Building a Pro-Regional Coalition in Nigeria

·
April/May 2025ECOWASECOWAS Week 2025Nigeria
Nigeria

Photo illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: AfDB / FLICKR.

THE MINISTRY OF WORLD AFFAIRS

Building a Pro-Regional Coalition in Nigeria

ECOWAS has underperformed in its trade integration and crisis response mandates. Nigeria has to step up its game in improving effective regional cooperation in West Africa. To accomplish this, a strong pro-regional coalition and ideology need to be formed in the country.
Nigeria

Photo illustration by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Source Ref: AfDB / FLICKR.

THE MINISTRY OF WORLD AFFAIRS

Building a Pro-Regional Coalition in Nigeria

ECOWAS has underperformed in its trade integration and crisis response mandates. Nigeria has to step up its game in improving effective regional cooperation in West Africa. To accomplish this, a strong pro-regional coalition and ideology need to be formed in the country.

In a few essays published in The Republic and Developing Economics, I have made the argument that West Africa has undergone a ‘malformation’. The region was the site of some of the most prominent empires in precolonial sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Sokoto) and the host of nineteenth-century polities envisioned by pan-Africanists to lead the African people to global ascendancy (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Lagos and the Gold Coast). In contrast, the region underperforms today, relative to its potential, relative to other African regions, and relative to the expectations of the generation of African independence leaders. This, I believe, is one of the reasons for the failure of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in fostering trade integration and in preventing or effectively addressing many of the region’s crises.  

Many scholars are tired of the numerous African intergovernmental institutions that are either dormant, merely exist for forum shopping or fail to achieve their primary mandates. While Africa has the second highest number of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) after Europe, it also has the second highest number of IGOs that died (through expiry, dissolution, succession, merger or inactivity). Ken Opalo, an associate professor of Political Science at Georgetown University, has argued that a major reason for such failures is that the consensus-driven model of pan-Africanism held on the continent is one which privileges equal influence over effectiveness. Regional blocs such as ECOWAS can only improve if we allow that ‘states that step up to the plate are able to reap the benefits of bankrolling regional cooperation by acquiring agenda-setting powers and gaining more influence on continental affairs.’  

Within the ECOWAS region, Nigeria is the most apparent hegemonic contender, as it has the region’s largest economy, largest population and biggest military. As the country has the largest central government budget in the region, it contributes more than 75 per cent of the human and financial resources of ECOWAS, which is more than the contributions of 13 other member states combined. However, while Nigeria was instrumental in the formation of ECOWAS, securing regional support for Nigeria’s hegemony requires that the country also improve the intensity and scope of its pro-regional impulses. 

Transforming ECOWAS requires not only a willing (and able) regional hegemon to put in place the capital, economic resources and military capabilities required to drive regional cooperation. As the Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, elaborated, the ideological dimension of hegemony is just as important. One could argue that ideological hegemony is even more important when the productive forces (e.g. formal trade, foreign direct investment, etc.) for regional integration are absent and need to be driven by political and ideological exertions that the notion of malformation can provide. 

IS NIGERIA READY TO BUILD IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY?

Development was never easy, which is why for over 10,000 years since the Neolithic revolution, very few societies managed to secure intensive economic growth (a feat which was never sustained until early modern northwestern Europe). After over 200 years of industrial revolutions, only a minority (39 per cent) of countries (representing 17 per cent of the global population) have attained high-income status. Just 13 out of 101 middle-income economies have managed to transition to high-income status between 1960 and 2008 (most of which were in east Asia and Europe), and since 2000, only 27 countries transitioned from middle-income to high-income status, many of them in Europe and central Asia. The fact that most countries in the world, including some Black countries, have gone more than a century attempting to develop (i.e., Haiti for 221 years, Liberia for 177 years and Ethiopia for 136 years since consolidation under Emperor Menelik II) should prevent one from believing that creating the conditions for development is easy, more so for West Africa where malformation prevails.

