Nigerian President Bola Tinubu recently completed a whirlwind tour of the Americas, East Asia and the Middle East, headlined by his attendance of the ninth Tokyo International Conference on African Development in Japan and visit to Brazil at the invitation of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Tinubu squeezed in two trips to the United Arab Emirates and the United States between his travels to Brazil and Japan for what his aides called “stopovers,” the purpose of which was not made clear to Nigerians).
In light of the splash that Tinubu’s high-profile visits made at home and given that he recently reached the midpoint of his presidency on May 29, I thought that the time was ripe for an assessment of Nigeria’s foreign policy during the approximately 27 months of Tinubu’s term.
The Tinubu administration, which has framed its foreign policy as Nigeria’s most proactive and boldest in decades, has said that it aims to boost Nigeria’s global influence and position it to be Africa’s superpower. But as with much of his domestic policy agenda, Tinubu’s valiant rhetoric on foreign affairs is a case of plenty sizzle and no steak.
The Tinubu administration’s assertive rhetoric and exhortation of Nigeria’s leadership credentials are belied by a lack of cognizance about the vast changes that have taken place in Nigeria, on the African continent and in the wider world. Given the important juncture in which Nigeria finds itself and the way in which global dynamics are shifting with increasing unpredictability, Nigeria cannot afford to conduct business as usual in its relations with the rest of the world.
The Journey So Far
In his inaugural address after taking the oath of office, Tinubu said that his primary objective on foreign affairs was “the peace and stability of the West African subregion and the African continent.” He added that his administration would “work with ECOWAS, the AU and willing partners in the international community to end extant conflicts and to resolve new ones.”
Tinubu’s statements were in keeping with Nigeria’s decades-long “Afrocentric” foreign policy that is anchored around Pan-Africanism, non-alignment and multilateralism, and premised on a leadership role that Nigeria’s founding figures believed that the country must play in the West Africa region and on the broader continent.
In July 2023, Tinubu was selected by his fellow West African leaders as the chairperson of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), and pledged to prioritize political stability, peace and security, regional economic integration and democratic accountability during his stint as the bloc’s chair.
His leadership of the regional bloc would be quickly put to the test when, merely weeks after Tinubu inherited ECOWAS’ chair, a military coup in Niger deposed then-President Mohamed Bazoum. In response to the takeover, Tinubu spearheaded an aggressive response by ECOWAS leaders that included the imposition of heavy sanctions on Niamey and a threat to use military force to restore Bazoum to office.
In September 2023, Tinubu addressed the United Nations General Assembly for the first time since he was sworn into office. During his remarks, he made several allusions to his view of Nigeria as a continental anchor and leading voice for Africa on the international stage, and echoed longstanding calls by African leaders for reforms of the global multilateral system.
Tinubu closed out his 2023 itinerary by attending the COP28 UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai, the G20 Compact with Africa as well as the fourth G20 Investment Summit, both of which were held in Berlin.
Tinubu’s international agenda in 2024 would be dominated by bilateral meetings with world leaders and his continued hunt for foreign investment. He visited nations such as China, Equatorial Guinea, the Netherlands, Qatar, Senegal, South Africa and the United Kingdom, and hosted German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital. In November 2024, French President Emmanuel Macron hosted Tinubu to a three-day state visit, the first by a Nigerian leader in more than two decades (Stay tuned for a post in the coming days on Nigeria-France relations).
This year, Tinubu has visited Ethiopia, Ghana, St. Lucia, Tanzania and UAE for official purposes in addition to last month’s engagements in Brazil and Japan. In January, Nigeria became the ninth “partner country” of the BRICS, joining Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Thailand, Uganda, and Uzbekistan. In July, Tinubu attended the 17th BRICS Summit—also in Brazil—where he delivered remarks calling for an overhaul of global governance institutions and the international financial architecture.
Given his record of extensive travel, Tinubu is likely to be wheels up again at some point before the end of the year.
The Tinubu Doctrine
Like every “post-independence” Nigerian government, the Tinubu administration is broadly pro-West in its disposition and maintains good relations with the likes of China and Russia as well as emerging powers like Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey and the Gulf Arab states.
In December 2023, Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar formally launched the “4Ds” — Democracy, Demography, Development and Diaspora — as the overarching framework of the Tinubu administration’s foreign policy. According to the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the 4Ds would “reinforce Nigeria’s position as a leader in Africa, enhance its influence globally, maximise opportunities through strategic autonomy, drive major multilateral reforms, and foster improved national security, trade, and investment.”
