Seventy-three years ago, almost to the day on March 31 1953, the late Chief Anthony Enahoro, then a member of the federal House of Representatives in Lagos, moved a motion proposing "that this House accepts as a primary political objective the attainment of self-government for Nigeria in 1956". What is the story of that day and that independence today?
The story of that day and that event is well known, and bears no more than light recounting here. Enahoro's motion accelerated Nigeria's independence from Britain which was eventually achieved on 1st October 1960, if not the 1956 year proposed. The majority northern members of the House of Representatives at the time agreed with the idea of self-government in the motion, but opposed the 1956 deadline, substituting it, instead, with "as soon as practicable".
The events of that day quickly spiraled out of control, and in a sense, we are still dealing with some of them. Independence itself would come soon enough in 1960, and nearly 66 years later we must raise the bold question: what have we done with it since then? Nigeria's current leader, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was then one year and two days old on the day Enahoro moved his historic motion. Yet, the preceding question is at the heart of my reading of Tinubu's foreign policy actions--in both style and substance--over the past three years or so.
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The northern representatives and their leaders who opposed early independence were jeered by a Lagos crowd, and denounced for preferring colonial subservience to self-rule. But where are we with that independence today? For all intents and purposes, President Tinubu has already handed back Nigeria's independence, and just to one but several former colonial powers. In just three years, Tinubu has turned Nigeria from a post-colonial country to a pro-colonial one.
Enahoro was a member of the Action Group, the political party founded and then led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo and first Premier of the Western Region. Therefore, Enahoro's motion for independence could not have been without his blessings. Awolowo himself was, of course, one of the finest thinkers of his generation, and few others, if any, laid out an intellectual foundation for what a future independent Nigeria should be more systematically or persuasively as he did.
In his Path to Nigerian Freedom (1947), Awolowo made two basic points. First, he argued that an unfinished creation of British colonial rule, but unlike metropolitan Britain itself, which was and remains a unitary state, Nigeria was best able to endure into the future as a federation made up of semi-autonomous units however devised. Secondly, Awolowo argued that for Nigeria, independence from Britain was not an end of the story, but the beginning of a far more difficult task of building a viable, self-reliant, and preferably a welfare state. Nigeria, he recognized, must endeavour to rely on itself, on the skills and abilities of its own citizens--forged through free but quality education for everyone--rather than on the departing British or anyone else.
Those two basic arguments, reinforced throughout Awolowo's writings, are not too different from those of his northern contemporaries. The significance of Nigeria's independence was not at all lost on the northern representatives or their leaders in 1953. Independence, they thought, was a natural eventuality since they knew colonial rule was an aberration that would not endure forever. More importantly, however, they also recognized that independence was not merely a moment of euphoria to look forward to, but a heavy responsibility for which people and institutions needed to be fully prepared across all parts of the country.
It is this founding legacy of self-awareness, self-belief, and self-governed Nigeria that President Tinubu has been doing everything possible to throw overboard in three short years. President Tinubu's one-man foreign policy appears deliberately designed not to advance Nigeria's political and economic interests or to reimagine a new framework for our engagement with the rest of the world, but to hand over Nigeria's sovereignty to other countries. There is a sad irony here because President Tinubu traces his political lineage directly to Awolowo.
When only months into office, Tinubu quickly positioned himself not as Nigeria's President who comes to reinvent the ECOWAS subregional body we practically founded, largely fund, and host, but as the Chief Defender and Protector of French interests in the region. Tinubu misreads the earlier military coups in Burkina Faso, Guinea, and Mali as a seasonal flu airborne to Nigeria, and accordingly sought to reverse the coup in Niger Republic, and militarily succeeded in the case of the attempted coup in neighbouring Benin Republic. All on behalf of France. But these are contagious coups only in the sense that French Africa is tired of France.
For his reward as the policeman of the French in West Africa, the President was greeted to a lavish state reception in Paris. Nigeria itself as a country, has got nothing out of it other than platitudes and promises that no one remembers, least of all, the President himself. Flattered by the state reception, Tinubu quickly handed over Nigeria's tax administration reforms, a core aspect of any country's economic sovereignty, to France in a ceremony signed at the French Embassy in Abuja, that is, on French soil in Nigeria. The indignity of an independent Nigeria signing any agreement in a foreign embassy in Nigeria would not have been lost on Awo.
Also, this government's Nigeria-U.S. Security Cooperation Framework is the widest and most in-depth security cooperation Nigeria has ever entered into with any country. The scope, covering cooperation on defence, intelligence, police, military hardware, and more, is simply too wide for a country facing mostly domestic terrorism concerns. Nigeria has always maintained friendly relations with the United States economically and diplomatically. We have also always bought military wares from the U.S and benefited from other forms of security assistance, such as training.
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Yet, successive Nigerian leaders and governments have not gone further, and for good reason. The United States is a superpower, and superpower politics can be dangerous for a country like Nigeria if we get too close on security relations. After all, Nigeria should be providing security guarantees for West Africa, if not the rest of the continent. More importantly, Nigeria entered into that agreement only out of duress, arising from the negative branding of Christian genocide by the same Americans. In other words, our security agreement with the U.S is more an indication of moral and political capitulation than it is the need to actually solve problems.
Moreover, the government has also been on a foreign borrowing spree since coming into office in 2023. Of course, all Nigerian governments have borrowed money from foreign entities. But for a government which removed fuel subsidy on its first day in office, this government was expected to borrow less, not more. At this rate, by the time this government leaves office next year or in 2031, Nigeria's debt stock to foreign creditors would probably be unpayable, ever. Indeed, even the government's signature policies--naira devaluation and fuel subsidy removal--result more from the influence operations of foreign entities than strategic thinking or sensible policy at home.
All of these leave us with the question of why? The answer is simple. President Tinubu appears to value external validation and external legitimacy than Nigerian public opinion. It is not too late to value Nigerian legitimacy more.
