuremberg Tribunals221 216 Activities like mobilizing the Shiite population that stormed the American Embassy in the heavily

guarded Green Zone of Baghdad as well as the December 27th 2019 incident where “ dozens of missiles, allegedly fired by an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq called Kataib Hizbullah, struck an Iraqi military base in Kirkuk, killing an American contractor and wounding American and Iraqi soldiers”, to which the United States responded two days later “with air strikes on Iraqi soil that killed at least 25 militia members and wounded over 50”; see “America, Iran and Iraq undeterred: A miscalculated retaliation shows how not to tame Iran”, The Economist, January 4th–10th 2020, pp. 8–9, op. cit. 217 Agwu (2005), United States System …, pp. 66–69, op. Cit. 218 Agwu (2018), Armed Drones and Globalization …, pp. 167–190, 209–210, op. Cit. 219 Ibid, pp. 172–173; Agwu (2005), United States System …, pp. 69–75, op. Cit. 220 Agwu (2018), Armed Drones and Globalization …, pp. 71–72, op. Cit. 221 Agwu (2005), United States System …, p. 71, op. Cit.

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and the International Law Commission.222 Even when Iran vowed vengeance for the killing of Soleimani223 and later retaliated by launching ballistic missiles on Iraqi bases housing US soldiers.224 The Iranian missiles attack was described by Javad Zarif, the country’s foreign minister, a “proportionate measures in self-defence”,225 consistent, as he tweeted, with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.226 This sort of self-defence is also inadmissible under the United Nations jurisprudence of the use of force because, not only was there no armed attack against Iran, but were one to have existed, this delay in response was equally inadmissible in the United Nations system.227 One of the cumulative effects of all these is that the Middle East has been practically made a “battlefield”, in which Iran activated all of its proxies, including the powerful Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Shiites in Iraq, its Quds elite forces at home and beyond, and the Huthi forces in Yemen—all arraigned against the United States interests in the region with even the fear that it could strike Washington on its own soil. There is also a Shiites presence in Africa, including in Nigeria where Shiites groups burned American flags over the killing of the Iranian General Soleimani.228 The Nigerian Inspector-General of the Police was forced to issue red alert nationwide as a result of the Shiites protest.229 In the protest, the sect was also demanding the release of their leader, Sheikh Ibraheem El-Zakzaky and his wife, Zeenat, that were also in detention in Nigeria.230 Iran’s capacity to activate or even weaponize the Shiites in Nigeria was purely the function of Nigeria’s public since their leader and his wife had been in detention since December 14, 2015, in which the courts had given judgments for their release, with Justice Gabriel Kolawole of the Federal High 222 Ibid,

pp. 71–75.

223 See “Iran vows vengeance after America kills Qassem Suleimani”, available at https://www.eco

nomist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2020/01/03/iran-vows-vengeance-after-america-kills-qassemsuleimani? (last visited on Wednesday, 08 January 2020). 224 See “All eyes on Trump after Iran fires missiles at U.S bases in Iraq—live updates”, CBS News, available at https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/iran-fires-missiles-at-military-bases-iraq-usedby-us-coalition-troops-today-live-updates-2020-01-08/ (last visited on Wednesday, 08 January 2020). 225 Loc. Cit. 226 CNN Newsroom, mmonitored in Lagos (Nigeria) on Wednesday, January 08, 2020, at 7am local time. 227 Agwu (2005), United States System …, pp. 177–194, op. Cit. 228 See Luminous Jannamike in “Shiites burn US flags over killing of Iranian military chief”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, January 7, 2020, p. 14; see also Gbenga Omokhunu in “Shiites protest Soleimani killing in Abuja”, The Nation (Lagos), Tuesday, January 7, 2020, p. 7; and Kingsley Nwezeh, Olawale Ajimotokan and Adedayo Akinwale in “Shiites mobilize protest in Abuja over killing of Iranian General: Police cordon off FCT entry points; NSCIA sues for calm; be security conscious, US warns citizens in Nigeria”, ThisDay (Lagos), Tuesday, January 7, 2020, pp. 1, 8. 229 See “Death of Iranian General: IGP issues red alert nationwide”, Daily Independent, (Lagos), Monday, January 6, 2020, p. 5; see also Kingsley Omonobi in “Police on nationwide alert over killing of Iranian general”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, January 6, 2020, p. 14. 230 See Luminous Jannamike in “Shiites burn US flags over killing of Iranian military chief”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, January 7, 2020, p. 14, op. Cit.

