Jonathan And His Nigerian ‘Houphouetistes’

The scope and depth of the global economic crisis is so overwhelming. It is inevitable for the management of the crisis to throw up difficult and novel problems that are impelling changes for all in the global system. It has raised profound questions regarding the structure of economic and political relations across the system. Some have advanced that the crisis has, in fact, turned the global system topsy-turvy and is generating tensions in the most unlikely of places, while it is also querying what hitherto were believed to be settled sociopolitical structures and realms. For example, the pervasive bankruptcy of European economies has begun to threaten the viability of the euro and undermine the integrity of the European Union.

Governments have fallen. Greece, even Italy’s teflon and seemingly unimpeachable Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, succumbed to the ravages of an Italian economy hanging by the thread from tumbling into the abyss. This upended system demands well tailored responses and nuanced articulation of policy, both economic and its political nexus, from all. This include the traditional elite predatory states that ultimately have to exploit the margins of the global system more to regain the equilibrium of their economies. The same, more importantly, goes for the historically weak and exploited margins of the global system on whose backs the predatory states would eventually realign their economic woes.

In this global context, relationships and processes among partners have to be carefully watched and interpreted for their implications down the road for all engaged. The dictums are that relationships have to be consolidated, if they advance national interests in meeting the challenges posed by the crisis for the respective national economies. Relationships have to be redefined or outrightly vacated if they impede a state’s capacity to overcome the gargantuan challenges posed by the economic crisis.

These are the axioms, consistent with the primary law of interstate relations, that are fuelling talks of the possible reconfiguration of the European Union, including the exercising of such problematic members like Greece. Suddenly, the image of the Southern European as lazy resurfaces.

The implications of the crisis are profound for all. The concern here is about those of us in these parts, West Africa and how we relate to this global crisis. The direction of the impact of the global crisis is mediated by, or in fact, is determined by our own resolve to chart an independent course that protects our interests against the powerful predatory states in the system. A first affirmation is that, notwithstanding our conventional understanding of our locus in the global system, Nigeria does not have the capacity to go it alone in the turbulence of contemporary global politics and economy. Conventional wisdom would dictate that we strengthen our sub-regional and continental relationships and put them on tracks that consolidate our collective capacity as a sub-region and continent to fend off current predatory invasions and more that would surely come in various guises.

A third is that an ECOWAS that largely groups Nigeria and Anglophone West Africa but excludes full and effective economic engagement of Cote d’Ivoire is obsolete and anachronistic. And it has been this way since the inception of ECOWAS. The hype and internal restructuring of ECOWAS secretariat are good only if they advance critical sub-regional economic and political objectives. For now, it is limited in that regard. Its role in Cote d’Ivoire has paradoxically undermined its capacity to achieve primary and critical sub-regional agenda.

There are paradoxes in our policy formulation process. Six months after our disturbing policy fiasco in Cote d’Ivoire and the ousting of the neo-nationalist Gbagbo administration by France, with the effective connivance of Nigeria, the conversation can begin on what the inauguration of a Houphouetiste Ouattara presidency in Abidjan has meant for Nigeria. To say the least, it has been disastrous for the country. It has set back, by decades, the consolidation of ECOWAS as a truly pan-regional organisation bridging the Anglo-Francophone divide and set the stage for a regrettable consolidation of a deleterious status quo in West Africa, with unfortunate consequences for Africa.

With Cote d’Ivoire effectively and seriously integrated into the ECOWAS Project, it would have been only a question of time for the body to be the undisputed driver of a truly integrated sub-regional political and economic union in the sub-region. Our policy fiasco thus implied a missed opportunity of historic proportions as Ouattara begins rebuilding the economic and political structures of a Houphouetiste vision of Francophone West Africa as an alternative pole to the Anglophones.

Houphouetism is a code concept for the hegemony of France and the polar opposite of the ECOWAS vision. It is the antithesis of ECOWAS.

It is to be recalled that the impatience to oust President Laurent Gbagbo from office in April 2011 and the installation of Cote d’Ivoire’s nominal president Ouattara were against the backdrop of the dire economic exigencies emerging in Europe. The stalemated outcome of the presidential elections in Cote d’Ivoire coincided with the height of Europe’s economic crisis. Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy were beginning to sink under the weight of their national economic insolvency. By late March 2011, the socialist minority government of José Socrates in Portugal collapsed due to its inability to reach agreements with EU creditors on its bail out. The conservative opposition would have none of it. In these dire circumstances, in different guises, European nations with ex-colonies looked up to them for salvation. France needed to act urgently to consolidate its weakened historical safeguard against economic downturn. It needed unlimited resource inflows from its African pre-carre more than ever to mitigate the prospect of the social turbulence witnessed in Greece and Italy. Its situation in Africa was different from Portugal.

Driven out of Angola with machetes some 36 years ago, Portugal did not have the leeway of France in its colonial pre-carre. In what some had dubbed the rewriting of economic history, Lisbon chose humble persuasion in turning to Luanda to buy up Lisbon and to facilitate the return of Portuguese former colonial families to Portugal’s African el dorado.  President Eduardo dos Santos was understanding and ready to inject Angola’s petrodollars in Portugal to help privatise struggling Portuguese state-owned enterprises under a €80 billion (£70 billion) International Monetary Fund bailout. The Portuguese’ foreign ministry has acknowledged that tens of thousands of Portuguese have established commercial enterprises in Angola over the last year. The point in all this is that the razor sharp political consciousness of Angolans would not brook for an instant, the kind of French neo-imperialist coercive manipulations that allowed France to simply impose a local overseer in Cote d’Ivoire. And this was clear in its militant pro-nationalist policy in that country.

In its difficult situation, Portugal redefined its relationship with a country that it had deeply wronged in the past and took a persuasive approach to Angola.

Meanwhile, the French approach in Cote d’Ivoire is now history. Through the use of arms and encouraged by Nigeria, it imposed a local overseer accountable to Paris. It called its military intervention the advancement of democracy. Dusting off his primer on Houphouet-Boigny’s development paradigm, President Ouattara has in six months guided the French seizure of the reins of the Ivorian economy to plunder resources required to stabilise the French economy. It all began within the first 30 days of his presidential oversight of French affairs in Cote d’Ivoire.

— Osuolale Alalade