Zuma in Abuja, victory for Nigeria? -By Ochereome Nnanna

President Buhari with President Jacob Zuma and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo as President Buhari hosts his South African counterpart Jacob Zuma to a State Banquet at the Presidential Banquet Hall on 8th Mar 2016

It was described in official circles as a visit to deepen trade relations between Nigeria and South Africa. Nigeria’s largely unutilised Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geffrey Onyema, said the state visit of President Jacob Zuma of South Africa was also meant to calm the tension that “may exist at another level”. After all,

Zuma came with a large retinue of business leaders from South Africa, some of whom already have flourishing businesses here. He was given the great privilege of addressing the joint session of our National Assembly. No doubt about it, this visit was as big as any state visit could get.

But beyond the trite official diplomatese and pageantry, you and I know that Zuma came here to plead for MTN which is reeling from the US$5.2 billion (N1.1 trillion) fine that MTN calls “the world record” in punitive corporate penalties. MTN had tried negotiation and court action. When they failed, they obviously persuaded the South African president to engage President Muhammadu Buhari and settle the matter politically. If you put it bluntly President Zuma came to beg Nigeria.

The symbolism of this issue should not be lost on us. It shows that Nigeria has the capacity to move mountains on the African continent. Nigeria has a ton of influence over its continental rivals, South Africa. Nigeria can hurt South Africa’s strategic interests more than they can hurt ours.

This is because South African businesses have grown from about four in the past two decades to 120 today, and most of them are growing faster and making more profits in Nigeria than any other place in Africa. The truth of the matter is that Nigeria not only played the leading role in freeing South Africa from Apartheid as President Zuma acknowledged while here, we have become a mainstay of South Africa’s economic prosperity.

Nigerians should rejoice at being able to pull just one string and South Africa’s leader came running to us for amicable settlement of a cynical corporate infraction which undermined our nation’s security. It is a huge diplomatic victory. The question now is: what next?

When a country wins a victory, be it a military, diplomatic or economic one, they use it to further their grand national interests.

When the Allied Powers defeated Adolf Hitler’s Germany and her allies in 1945, the five principal powers – USA, USSR, UK, France and China – awarded themselves veto powers in the Security Council of the United Nations, a universal organ they created to rule the world and prevent another possible world war and invasions of sovereign nations by stronger powers. They forbade Germany and Japan from pursuing military programmes that could threaten others in future.

But they did not arrogantly abandon Germany and Japan to their own devices or attempt to marginalise them. Instead, they created the Marshall Plan, which enabled the defeated enemies to grow on the economic and technological fronts.

After the USA and China, Japan remains the third richest economy in the world followed by Germany. In fact, these two former bloodthirsty military powers have become so wealthy that they have lost the apetite to stockpile military capabilities. They became part and parcel of the West. The winners of the World War II used their victory to build a stabler, more economically prosperous Western power bloc. This is the original “win-win” situation.

Compare this to how we, in Nigeria, used the civil war victory over Biafra 46 years ago. The victorious Federal side declared “No Victor, No Vanquished” and even rolled out the three “R’s” (Reconciliation, Reconstruction, Rehabilitation), in apparent mimicry of the Western Marshall Plan. But while the West rehabilitated the defeated countries Nigeria sidelined its defeated enclave, marginalised it and discarded the Biafran inventions that could have taken Nigeria to a different level if we had copied the Americans and Jews who took over the inventions of Hitler’s Germany for the benefit of ther nations.

Today, the marginalisation that was reserved for the former Biafrans has spread to all Nigerians, and everybody is crying. It is not only the renewed agitation for Biafra that we have to contend with; even those who led the coalition against Biafra are crippled by the extreme poverty of governance which came after the civil war. Some of their young people now believe that only a system based on strict Islamic rule would cure the poverty and destitution that sweeps across Northern Nigeria. Those who led and won the war against Biafra had chosen to reward themselves with the spoils of the oil resources of the former Eastern Region. This bred corruption, indolence and ethnic rivalries and domination. It sowed the seeds of the ethno-religious violence that rages all over the country in various guises today.

So, what are we going to use this diplomatic victory over South Africa to achieve? Are we going to now sit down and exploit the full benefits of the various bilateral agreements we have signed with South Africa? Are we going to explore the advantages that exist within the framework of the Nigeria/South Africa Bi-national Commission? Are we going to engage the South African government such that they will remain conscious of what we can do if Nigerians are ever harassed again in South Africa? Will we insist that all South African businesses operating in Nigeria must accommodate more local content?

Will we pursue our economic diversification drive with patriotic zeal that will allow South Africa to bring in its epertise, experience and funds into our solid minerals sector without trampling on the rights of our people as MTN, DSTV and many South African businesses have been doing? If we do these and more, then our diplomatic victory will make sense.

I suspect, however, that the main focus of our government is to get MTN to pay as cash as we can wheedle from it to go and spend. After that, nothing more. Such is the poverty of the mentality of our rulers.