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Court sitting in Abuja had on December 3, 2016, awarded a total of #50 million to El-Zakzaky and his wife for the violation of their rights in unlawful custody since December 14, 2015.231 It is in this context that Nigeria’s local public policy—like the obedience of court orders and the non-victimization of the Shiites—can prevent Iran from weaponizing and turning the sect into a terrorist organization. But in all the zones of conflict around the world, rather than rallying around problems with public policy inclusiveness, the driving agenda has remained the national interest, even when the problem (though national in character) may trigger a conflict that could have international consequences. The prevalence of the national interest was not in any way alleviated by the increasing revolt against globalization and the dominance of nationalismand populism in many countries around the world. The Nigerian 2019 Presidential elections were national in character; but the prevalence of the national interest, especially in the age of nationalismand populism could not allow a suitable international response to it. At a time President Muhammadu Buhari militarized the country’s electoral process by ordering the military, the police and other national security agencies to be ruthless to assumed ballot box snatchers,232 and the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Yusuf Buratai vowed that the military would treat electoral saboteurs as enemies of the state, criticizing the People’s Democratic Party’s candidate, Atiku Abubakar who asked Nigerian military commanders and officers not to execute orders that were manifestly unlawful,233 the Nigerian Presidential and National Assembly elections actually turned bloody as the military hijacked the process234 ; yet, the European Union (EU), the AU, the US and other polls observers acclaimed the elections as peaceful,235 with the United Kingdom at the verge of its Brexit declaring that the Presidential results declared by the Nigerian Independent National Electoral Commission (NIEC) were okay and verified236 as the opposition People’s Democratic Party were rejecting the results.237 231 See

John Shiklam in “What fate lies in wait for El-Zakzaky?, ThisDay (Lagos), The Sunday Newspaper, January 5, 2020, p. 74. 232 See Innocent Anaba, Charles Kumolu, Omeiza Ajayi, Johnbosco Agbakwuru, Dirisu Yakubu, Henry Ojelu and Peter Okutu in “Ballot Box Snatchers: I’ve ordered Army, Police to be ruthless— Buhari”, Vanguard (Lagos), Tuesday, February 19, 2019, pp. 1, 5, 41; see also Adamu Abuh, Chijioke Nelson and Emeka Nwachukwu in “Outrage as Buhari orders ruthless action over polls”, The Guardian (Lagos), Tuesday, February 19, 2019, pp. 1, 6, 10, op. cit. 233 See Ronald Mutum in “Buratai: We’ll treat electoral saboteurs as enemies of state …”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Thursday, February 21, 2019, pp. 1, 5; see also Kingsley Omonobi, Joseph Erunke and Dirisu Yakubu in “Unlawful Orders” Withdraw your statement, Army Chief tells Atiku”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, February 21, 2019, pp. 1, 5, 41. 234 See Kabir Alabi, Danjuma Michael et.al in “11 feared dead in bloody polls”, The Guardian (Lagos), Sunday, February 24, 2019, pp. 1, 2, 6. 235 See Ozibo Ozibo in “EU, AU, others say peaceful polls broadened democratic space”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Tuesday, February 26, 2019, p. 3. 236 See “Results declared by INEC were verified, says UK”, Vanguard (Lagos), Thursday, February 28, 2019, p. 40. 237 See Abbas Jimoh, Muideen Olaniyi and Saawua Terzungwe in “PDP rejects results as Buhari maintains lead”, Daily Trust (Abuja), Tuesday, February 26, 2019, pp. 1, 5.

