Nigeria and Southern Africa’s unfinished business: After freedom (Part 2A)

The part two looks at the period after liberation and considers how the relationship between Nigeria and Southern Africa began to change as the region moved from the struggle for freedom to the challenge of nation-building, development and cooperation.

For decades, Nigeria had wrestled with one overriding question: how could Africa help Southern Africa achieve freedom? By 1994, that question had, at least in its political sense, been answered. Apartheid had been dismantled, Nelson Mandela had become president, liberation movements had been transformed into governments, and countries that had spent generations confronting colonialism and minority rule were entering an entirely different phase of their history. The challenge before Nigeria was no longer simply how to support a struggle for freedom, but how to build a relationship with countries that were now free, sovereign and increasingly determined to shape their own economic and political destinies. The transition was profound because supporting a liberation movement and dealing with a government are two very different responsibilities, just as standing beside a people in their hour of oppression is different from building a durable partnership with them after they have achieved political freedom.

Nigeria had, in fact, begun preparing for this new kind of African engagement before Mandela ever walked out of Victor Verster Prison. During the years when Nigeria benefited enormously from its oil wealth, particularly during the 1970s, successive governments increasingly viewed the country’s economic resources not simply as instruments of domestic development but also as tools of African diplomacy. Nigeria provided financial and material assistance to African countries facing serious economic and humanitarian difficulties, and it used its oil resources to support countries on the continent through concessionary arrangements. The broader philosophy was unmistakable: Nigeria’s strength carried responsibilities beyond its own borders.

But there was an important limitation to financial assistance. Money can build a school, but it cannot teach indefinitely; equipment can be supplied to a hospital, but someone must operate it; agricultural machinery can be delivered, but people must be trained to use it and maintain it. Nigeria possessed something potentially more valuable than money alone: a large pool of educated professionals whose knowledge could be deployed where African countries faced shortages of skilled manpower. That insight eventually produced one of the most innovative instruments of Nigerian foreign policy.

The Nigerian Technical Aid Corps was established in 1987 under the administration of General Ibrahim Babangida, following the initiative associated with Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, who had served as Minister of External Affairs. The programme represented a major departure from conventional aid because Nigeria was not simply transferring funds to another country; it was transferring knowledge, experience and human capacity. Doctors, engineers, teachers, agricultural specialists and other professionals were deployed to countries that formally requested Nigerian assistance. The official objectives of the scheme were not limited to the transfer of expertise. They included sharing Nigerian know-how, responding to the needs identified by recipient countries, promoting cooperation and understanding and, significantly, facilitating meaningful contacts between Nigerian youths and the youths of recipient countries.

That last objective is particularly important to the story we are telling because it suggests that the architects of the programme understood something that governments often forget: foreign policy is ultimately about people. An engineer sent from Nigeria to Mozambique could contribute to a project, a doctor could strengthen a hospital and a teacher could influence an entire generation, but the human relationship created in the process could sometimes be more enduring than the official assignment itself. The first cohort numbered 102 volunteers in the 1987- 1988 period, and the programme expanded from there. Official records show that Nigerian volunteers served in countries including Mozambique, Zambia, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland, among many others across Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

There is an important historical distinction here. Nigeria had provided technical assistance to African countries and liberation movements before 1987, but the Technical Aid Corps was designed as a more structured and institutionalized programme. It transformed technical assistance from a series of less coordinated interventions into a recognizable instrument of foreign policy and South-South cooperation. In that sense, Nigeria was doing something quite sophisticated: it was converting human capital into diplomatic capital.

The timing was equally significant. The Technical Aid Corps began in 1987, only a few years before the collapse of apartheid, and by the early 1990s Southern Africa was moving rapidly from liberation politics towards nation-building. Countries that had lived for years under colonial or minority rule suddenly faced the difficult task of governing, educating, rebuilding infrastructure, expanding health services and creating economic opportunity. Political freedom had been won, but freedom had to be made meaningful in the lives of ordinary people.

Nowhere was that challenge more formidable than in South Africa.

When Nelson Mandela assumed the presidency in 1994, he inherited a country in which political liberation had not erased the social and economic consequences of apartheid. The new democratic government confronted deep inequalities in education, housing, employment, land ownership and access to public services, while also having to reassure a country emerging from decades of racial conflict that the transition would not descend into revenge or permanent instability. Mandela chose reconciliation and nation-building as central features of his presidency, while the Government of National Unity adopted the Reconstruction and Development Programme as a framework for tackling the enormous socio-economic damage inherited from apartheid.

Mandela’s South Africa therefore represented a new kind of challenge for Nigeria. The country was no longer asking the outside world primarily for solidarity against oppression. It was trying to construct institutions, expand opportunity and create a functioning democracy in circumstances in which expectations were enormous and resources were limited. Mandela himself recognised that political freedom could not be the final destination. His government spoke explicitly about freedom from poverty, hunger, deprivation, ignorance, suppression and fear, while the Reconstruction and Development Programme was designed to connect political emancipation with practical improvements in people’s lives.

That shift should have changed the way Nigeria thought about its relationship with Southern Africa. During the liberation struggle, the central principle was solidarity. After liberation, the principle needed to become partnership.

Nigeria had already created an instrument capable of supporting that transition. The Technical Aid Corps did not require Nigeria to choose between generosity and self- interest because it was conceived around cooperation, expertise and relationships. It allowed Nigeria to help other countries build capacity while simultaneously strengthening the bonds between their people. In countries such as Mozambique, Zambia, Namibia and Lesotho, where Nigerian professionals served, the philosophy of African countries helping one another became something tangible rather than rhetorical.

But there was another dimension of this relationship that we did not pursue with anything close to the same imagination: the movement of young people.

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