Tuggar articulated the logic of the 4Ds in a televised appearance on NBC’s Morning Joe during a working visit to the United States. Nigeria is a civilian-led democracy that is Africa’s most populous nation and was its largest economy until recently. Nigeria has a large global diaspora and is projected to have the world’s third-largest population by 2050.
As Nigerian officials see it, Nigeria’s pathway to becoming Africa’s first world power lies in its ability to defend democratic values, harness its demographic potential, stimulate economic development at home and leverage its large diaspora for strategic purposes.
Tinubu administration officials believe that Nigeria must join global bodies like the G20, UN Security Council and BRICS+ in order to amplify its voice on the international stage, and leverage regional and continental institutions like ECOWAS, the African Union and African Development Bank to shore up its prominence in Africa. From that perspective, the Tinubu administration’s calls for reform of the global multilateral system are necessarily self-interested, as it believes that an increased voice for Africa in the international arena would benefit Nigeria and confer more responsibility on it as the so-called Giant of Africa.
During an appearance at the 2024 meeting of the World Economic Forum, Tuggar said that Nigeria “belongs” on the UN Security Council as a permanent member and “deserved” it because of its prominence on the African continent and what he described as the goodwill that he believes Nigeria retains with its neighbors.
At an event on the sidelines of last year’s UN General Assembly, Defence Minister Mohammed Badaru Abubakar highlighted Nigeria’s participation in continental and global peacebuilding efforts since 1960, saying that the country’s contributions to peacekeeping missions authorized by ECOWAS and the UN qualified it for permanent membership of the UN’s most powerful organ.
Nigeria’s demands for reforming multilateral institutions and search for the partnerships needed to boost economic growth and combat transnational threats, according to Tinubu administration officials, are aimed at safeguarding the country's future and amplifying its voice in global decision-making forums as well as that of Africa.
‘Open for Business’
As a presidential candidate, Tinubu pledged to boost Nigeria’s gross domestic product to $1 trillion by 2030. Since taking office, his administration has regularly deployed the target as a statement of ambition and a marketing device of sorts.
Weeks before Tinubu completed his stint as ECOWAS chair, the West Africa Economic Summit was held in Abuja. That gathering, the first of its kind to be held in the region, was one of Tinubu’s key initiatives during his chairmanship that his administration touts as a major accomplishment.
Tinubu has regularly refrained during his presidency that Nigeria is “open and ready for business.” Upon taking office, he quickly implemented a range of market-friendly policies in a bid to attract foreign investment. In addition, he indicated to domestic and foreign business leaders that he was willing to personally invest in the effort required to attract investment to Nigeria, including by traveling overseas for events and meetings with top government officials and corporate executives.
Tinubu’s first major opportunity to deliver this message to a major international audience came in September 2023, when he attended the G20 Summit in India and indicated that Nigeria wished to join the group.1 Since then, Tinubu and his cabinet officials have become regular fixtures at international gatherings, where they constantly repeat the administration’s refrain that Nigeria is “open for business.”
In addition to the market-friendly policies it has implemented, the Tinubu administration has signed several bilateral investment and technical cooperation agreements and memorandums of understanding with a range of partners including Brazil, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and the UAE.
Under Tinubu, Nigeria is branding itself as a continental trailblazer in ICT, natural gas, healthcare and the creative services. His administration’s economic diplomacy has consisted of pitching major developments taking place in those industries as evidence that its policies are working.
Tinubu, who dual-hats as Nigeria's petroleum minister, has said that he wants to diversify the country's energy exports beyond oil in part by establishing Nigeria as a major producer of natural gas at a time of rising demand from Europe and other parts of the world. His administration made a successful push for Nigeria to host the headquarters of the newly formed Africa Energy Bank, a joint initiative of the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) and the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization.
Tinubu has overhauled the leadership team of key government-owned companies in the energy industry like the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and issued a series of executive orders aimed at increasing oil and gas production, attracting investment into Nigeria’s energy and minerals industries and boosting government revenues from them. Many observers, including industry experts and Tinubu administration officials, have credited those policies for what they say is a flurry of new investments in Nigeria’s energy industry.
Over the past decade, Nigeria has quietly emerged as a hub of innovation in healthcare. Many private hospitals offering high-quality, relatively affordable services in areas like oncology, neurosurgery, ophthalmology and urology have sprung up in Nigerian cities like Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Ibadan and Enugu. This development, and many others in the industry, has been driven considerably but not entirely by returnees from the diaspora, many of whom are professionals who were trained in Nigeria.