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This was as the whole country deployed the election as one observer declared that “I no longer see the point of foreign election observers; they add no real value and can even do harm by legitimizing deeply flawed elections and shielding miscreants”.238 Recounting the statement by Joseph Stalin that “the people who cast the votes decide nothing; the people who count the votes decide everything”, Shaka Momodu wrote about the elections that: Indeed, many are angry, disappointed, dispirited about what just happened to our democracy. The only people celebrating are not different from armed robbers who broke into a bank’s vault and made away with the cash and other valuables in there. After escaping, they are popping champagne celebrating their success in a hideout.239

This was the state of the Nigerian election that should have been roundly certified for what it was and saved the people the inherent dispute; but the international observers, representative of many countries and international organizations looked the other way, exposing the people to the inherent dangers of election disputes and the consequent crises that could destabilize the country with the associated high risks of refugee outflows that could destabilize the neighbouring countries. The Nigerian example aforementioned was one of the risks in the prevalence of narrow interests in an atmosphere of nationalism and populism that countries like the United States of America were catch-phrasing under President Donald Trump. In response to President Trump’s “America First” worldview that he presented at the 73rd General Assembly of the United Nations in New York in September 2018, Fareed Zakaria wondered how the United States President’s knack for patriotism, “pursuing narrow self interest over broader global ones and privileging unilateral action over multilateral cooperation”, exemplified in pulling America out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal or withdrawing from the United Nations Human Rights Commission would serve America’s interest since other countries move on without Washington.240 In other words, “when Washington steps away, the global agenda is shaped without US input” or participation.241 In fact, Fareed pointed out that “the Trump administration’s constant attacks on the World Trade Organization, an American idea, have left the field wide open and China is eagerly jumping in to shape the rules; … [and] that when Trump cuts funding for various international agencies, he is playing into the hands of Beijing, which has long sought greater influence in these bodies.242 And although Fareed maintained that “America’s abdication will not be [or translate to] European or Chinese dominance” 238 See Donu Kogbara’s Sweet & Sour in “Shocking!!!”, Vanguard (Lagos), Friday, March 1, 2019,

p. 17. 239 See Shaka Momodu in “The Great Heist”, ThisDay (Lagos), Friday, March 01, 2019, back pages. 240 See, Fareed Zakaria in “How is this a victory for America?”, Washington Post, available at https://

fareedzakaria.com/columns/2018/9/27/how-is-this-a-victory-for-america (last visited on Sunday, September 30, 2018), op. cit. 241 Loc. Cit; Agwu (2018), Armed Drones and Globalization …, pp. 285, op. cit. 242 See Fareed Zakaria in “How is this a victory for America?” …, op. cit.

