Nigeria has been one of the major hurdles to economic integration across West Africa, this author argues. It is one of the most inward-looking developing countries in the world, but will the next president be able to reverse this trend?
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Too many economists and commentators have approached the topic of Nigeria’s frequent anti-liberal foreign economic policy without understanding the full regional political geography and context that fosters it. Nigeria’s hesitancy in entering into the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) until 2019, the frequent border closures, and the persistently high levels of tariff and non-tariff trade barriers need to be placed in a historical-structural perspective. One approach is to place Nigeria’s problems within the context of West Africa’s malformation. I have explained this notion in a previous article albeit with a focus on coastal-interior relations.
Malformation, however, is not limited to coastal-interior relations but also applies to trans-coastal relations (relations among the West African countries that border the Atlantic Ocean, from Senegal in the west to Nigeria in the east). One particularly important manifestation of this coastal malformation is the significance of parallel trade in West Africa. This trade is the result of coastal West Africa’s distribution of states and regulatory regimes, the region’s political geography...
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