By Henry Uche
Former Minister of External Affairs, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, in an interview monitored on Channels TV spoke on President Tinubu’s trip to Beijing for China -Africa Forum, urging that Nigeria should be very careful in dealing with China. According to him, the Asian economic giant offers no free gift. The former Minister also weighed in on the political process in Nigeria.
Implication of China- Africa summit, what is China trying to do economically and diplomatically?
There is a competition going on at the global scene, and the competition is between, on one hand, the United States and China for economic and political dominance, for influence. Equally among the global North is Russia, which also, if you recall, is seeking to get back its status, but we will be making a mistake if we focus on the global North alone. In what I will now call the global middle, you have Japan, you have Turkey, you have India, which also are now fighting for status within the global medium, and then you have the global South, and in the Global South, I think we should stop until we confirm our status there. We should stop focusing attention on just Nigeria. You have South Africa, you have Brazil, you have Indonesia and some such countries. So in a way, it’s not a straightforward battle. It’s a battle with so many fronts, and if Nigeria can get it right, then we can be certain of Nigerian status there. What has happened is what they call now the ‘FORKA’, some call it the Nigerian African Chinese Summit, China is positioning itself to confirm its own role in the competition for influence in Africa. Don’t forget that we also have America- African Summit, we have Japan African- Summit, we have turkey African -Summit. And one summit that fell below your radar last week, was Indonesia African Summit. So even Indonesia is making its own claim for status.
Nigeria debt to China, France, Germany, India, and others. Nigeria is owing China about 84% of the entire debt, which is over 4 billion US dollars. Some of these loans have a payment plan of over 20 years with a moratorium of seven years. Should we be careful or worried about this global political war and our indebtedness to China?
Of course we should be careful. That is where I was going. We should be careful, but don’t isolate the focus on China. There are also debts we owe the United States. There are also debts we owe even some of the medium power countries. What we need to do is to be careful about two things. One, we shouldn’t default on that debt. A month before this African Chinese Summit, Nigerian sovereign goods were being impounded all around the world at the instigation of a Chinese company. So China is not going to serve us anything on global butter. We have to be careful that we fulfill our own side of the bargain, not only with China, but with all the other countries that we may be doing deals with. It is shaming on our status, on our pride for our sovereign goods to seize because we are defaulting from fulfilling our part of the agreements. And this leads me to the second factor. Nigeria, as a sovereign country, to keep an eye on the types and content of agreements being signed by what we call the ‘sub-nationals’. States are not entities in international global system. They are not. Nigeria is the sovereign entity, therefore it is Nigeria that will be held responsible. If state default in fulfilling agreement signed, it is Nigeria that will be held responsible. If governors come into the scene and decide to cancel agreement signed by their predecessors, we should get out of that mental thinking of, you know, the emperors in Nigeria is not the president, the emperors in the political system in Nigeria are the governors, because there is nobody who controls them. They have the Assemblies in their pocket, they have the Judges in their pocket. And yet, internationally, it is Nigeria they get into problem. So those are the two factors I would like to draw attention to. In fact, there is a third one. Our own behavior, our own DNA, you know, part of the problem we are starting to run into in terms of the infrastructure projects which the Chinese have got to is that, Nigerians who are supposed to be collecting money for trips, are pocketing the money. They bring their own POS, and if you go through the right system, the passengers and get the tickets naturally directly, when you get there, the conductor says, oh, there is something wrong with what you bought. You have to buy another ticket, and that one is going into his own pocket. How are we going to refund the loan on those infrastructural projects? When we have corrupt Nigerians, we tend to focus on corruption at the very top. And yes, that is there, and we do need to do but please, look at corruption amongst ordinary Nigerians. That, to me, is more worrisome than the corruption at the top. Of course, if the top is clean, maybe that cleanliness will trickle down to the ordinary Nigerians, but the problem with all these loans we are signing will be our inability to repay the loans when they are due, and that responsibility falls on all of us.
It does look like China is our biggest master out of the five big countries. In the first quarter of 2023, we were owing China $4.34 billion; France $593 million; Germany, $144million; Japan, $62million; India $26million, a total debt of $516 billion- according to the Debt Management Office. But that has increased now. At the forum, Lagos, Kaduna and Niger State Government all signed different deals, how do you assess some of the deals that Nigeria got from China?