The African Medical Center of Excellence, another Afreximbank initiative that the organization described as “a bold statement of Africa’s determination to reduce dependence on foreign health systems and reverse the estimated US$6-10 billion Africans spend annually seeking treatment abroad,” was launched in June. Tinubu administration officials including cabinet ministers and Vice President Kashim Shettima were present at the hospital’s official launch in Abuja, and touted it as an example of the steps Nigeria is taking to become a leader in healthcare services and a destination for medical tourism.
Like many Nigerians, officials in the Tinubu administration wish to leverage the rise to international popularity of Nigerian music artists, actors, authors, fashion designers and other creatives. Earlier this year, the Nigerian government established a Creative Economy Development Fund and a Creative and Tourism Infrastructure Corporation as part of an effort to increase the contribution of Nigeria’s creative economy to GDP to $100 billion by 2030.
Tinubu and his administration’s officials regard Nigerian cultural exports from Afrobeats and Nollywood to sports and the vivacity of popular ‘skitpreneurs’ like Layi Wasabi, Josh2Funny and Debo Macaroni as an outlet by which Nigeria can brand itself overseas and broaden the country’s global cultural influence.
4D gets an F
Tinubu’s foreign policy reflects a common tendency among many Nigerians to view their country through a prism of international affairs that is out of step with contemporary developments. His administration’s “4D” doctrine appears to be forward-looking, but is underpinned by faulty, retrograde assumptions about the world and Nigeria itself.
Nigeria’s statecraft does not match the level of its stated ambition let alone what is needed to navigate an increasingly complex world. Tinubu’s conduct of Nigeria’s foreign relations is far too personalist and linked to his individual interests to be regarded as a robust expression of the country’s international posture. With several examples to cite including his extensive overtures to France, Tinubu’s foreign policy is inseparable from his provincial interests as well as those of his close allies.
As tends to be true of its approach to domestic affairs, the Tinubu administration makes major announcements on foreign policy without doing extensive consultation. Its officials frequently tout purported achievements without pointing to evidence to support their statements, like their claim that Nigeria has secured more than $50 billion in foreign direct investments since Tinubu took office.
Tinubu’s aides have regularly issued statements that turned out to be false, incorrect or a misunderstanding of discussions with foreign interlocutors.
Two incidents stand out in this regard. In September 2023, Tinubu’s spokesperson stated after a bilateral meeting with Emirati President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan that the UAE had lifted a visa ban it placed on Nigerian travelers the previous year. The Tinubu administration was forced to backtrack from the statement after the Emiratis publicly refuted that claim and insisted that there was no change to the visa policy. Several months later, another Tinubu spokesperson incorrectly claimed on X that the UAE had lifted the visa ban before deleting his post and issuing a “clarification.”
During Tinubu’s visit to Japan last month, his administration announced that the Japanese government would designate the city of Kisarazu as a “hometown” for Nigerians and create a special visa category for Nigerians who wished to move to Kisarazu to work and live. This statement appeared to misunderstand the terms of an initiative by the Japan International Cooperation Agency to promote cultural exchanges between Japan and African nations. Many Nigerian media outlets picked up the government’s statement and reported the purported agreement.
The circulation of those reports sparked an angry backlash in Japan that forced its government to clarify that it had no plans to issue special visas to Nigerians to work and live in Kisarazu. There again, Tinubu’s aides withdrew their initial statement and issued a “correction” on the Nigerian presidency’s website without taking ownership of the incorrect information they published or explaining why the government backtracked from its previous announcement.
The so-called Giant of Africa has had no full-time representatives in foreign capitals since the Tinubu administration recalled Nigeria’s ambassadors two years ago. During a time of aid cuts, tariffs, trade wars and travel bans, this is a profound act of unseriousness that has no credible rationale. Tinubu’s aides have been evasive about the reason for the delay, made contradictory statements about when the envoys would be chosen and disparaged the opposition for criticizing the delay in appointing new ambassadors.
The delay is likely connected to an intense jockeying for presidential appointments in Tinubu’s All Progressives Congress party, as he alluded to yesterday. It might also have to do with the embarrassing state of Nigeria’s diplomatic missions, including the funding difficulties that have afflicted them for many decades. The chaos within Nigeria’s diplomatic corps has had tangible consequences, and might explain why it was caught off guard by reports that the US government has been revoking visas issued to Nigerians.
It is not uncommon to hear reports of visa bans and other travel restrictions placed on Nigerian travelers by foreign governments, to say nothing of instances of harassment and violence meted against Nigerians living in foreign lands. In many of these and other instances, Nigerian consular officials are unable to render assistance to their nationals.
