Nigeria’s Image, Democracy and Foreign Policy, 1999-2007

Abstract

Nigeria's image was negative prior the return of democracy in 1999. The major cause of this was the long period of military rule which not only dismantled democratic institutions, but made Nigeria a pariah State as a result of corruption and draconian policies. The protracted military rule led to plethora of sanctions which led to hardship on the populace. The return to democratic governance reinvented the State and ushered in diplomatic shuffles which culminated to the eliminating of the sanctions which eventually readmitted the country into global reckoning. This study reviews Nigeria's image, democracy and foreign policy, 1999-2007, adopting content analysis in the scrutiny of our data and political economy perspectives as a paradigm for our analysis. It recommends effective Executive -Legislative Collaboration as a panacea for achieving effective and stable foreign policy.Keywords: corruption, democracy, image, foreign policy, Nigeria Introduction'Foreign policy', as a concept, is nebulous and defies a generally-acceptable definition (Aluko, 1981). Though different scholars have defined it from different points of view, each of these definitions could be said to have stemmed from, and influenced by, peculiar ideological strands. The concept of foreign policy is of utmost interest and importance to every nation, since, according Dunmoye, Njoku & Alubo, eds. (2007:12), 'it connotes formal decisions/positions of sovereign states towards their counterparts, defined in terms of political, economic, cultural/social and strategic realms of inter-sovereign relationships, bilaterally and or multi-literally.' Foreign policy essentially deals with the relations between sovereign actors in international system. Foreign policy objective therefore can be understood as a range of intended actions as well as set strategies adopted by some sovereign actors with the purpose of influencing the behaviour of other sovereign actors within the international system. Accordingly, Ogwu (2006:6) argues that the ultimate objectives of any foreign policy are to achieve short-range or long-range goals that ensure the superiority of one sovereign national actor over another. That is, foreign policy could be perceived as the pursuit of national interests. The milieu within which foreign policy is contrived and executed could be dichotomized into three main realms; the psychological, the domestic and the external. The psychological realm denotes the mental process of the decision maker(s) and all the factors that shape the conception of the policy. The domestic realm on the other hand is beyond the decision maker(s), but within the territorial bounds of the state. The external realm deals with the international system into which the policy is directed and this could be significantly unpredictable. The interface of the trio therefore is essential in the formulation of foreign policy.The Principal objective of Nigeria's foreign policy is as provided for in Section 19 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic and others that pr...

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