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of the world243 ; but in respect of how this abdication affects Europe, The Economist posited that “an increasingly wealthy [and assertive] China has designs on Europe”; which manifests in part in China using its financial muscle to buy political influence” in Europe.244 All these prompted Fareed Zakaria to pose this question: “how is this [the fact of not being represented at the table where global events are being shaped because of populism and nationalism] a victory for America?”.245 Whatever is the problem of globalization—whether it is an inherently exploitative phenomenon or it is full of socio-economic and political distortions—the attendant nationalism and populism are very destructive and not viable national approaches or alternatives; more so when in globalization, they have highly fractured all international relations. The effects of nationalism and populism in globalization are different from what obtained in the defunct Cold War era because although the Cold War was equally highly dysfunctional, but whereas the Cold War was defined by “a challenge between two [disparate] systems that had a view of how human history ought to unfold”; the problems of nationalism and populism as characteristics of unrelenting “great-power politics, great-power rivalry [and] great-power conflict were so problematic that they have made the Russian side that succeeded the Soviet Union very strategically aggressive, especially in the fact that President Putin is now trying to rebuild the Russian geo-political assertiveness and influence.246 In other words, unlike the Cold War that was defined by ideological differences on how the human history would unfold, the problems of nationalism and populism in globalization have made the pursuit of the national interest more nativistic, competitively complex and very difficult to be mutually reconciled, especially in its aversion to immigration. In addition to Putin’s Russia that is trying to rebuild its influence, China has also become a formidable emergent power whose position in the greatpower politics has caused rivalry and even conflict in some places because in its status as a rising power, it is laying claims to an entitlement that is capable of, as already observed above, endangering the world with the “Thucydides trap”. Unfortunately, the risk of the “Thucydides trap” under President Trump’s nationalism and populism in the United States was very grievous because the American President had distanced the country from its allies and lost grip on the containment policy, the historic strategy that George F. Kennan authored in a 1946 cable to President Harry Truman, a policy that was used by Washington to prevent the Soviet’s spread of communism, and to even eventually triumph in the Cold war.247 In the nationalism and populism-suffused globalizing world of great-power politics, rivalry and conflict, every weak nation or minority group was used as a pawn. 243 Loc.

Cit. Parenthesis mine. “China’s designs on Europe: And how Europe should respond”, The Economist, October 6th–12th, 2018, p. 11. Parenthesis mine. 245 See Fareed Zakaria in “How is this a victory for America?” …, op. cit. 246 See Philip Elliott in “Condoleezza Rice: The former Secretary of State on predicting chaos, dealing with Russia and how to fix Foggy Bottom”, Time (New York), May 14, 2018, p. 52. 247 See “Containment” in Wikipedia, available at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/containment (last visited on Thursday, April 23, 2020). 244 See

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Unlike during the Cold War era when the ideological struggles even redounded to the benefit of minorities like the black population in the United States whose ill-treatment was used as a propaganda by the Soviets,248 just as in resentment of President Trump’s racism, populism and nativism, the racial police’s strangling to death of a handcuffed African-American, George Floyd, over the accusation that he attempted to buy an item in a shop with a $20 counterfeit note sparked protests in America and across the world, in defiance of the COVID-19 restrictions and curfews.249 In a populist and nationalistic world, countries like China also repressed black immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic, including the rights of its Uighur Muslims population in the name of curbing terrorism as the rest of the world apparently looked elsewhere.250 It was in this context that the colonized as well as the victims of Western imperialism were also beneficiaries in the Cold War because of the Soviet propaganda. But in this age of populism and nationalism, crisis-ridden countries like Syria and Libya, including minority groups like the Rohingya in Myanmar and the Kurds (in Iraq, Syria and Turkey) are obvious victims of abandonment despite the promises of globalization and the United Nation’s avowed principle of the Responsibility to Protect. In fact, although this may seem to be an overt exaggeration, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey was reported to have described the inability of the United Nations to act decisively to stem the carnage that Israel inflicted on Palestinian youths in the wake of their protest at the Gaza border (when Israel opened its embassy in Jerusalem) as the “collapse” of the United Nations organization as a custodian of international peace and security.251 Fortunately, there is no absolute collapse of international peace and security as the protection of the weak in this era of nationalism and populism is still working, especially when that protection meets the national interest of a powerful state like the United States when there is a paralysis of the United Nations Security Council. This is the huge albatross of the globalizing world on the heels of nationalism and populism. Thus, it must be noted that it was the United States (first, unilaterally and later with its allies) that launched a coordinated attack on the Syrian Assad regime in the wake of the regime’s use of chemical weapons (first on April 4, 2017252 and one

