Zuma looks to improve relations in talks with Nigeria
PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma will pay a one-day official visit to Nigeria tomorrow as Africa’s two very dissimilar giants see if they can put their squabbles aside and start pushing in the same direction.
The economic growth happening in parts of the continent could be in jeopardy if an unexpected resurgence of conflicts in others — Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, for instance — is not quickly contained.
In order to make the “Africa Rising” trend a long-term one, analysts say Nigeria and SA are condemned to be partners, if not bosom buddies.
“It’s a complicated relationship, marked by both co-operation and competition,” Centre for Conflict Resolution Cape Town executive director Adekeye Adebajo said in Cape Town.
Mr Zuma will meet Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan in Abuja and then host him next month during a fullblown state visit to SA, the Department of International Relations said.
The superficial focus of competition is about size — the relative size of the two economies.
Nigeria is due to rebase its gross domestic product figures next year, boosting the total to about $350bn and putting it in sight of SA.
If Nigeria’s growth rate remains at nearly 7% — twice that of SA’s — the title of Africa’s heavyweight economy will go westwards within a few years.
Mr Zuma was due to visit Algeria for talks with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for bilateral discussions ahead of his Nigeria visit.
PRESIDENT Jacob Zuma will pay a one-day official visit to Nigeria tomorrow as Africa’s two very dissimilar giants see if they can put squabbles aside and start pushing in the same direction.
The economic growth happening in parts of the continent could be in jeopardy if an unexpected resurgence of conflicts in other parts — Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic (CAR), for instance — is not quickly contained. In order to make the “Africa Rising” trend a long-term one, analysts say Nigeria and SA are condemned to be partners, if not bosom buddies.
“It’s a complicated relationship, marked by both co-operation and competition,” said Adekeye Adebajo, executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town.
Mr Zuma will meet President Goodluck Jonathan in Abuja and then host him next month during a full-blown state visit to SA, the Department of International Relations said.
The superficial focus of competition is about size — the relative size of the two economies. Nigeria is due to rebase its gross domestic product (GDP) figures next year, boosting the total to about $350bn and in sight of SA.
If Nigeria’s growth rate remains at nearly 7% — twice that of SA’s — the title of Africa’s heavyweight economy will go westwards within a few years.
“Nigeria will soon become the largest economy on the continent thanks both to its rapid growth rates and the current exercise of reweighting and rebasing its national accounts for the first time in two decades,” said Londonbased Gregory Kronsten of Nigerian bank FBN Capital.
“The flavour of the year for the offshore portfolio investor is frontier markets, and Nigeria in particular. The all-share index for the Lagos bourse has risen by 19.9% year-to-date while its counterpart in Johannesburg has shed 0.5%,” Mr Kronsten said.
The raw numbers disguise some key realities and not only the fact that Nigeria’s population of 162-million is three times SA’s. Nigerian revenue is still excessively reliant on its oil and gas exports. Its overall economy is nowhere near the depth and sophistication of SA’s. Per capita annual income in SA is $7,000, more than five times Nigeria’s, and as a percentage of the population, twice as many Nigerians are below the national poverty line as South Africans.
South African corporates and their expatriates, spearheaded by MTN, SABMiller and Shoprite, have led the investment charge into Nigeria. The traffic in the other direction is more about individual Nigerians, rich and poor, seeking better opportuni- ties. Dr Adebajo, a Nigerian, reports a degree of resentment in his homeland towards South African companies, which are perceived as making huge amounts of money while Pretoria restricts access to the local market.
The issue blew up last year when SA’s immigration department refused entry to Nigerians who lacked yellow fever certificates. The South African authorities backed down, certainly mindful of the financial cost of a drawn-out fight on the matter.
Commercial and economic links are not really the problem area. Politics and diplomacy are.
Nigerians have felt since the end of apartheid that SA’s African National Congress leaders have never really acknowledged or repaid the debt to their best and richest African friends while they were in exile.
In order to make the ‘Africa Rising’ trend a long-term one, analysts say Nigeria and SA are condemned to be partners
Mr Jonathan did not support Mr Zuma’s successful but divisive campaign last year to get his former wife, Nkosazana DlaminiZuma, elected as chairwoman of the African Union Commission.
Bilateral relations were sometimes closer during the presidencies of Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo. The two were instrumental in pushing the African agenda in the early 2000s and getting seats at the high international table for key nations and the African Union.
But Mr Zuma and Mr Jonathan are less effective in international arenas than their predecessors.
SA’s halo has been damaged by corruption and bad governance, both chronic weaknesses of Nigeria’s, which are now compounded there by the startling rise of domestic Islamic terrorism in its northern states.
“There is a sad decline of Nigerian foreign policy,” Dr Adebajo said. “Goodluck Jonathan doesn’t have a good grasp of foreign policy and the most dramatic example has been Mali, where France has intervened and Nigeria has been quietly applauding in the background”.
Previous Nigerian leaders, many of them military, regarded their country as being in competition in Africa with France. They would have wanted a central place in attempts to counter Islamic terrorists in Mali in their Sahelian backyard.
Similar suspicions about France’s involvement in the CAR appear to have been one motive for Mr Zuma’s hugely criticised military foray into one of Africa’s least strategic countries. Thirteen SA soldiers were killed in the CAR last month and on Saturday the politician against whom SA’s intervention was apparently directed, Michel Dodotjia, was formally invested as president.
“I think Mr Zuma and his team are unnerved a bit by CAR. I think they’ll be chastened by the experience,” Dr Adebajo said.
But SA did the Nigerian government a good turn this year when the South Gauteng High Court sentenced Nigerian national and South African resident Henry Okah to 24 years in prison for ordering bombings in his homeland in 2010 in which nine people were killed.
It was the first outcome of a trial under the Protection of Constitutional Democracy Against Terrorist and Related Activities Act, which gives courts in SA jurisdiction to hear crimes of terrorism committed abroad.