Mainland West Africa has produced no lasting economic success story (the top success stories in sub-Saharan Africa are in southern Africa—Mauritius and Botswana). It is no coincidence that Cabo Verde is the least affected by West Africa’s malformation and it has the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita in the region. Yet, Cabo Verde’s performance is substantially below that of the best sub-Saharan Africa performers (Seychelles, Mauritius, Botswana and South Africa, in descending order in terms of GDP per capita).

Given the magnitude of the malformation problem, the fact that African leaders suffer from an ambition gap (referring to the tendency to tow the conventional line and avoid creatively ambitious policy directions) is all the more consequential. A more experimental and creative approach to governance (i.e., policy imagination) is therefore required. It is in this spirit that I have made several propositions to begin to address West Africa’s malformation and the epicentral nature of Nigeria’s malformation—such as the operationalization of an ‘Asabiyya movement’ to ease some of the country’s inter-religious cleavages; a ‘quasi-bilateral industrial policy’ to address trans-Gulf malformation with Benin; a call for ECOWAS to adopt a principle of common but differentiated vulnerabilities in dealing with military coups (to ease coastal-Sahelian malformation); and a Sahvara summit to begin to tackle the challenges of the Sahvara more systematically and consistently. However, West Africa needs to build a coalition that takes these ideas seriously.

Nigeria, however, struggles to build the pro-regional ideological hegemony to undertake such experimentation. This is indicated by the fact that there is currently no major ideology within intellectual circles that systematically gives critical importance to West African affairs. Most movements and ideologies, are either nationally focused (such as liberal democratic elections as the basis for change, Olusegun Obasanjo’s Third Force, and the EndSARS Movement), focused on Africa as a whole (such as Nigerian Marxisms and Tony Elumelu’s Africapialism) or, when focused on West Africa (such as Pan-West Africanism), have their foundational basis as proximity of countries and a shared colonial history within West Africa (and variables applicable to other African regions, such as small national markets and regional response to crises), and not phenomena peculiar to the region.

shop the republic

shop the republic

BUILDING IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY

A coalition needs a unifying ideology and people imbibed with such an ideology. Opalo has argued that, since the demise of organized Leftist politics in Africa since the 1970s, there has been ‘a dearth of actionable political ideas for social and economic transformation on the continent.’ As political scientists Réal Lavergne and Cyril Kofie Daddieh have observed, ‘Although rhetorical support for integration exists, there is no dominant personality to articulate a vision and turn it into a crusade the way Nkrumah once did.’ A key conceptual framework that Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president, employed to push for greater regional integration was neo-colonialism, along with an eclectic framework of African socialism that accommodated continental planning. This, however, was not enough to convince African leaders to match pro-regional rhetoric with sustained and effective action.

However, there has been significant fatigue regarding the socialism-capitalism debates ever since the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s and the fall of the most powerful socialist bloc, the Soviet Union, in 1991. Neo-liberalism (and its African derivatives such as Africapitalism) is a weak basis for an ideology (and the neo-liberal approach to regional integration actually reinforces West Africa’s malformation). In a 2023 essay, I briefly examined other ideologies and movements in Nigeria and similarly found them wanting, including liberal democracy, organized labour, spontaneous grassroots movements, Islamic economics, religious extremist movements and protest movements such as ‘#EndSARS’ in Nigeria, ‘Let’s Save Togo’ and the Senegalese ‘Y’en a Marre’ (Enough is Enough).

It is partly in order to provide a coherent conceptual/ideological basis to pursue West African integration that I embarked on this path of building the conceptual apparatus of malformation. The goal is that, by demonstrating its explanatory power (in interpreting West African modern history), multidimensional relevance (for development, political affairs, security, industrial policy, fiscal distribution, regional integration and culture) and practical utility, more Nigerian and West African intellectuals, elites and grassroots movements would become more regionally conscious. While I am still building the body of evidence needed for the conceptual framework to find acceptance and subsequently spread, the goal is for the Nigerian and West African intelligentsia to more readily interpret their situations and national affairs in regional light.

shop the republic

shop the republic

Nkrumah, in seeing that not a sufficient number of African leaders desired African political unification, attempted to empower opposition groups in neighbouring countries and their militant wings, which were in favour of African political union. This was, however, an unsuccessful attempt, and gained the condemnation of several African leaders.