248 See

Philip Elliott in “Condoleezza Rice: The former Secretary of State on predicting chaos, dealing with Russia and how to fix Foggy Bottom”, Time (New York), May 14, 2018, p. 52, op. cit. 249 See “George Floyd, Trump and racism in USA”, Vanguard (Lagos), Monday, June 8, 2020, p. 18, op. cit. 250 See Tunji Ajibade in “So, Geoffrey Onyeama believed the Chinese?”; Opinion article in the punchng.com of Thursday, April 24, 2020, available at https://punchng.com/so-geoffrey-onyeamabelieved-the-chinese/ (last visited on Saturday, April 25, 2020). 251 See “U.N. has “collapsed” in the face of Gaza violence, says Turkey’s Erdogan”, Reuters, May 16, 2018; available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/turkeys-erdogan-says-u-n-collapsed-facegaza-185641569.html (last visited on May 17, 2018). 252 Agwu (2018); Armed Drones and Globalization …, p. 284, op. cit.

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year later on Friday, April 13, 2018) against its people, leaving innocent children, men and women dead.253 There can only be a failure to protect when there is an “inadvertent” collusion between the United States, Russia and other members of the UN Security Council on account of a clash of their clash of interests, which was what led to the abandonment of Syria in its long-drawn-out civil war without the United States being able to act responsibly (or even unilaterally) to stop it; or the United Nations Security Council finding the unanimity to activate its principle of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P)— hence, apparently giving credence to the lamentation by Turkey’s President Erdogan that the United Nations had “collapsed”.254 The prevalence of populist attitudes across the world, particularly President Trump’s unrepentant embrace of nativistic nationalism, his practical disavowal of America’s Western allies, and his repudiation of the importance of international institutions that prompted the inability of the United Nations Security Council to act in many cases of global distress may not translate to the collapse of the United Nations; it is rather humanity’s grave paradox—its setback in the struggle against injustice and the actualization of the minimization if not the end of bloody altercations.255

253 See

Carla Herreria in “World leaders respond to the coordinated strike in Syria”, HuffPost, April 14, available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/world-leaders-respond-coordinated-strike-024 930691.html (last visited on April 14, 2018). 254 See “U.N. has “collapsed” in the face of Gaza violence, says Turkey’s Erdogan”, Reuters, May 16, 2018; available at https://www.yahoo.com/news/turkeys-erdogan-says-u-n-collapsed-facegaza-185641569.html (last visited on May 17, 2018), op. cit. 255 See Francis Fukuyama (1992, 2006); The End of History …, p. 311, op. Cit.

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481

Index

A African Continental Free Trade Area, 261, 262, 264, 285, 288, 432 Allies, 9, 10, 24, 30, 41, 60, 61, 78, 127, 128, 131, 133, 135, 137, 138, 145, 146, 153, 161, 166, 167, 170, 176, 182, 190, 204, 205, 209, 384, 439, 442, 455–457, 469, 477–479 Alternative facts, 98, 144, 157, 175 America as city on the hill, 141 American exceptionalism, 102, 143, 146, 147 Anti-globalization, 39, 81, 95, 100, 101, 109, 110, 112, 114, 120, 124, 354, 444

B Bilateral multilateralism, 424 Brexit, 8, 14, 15, 20, 33, 44, 45, 57–93, 95, 97–101, 110, 112, 114, 115, 122, 189, 374, 378, 385, 389, 409, 428, 430, 440, 443–446, 475 Brexit debacle, 59 Brexiteers, 60, 70, 75, 77–82, 88 Burden of populism, 41

C China’s BRI, 187, 190, 225, 233 Continental coalescence, 310 Convergence and global sway of populism and nationalism, 111 Corruption, 9, 15, 195, 198, 201, 238, 239, 244, 253, 254, 267–269, 272, 273, 277, 283, 290, 298, 333, 336, 342,

356, 408–412, 414–419, 423, 443, 451 COVID-19, 31, 62, 86, 91, 92, 100, 105, 123, 143, 144, 204, 205, 231, 261, 262, 267, 278, 279, 291, 327, 329, 331, 333, 373–377, 379–404, 440, 447, 448, 453, 455, 458, 459, 464, 478 Creative destructiveness, 373 Critique of BRI, 189, 190 Cuban-Americanlash, 163 Culture of authoritarian politics by China, 245 Currency swap, 202, 256–259, 353