The Nigerian diaspora cannot vote in Nigerian elections despite the large volume of money it repatriates home. The government makes it difficult for Nigerians who live overseas to open local bank accounts, invest in the domestic economy or procure a passport at Nigeria’s embassies and consulates.
Tinubu’s frequent travels have drawn criticism from many Nigerians for their high cost and their belief that it is excessive. He and his officials have defended them by pointing to what they say is the investment opportunities that have been created by foreign travel.
There is a meaningful nuance here that the competing sides of the argument sometimes miss. In the modern world of international affairs, personal relationships matter a great deal and travel is an inevitable part of diplomatic engagements. At the same time, a head of state appoints a cabinet—especially one as large as Tinubu’s—for a purpose, and one of them is to oversee the day-to-day machinery of government.
To say the least, the way Tinubu has managed Nigeria’s foreign policy is below the standard of a country with stated aspirations to major-power status. Tinubu must pay closer attention to the details of executing Nigeria’s foreign policy. He needs to be more circumspect about those he selects to accompany him to international engagements. There is no justifiable reason for Nigeria to have registered more than 1,400 official delegates for the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, as was reported at the time.
Tinubu must be more sparing about the use of his time and delegate more tasks that require extensive travel, given the immense responsibilities that come with governing a country of approximately 230 million people.
Reality check
For the Tinubu administration to achieve its foreign-policy objectives, it must reckon with Nigeria’s diminished capacity and decline as a continental power.
Nigeria has lost its position as Africa’s largest economy and dropped to fourth place today, notwithstanding a rebasing exercise that it did earlier this year. According to data from the World Bank, Nigeria’s GDP per capita dropped from approximately $3,000 in 2014 to an estimated $800 today, underlining a lost decade of economic productivity that has been accompanied with a spike in the poverty rate and a decline of many other socioeconomic indicators.
Nigeria is beset by several flashpoints of violent insecurity that its diminished security services have struggled to contain. These developments within Nigeria’s borders have negatively affected its ability to project influence within its neighborhood.
Nigeria no longer possesses the same international clout it once did, and its inability to shape events in Niger—a country with which it shares strong cultural links and which is economically dependent on Nigeria to a considerable degree—is merely the most obvious sign of what has been plainly clear for many years, at least to me. In recent years, foreign powers like China, France, Russia and the US have wielded more geopolitical influence in West Africa than Nigeria has.
The days when Nigeria led Africa’s principled opposition to South Africa’s apartheid regimes and spearheaded regional efforts to stabilize Liberia and Sierra Leone are long gone, and it is telling that Nigerian elites feel compelled to refer to such instances from the 20th century to demonstrate their country’s significance in the 21st century.
Nigeria’s international reputation is generally negative, as many governments and foreign populations associate its people with crimes, particularly fraud and drug trafficking. This may not be fair but it is the reality that the Nigerian government must deal with given the immense cost that it comes with. Tinubu administration officials, like many Nigerians, overstate the degree to which the cultural exports around which they want Nigeria to build its global brand can confer tangible geopolitical benefits.
For all of Nigeria’s challenges, however, many African nations still have great expectations of it and regard the country as a continental standard-bearer in many realms including commerce, technology, the creative arts and sports. Nigerian music artists, authors, filmmakers and fashion designers are trendsetters who are the envy of the rest of the continent. If matched with a deliberate strategy to make them sustainable, Nigeria’s thriving creative services can become a major source of economic productivity and international branding.
Many civic organizations in Nigeria are well regarded in West Africa and on the broader continent, and a source of peer learning for their colleagues in other African nations. Despite its decline, Nigeria can still wield considerable international influence as demonstrated by its ability to rally support for its nationals when they compete for leadership positions in international institutions. Nigeria’s mineral endowments, in addition to its youthful, entrepreneurial and tech-savvy population, are assets that can deliver excellent returns with the right set of investments.
There are means by which the Tinubu administration can shore up Nigeria’s position in the global order, and they all begin with improving conditions on the homefront as Nigeria cannot project meaningful influence overseas without economic prosperity, political stability, human development and a drastic reduction in violent insecurity.
As a large English-speaking African country with a favorable geography and strong links with the global community, Nigeria is well positioned to become Africa’s first major global power. For that to happen, however, Tinubu and his administration’s officials must take Nigeria’s statecraft seriously and act with more urgency than they have for the past 27 months.
If Nigeria’s membership bid is accepted, it would be the second African country after South Africa to join the club.
Interesting analysis