OIL AND NIGERIAN FOREIGN POLICY

Abstract

AT FIRST SIGHT Nigerian foreign policy sometimes seems almost invisible. In public pronouncements by Nigerian officials, voting at the United Nations, etc., the Nigerian government is generally careful to endorse policies which have been agreed collectively within the OAU; there are few idiosyncratic Nigerian initiatives and no clear projection of specifically Nigerian, as opposed to African, objectives in the external field. In the contemporary idiom all Nigerian governments have been determined to maintain a low profile in foreign policy. Nor, again at first sight, has the increasing importance of oil in the Nigerian economy changed anything in this respect. If oil has had any superficial impact it lies in the opposite direction. From independence Nigerians have been aware that the size and potential of their country is regarded with suspicion by her smaller neighbours. In the diplomatic struggle that led to the establishment of the OAU in 1963, Nigeria was one of the strongest champions of the principles of sovereign equality and non-interference in the domestic affairs of states, principles which eventually prevailed, and which now form the backbone of the Organization's Charter. These principles served the Federal Government well during the Civil War, and provided the basis on which they were able to secure OAU endorsement of the Federal cause. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the OAU has continued to provide the official frame for Nigerian foreign policy in the five years since the war ended. In the period immediately after independence, it seemed to some observers that the Balewa government often paid lip-service to the collective African policy objectives of unity, non-alignment and liberation, but was in practice much more actively concerned in maintaining special relationships with Britain, the Commonwealth and the Western industrial world in general, and in containing, if not actually forbidding, contacts between Nigeria and the Communist states. As early as 1962, however, the pressures that led a year later to the establishment of the OAU, had already pursuaded the Nigerian government to modify the idiosyncrasies of its foreign policy and to bring practice more closely in line with the emerging all-African consensus. The defence pact with Britain was abrogated, diplomatic and aid relations were opened with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and government pronouncements on Southern Africa were more uncompromising than in the past. Although oil production began on a modest scale in 1958 and rose very rapidly after 1961, there is no clear evidence