D Debt trap, 189, 197, 198, 219, 229, 236–238, 422 Defence of globalization, 20, 68, 420, 437 Democracy and governance, 248–250, 364, 419 Diplomatic flat-footedness, 354 Double standard of globalization, 440 Downing of Trumpism, 452

E Eco, 341, 345–353, 427, 428, 433 Economic Community of West African States, 263, 274, 293, 309, 354, 358 Economic Partnership Agreement, 198, 233, 266, 361, 362, 367, 368 ECOWAS security architecture, 364 Electoral college, 101, 115, 143, 148–152, 170, 454 Epistemic challenges, 297

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 F. A. Agwu, Foreign Policy in the Age of Globalization, Populism and Nationalism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3372-0

483

484 Epistemic link, 305 European Union ideal, 57 Exchange rate cul-de-sac, 419

F Father Christmas, 229, 246, 247 Foreign interests, 349, 431–433 Foreign policy, 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 22, 38, 108, 115–118, 123, 139, 141–145, 148, 162, 164, 171, 172, 179, 182, 183, 194, 203, 205, 215, 241, 250, 261, 266, 267, 272, 274, 285, 287–290, 292, 294, 296–303, 305–309, 312, 320, 321, 324–326, 328–330, 332– 335, 338, 354, 366, 407, 412, 439, 440, 456, 457, 465–467, 469 Francafrique, 246–248, 250, 343–345, 353, 428 Francophone policy, 341, 349 Free movement, 63, 64, 263, 264, 272, 281– 284, 286, 288, 293, 332, 364, 365 Frenemies, 3, 160, 161, 182

G Geo-political landscapes, 175, 176, 183, 203, 241 Globalization, 1, 7, 13–21, 25, 26, 30, 60, 64–66, 68, 81, 95–97, 99–103, 109– 112, 114, 115, 119, 121, 123–125, 133, 148, 157–160, 164, 170, 172, 205, 206, 219, 228, 231, 235, 261, 330, 343, 353, 367, 370, 371, 373– 379, 384, 385, 392, 393, 407, 420, 431, 437, 438, 440–448, 450, 451, 471, 473, 475–478 Greenhouse emission, 456 Gung-ho, 144, 179 Guns blazing, 241, 243

H Havoc of the neglected by globalization, 444 Hell for Brexiteers, 77

I Impeachment and acquittal, 148 Interconnectivity, 195, 384, 393 International regulation, 447, 448, 450 Islamic State Iraq and Syria (ISIS), 5, 15, 17, 33, 34, 52, 65, 112, 115, 160, 161, 164–169, 182, 186, 343, 446

Index K Kinetic policy, 182

L Liberalism, 1, 12, 13, 21–23, 26, 27, 66, 68, 97–99, 102, 110–112, 122, 170, 194, 245, 287, 408, 442, 444, 445 Life and livelihood, 374, 400

M Migration, 8, 15, 19–21, 30, 31, 33–47, 51– 53, 58, 63, 65, 66, 81, 82, 101, 107, 119, 121, 134–136, 139, 243, 282, 371, 377, 379, 421, 427 Minorities, 7, 17, 29, 47, 114, 116, 118, 120, 124, 144, 149, 157–159, 162, 165, 166, 220, 233, 312, 314, 398, 399, 463, 477, 478 Monarchical conservatism, 164 Moroccan membership of ECOWAS, 354 Moroccan minefield, 354 Multilateralism, 8, 10–12, 15, 19, 30, 46, 57, 110, 360, 404, 407, 424–426, 428–430, 443, 453, 469, 472