As I said earlier, I will not be worried if we keep our side of the deal. From the itemization you have done, these deals are going into infrastructural development, and economists will tell you that there is nothing wrong with that, because with infrastructure, you have a repayment, even a domestic repayment plan. If you build an express road, be prepared to pay tolls on that road, it is from the tolls collected that you will refund the money you owe, the money you spend on building that road. But look at from what is happening, Nigerians love smooth express roads, right? But they don’t want to pay tolls, they want it free, economy doesn’t work that way. Number two, you have got honesty. Honesty has to become part of our DNA, not when the people you put there to collect the tolls divert the money collected into their pocket, I mean you have given us humongous figures about the people that we owe, but if you look at it, I thought you will raise this issue. I checked on my figures before I came on, debt as a percentage of your GDP. And I noticed that the first 10 in Africa were not there in terms of the volume of the debt in relationship to the GDP. So in a way, economists are right that we shouldn’t develop a headache in terms of the volume of the debt that we owe, but it is the discipline that we need to be able to refund this money as and when due, that’s number one. Number two, and the two are related, if we start to pump our crude back to the two point of barrels per day that it was several years ago, and we don’t put on this cup of shame that, half a million barrels of crude is stolen under our very nose, there is something wrong; why do we have a Navy? Why do we have an Air Force? So honesty must become part of our DNA, and we have got to do this. Now, let me say this, the honesty also must be on the part of our partners. The oil stolen in Nigeria, it is not sold to us in Nigeria. It is sold in Amsterdam, ports and other parts where they discharge this crude; crude has a DNA. They can tell you exactly where this crude is coming from, and at the price they are being offered, they know this is stolen crude. Why are they not helping us? Of course, they are not helping us because they will say your people are involved. They are collaborators in this. If we can stop the stealing of the crude and get up to the number, we don’t need to go anywhere to borrow money for development projects. Now there is no nation in the world, and that includes the United States, that does not sign all kinds of agreement with China, because, again, I check that people owing China, and I was surprised that even some of the countries in the Global North are also owing or not owing, that this time, they have economic agreements that involve debts to China, but they are fulfilling their part of the bargain and until we have that economic power that we can negotiate as a matter of strength, the people we are borrowing the money from are going to be exercising influence on us. And that bothers me. That bothers me a lot.
Should Nigeria be thinking of joining the BRICS nations?
Nigeria should have been a member of BRICS at the very beginning. It gets to a situation in international politics where you don’t want to put yourself as a supplicant. I remember having a discussion with a sitting president of Nigeria when I discussed this issue with him, and his idea is we will never beg to become a member of BRICS. It is demeaning. And I asked him, ‘have you asked the people you took over from why Nigeria was not a member of BRICS at the beginning?’ He didn’t give me an answer. Now, knowing the person who was president of Nigeria at the time when BRICS was formed, there has always been this attitude on his part that if a project is not his own, then he is not interested and Nigeria is not interested. And that may have been why they turned to South Africa. Originally, South Africa was not a member, South Africa was later invited in to become a member of BRICS. The Professor who proposed BRICS, when he now saw how limited his scope was, also now proposed another grouping, which would then involve Argentina, Indonesia, Nigeria. But that project, again, never took off. Why? I don’t know. You know, there are some questions that you pose to us that you should be posing to the people who are presidents and who are foreign ministers as of that time, because they will have the fact as to why we were not invited, or if we were invited, we turned down the invitation to be an original founding member of BRICS, and when that fell apart, how about the other one? Now the reason why with the second batch of countries who were not invited to join BRICS is because there is,(and you better believe me), this negative competition between South Africa and Nigeria. And that one is not the fault of Nigeria. In spite of all the things we did for South Africa, South Africa is determined to derail Nigeria wherever she could. You know the details I don’t need on this programme to spell out the details of what South Africa had done in order to derail Nigeria, where this whole thing is going, of course, is who will occupy one of the African seats, permanent seats in the Security Council of the United Nations. The one being allocated to Africa South of the Sahara is now being fought over by South Africa and Nigeria, and unfortunately, with Nigeria being out of BRICS, BRICS, members are going to automatically support South Africa, and that’s what South Africa is aiming in this whole competition. I don’t think we will go into BRICS. I think we should turn around and first of all build a solid foundation of economic development. Let us become an economic giant in Africa. Please stop saying, Oh, our population, our this, our, that. I mean we are aiming for 5000 watts of energy, but South Africa in terms of economic development is an industrial power. Nigeria is not so. When we start to talk about Nigerian being an economic giant, it is not just by selling crude, it is by getting all our refineries working, and it is the refined product we will be selling.
Parting words to the leaders of this country, how Nigeria can stamp his own feet to become a giant within the global space
Yes, it will be, and this is economics 101, it will turn Nigeria into an industrialized country. Stop exporting everything crude, whether it’s yam, whether is cocoa, whether it is rubber, whether it is anything, stop exporting them, add value to them within the country before you then export them; that way, you have been building an industrial base. You must build an industrial base. Nigeria must be turned into an industrialized country. That is where nobody will be able to push you around and you then don’t have to go and beg to be part of any organization.