The alternative is for a softer, but more protracted approach. To amplify the diffusive capacity of a counter-malformation ideology across the ECOWAS region, the best possible situation would be for the emerging counter-malformative coalition to be bilingual in order to reflect the predominantly Francophone structure of West Africa. International relations theory has often neglected the importance of informal relations. Yet, Nigeria has made little serious effort to address this. Googling ‘prominent French-speaking Nigerians’ produces nothing directly relevant. Reuben Abati, an Arise TV journalist and former special adviser on media to President Goodluck Jonathan, has also made the following observation:

It is often so embarrassing to see many of our Foreign Affairs Ministry officials not being able to speak any other language apart from English, or not being proficient enough, even when they can. When Nigerians attend international conferences within the region, they rely on translators during formal sessions and thereafter they just stand around playing deaf and dumb. Almost all the presidents in our neighbouring Francophone countries speak English. The day we have a Nigerian president who can have a decent conversation in French, we should slaughter a cow! We need to take a second look at the policy on the teaching of languages in our school system.

This gap also exists at the popular level. Responding to the news of President Bola Tinubu’s administration denying allegations of approving a French military base in Nigeria that will teach French to Nigeria’s military, a radio host on the 6:oo pm Wazobia FM programme on 29 April 2025 argued, ‘Wetin we wan use French do? The one wey we learn for school wetin we use am do?’

Creating a counter-malformation coalition requires building up a generation of intellectuals and elites with bilingual skills (i.e., ‘Franc-anglophonie’). This should involve the strategic and targeted financing of educational and professional programmes aimed at accomplishing just this. For instance, a 30-year ‘Nkrumah Scholar’ funding programme could target three levels of people-building: basic education, higher education, and professional development across multiple cohorts. Promising children would be sponsored to obtain high-quality basic and secondary education that includes French as a language and the cultures and histories of Francophone West African countries and peoples (integrated into curricula and extracurricular activities of selected schools). The scholarships could be targeted at children from pockets of French-speaking communities along border areas in Nigeria, such as Ilubirin and Makoko in Lagos, Ejigbo in Osun, and Nigerian citizens residing in French-speaking countries. Specific schools (such as Pythagore Bilingual in Lagos) could even be funded to provide a more regionally oriented curriculum and extra-curricular activities.

Then, scholarships could be offered to these bilinguals to study political science, economics, history, international relations, public administration and management (i.e. social sciences and humanities) with a strong regional orientation. It is this strengthened bilingual class of thinkers, actors and scholar-practitioners in Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora in Francophone West Africa that could lead the diffusion of counter-malformation ideas and coalition-building in other countries.

Efforts could also be put into improving the attention paid to broader West Africa in popular Nigerian culture. Nigeria has the biggest movie industry in Africa. Intellectuals should explore the strategic utility of this medium. Through the funding that the Nigerian government provides to Nollywood, there should be a promotion of more trans-national movies (Last flight to Abuja and Òlòtūré, where Niger was featured and Citation, which featured Senegal, are examples of such kinds of movies) and music, including use of music from other West African countries for Nollywood soundtracks.

shop the republic

shop the republic

THE FUTURE OF ECOWAS

If Nigeria, and/or another West African country, can produce an intellectual tradition, policy and political movement and popular discourse that is pro-regional and experimental, ECOWAS may be able to escape its status quo. The exit of Mauritania in 1999 and three other Sahel countries which, I have linked to malformation, more recently have already weakened the bloc. To avoid further disintegration and muted impact, a counter-malformation coalition needs to be built from scratch. An alternative to Nkrumah’s attempted approach of supporting pro-Nkrumahist political parties and militant wings in other countries; a strategy of supporting the multilingual and pro-regional education of Nigerians and the Nigerian diaspora may be taken.

With such a coalition in place, the impact of ECOWAS may be improved by improving the pro-regional orientation within Nigeria, creating pro-regional forces within other West African countries, and creating a cadre of counter-malformative actors that drive advocacy within ECOWAS and within its member countries⎈

BUY THE MAGAZINE AND/OR THE COVER