N National interest, 1–5, 7, 17, 18, 40, 60, 103, 141, 142, 146, 170, 188, 197, 224, 226, 233, 249, 250, 278, 298, 300, 303, 304, 310, 319, 348, 355, 366, 420, 429, 434, 445, 447, 470, 475, 477, 478 Nationalism, 1, 4, 5, 7–13, 17, 21, 23, 25, 29, 46, 58, 60, 64, 95, 99, 101, 102, 106, 109, 110, 112–115, 117, 119, 123, 158, 164, 170, 172, 177, 206, 228, 261, 294, 330, 331, 333, 366, 375, 376, 391, 396, 419–424, 426, 443–446, 451, 470, 472, 475–479 Neglected by globalization, 446 Neo-liberalism, 7, 17, 68, 99, 123, 124, 205, 246, 274, 374, 375, 377, 397, 407–409, 411, 419, 431 Nigeria/South African populism, 310 Nigeria’s protectionism, 287 No-deal Brexit, 72–75, 81–84, 88

P Policy inclusiveness, 470, 475 Pompeo and Tillerson, 241

Index Populism, 1, 4, 7–13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 39, 46, 47, 60, 64, 76, 77, 81–84, 92, 93, 95, 97, 100, 101, 109, 111, 112, 114–117, 121–123, 135, 228, 310, 317, 318, 341, 376, 378, 385, 396, 419–423, 440, 442, 445, 452, 454, 457, 458, 466, 470, 475–478 Populism and nationalism, 1, 7, 11, 21, 29, 30, 57, 59, 95, 99, 109–111, 117, 175, 219, 261, 343, 353, 354, 373, 396, 407, 421, 430, 437, 438, 440, 442, 445, 454, 477, 478 Post-modernism, 246, 442 President Biden’s legacy, 466 President Trump, 5, 7, 10–12, 15, 24, 27–33, 40, 46, 47, 52, 53, 61, 62, 66, 82, 83, 95, 97–100, 102–112, 114–117, 123– 139, 142–147, 150, 152–157, 159– 164, 166, 167, 170, 172, 176, 177, 179–184, 190, 195, 202–208, 212– 215, 242, 243, 245, 297, 306, 327, 354, 362, 375, 376, 378, 386–388, 392, 393, 401, 402, 404, 434, 438– 440, 442, 444, 445, 452, 454–466, 468, 476–479 Protectionism, 1, 2, 8, 20, 29, 30, 46, 60, 64, 81, 124, 126, 130, 182, 261, 269, 277, 278, 287, 298, 330, 331, 378, 384, 419–423, 437, 438, 453, 470

485 Sino-Nigeria, 256 Soft power, 2, 21–30, 134, 143, 188, 205, 206, 441 Strait of Hormuz, 74, 142, 212–215

T Threat to the dollar, 203 Town and gown, 305, 306 Trade war, 27, 123–138, 163, 170, 186, 202, 240, 327, 408, 421, 422, 438, 452, 455, 468 Treaty and accession clause, 357, 362, 363 Trumpian apology, 107 Trumpism, 93, 95, 97–100, 105, 122, 141, 143, 148, 157, 163, 164, 170–172, 375, 440, 452, 455, 463–465, 470 Trumpism and contradiction, 170, 172 Trump’s second impeachment, 452

U UK, 20, 43–45, 57–63, 65–69, 71–74, 76– 93, 123, 190, 229, 233, 240, 282, 284, 378, 379, 385, 388, 389, 393, 409, 412, 413, 415, 417, 426, 428–430, 439, 445, 475 Unilateral multilateralism, 7, 44–46, 53, 62, 177, 290, 360, 424–430, 469 US/Turkey snafu, 184

R Race, 4, 21, 99, 105, 143, 146, 158, 176, 313, 321, 325, 327, 388, 390, 402, 471 Regional hegemony, 175, 179 Regionalism, 270, 357, 358, 361–363

V Vaccine hesitancy, 388, 389 Vaccine nationalism, 91, 92, 389–392

S Sino-African relations, 245, 247, 248, 360

W Weaponization of trade, 135