By Dr ONIBIYO EZEKIEL

At the launch of “Shadows of Power” in Abuja, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Sola Enikanolaiye, said the quiet part out loud.

“You cannot have a dynamic and activist foreign policy if the home is weak, if the country is disunited, if there is no harmony in Nigeria. How can you go outside and be taken seriously?”

For 60 years, Nigeria bankrolled Africa’s liberation struggles, peacekeeping missions and ECOWAS interventions, often while our own house was on fire. Enikanolaiye has now formally buried that old Afrocentric reflex. The new motto of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he said, is brutally simple: ‘Nigeria First’.

“Every foreign policy action we take must speak to Nigeria,” the Minister said. “We are locating Nigeria and Nigerians at the core of foreign policy preoccupations so that our national interest that advances our security, our defence and our economic prosperity are the core.”

This is not isolationism. It is strategic autonomy. “What is strategic autonomy? Simply put, it means alignment to our national interest. Therefore, wherever the wind blows, that’s where we go in pursuit of Nigeria’s interest.”

The clearest proof of this doctrine in action was Niger. When the July 2023 coup in Niamey happened, the old Nigeria would have mobilised an ECOMOG-style invasion to forcibly restore democratic rule, at enormous blood and treasury cost, as we did in Liberia and Sierra Leone. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, then ECOWAS Chairman, refused.

Abuja led with diplomacy, sanctions and measured pressure, but drew a hard line against spending Nigerian lives and billions to restore another country’s democracy while terrorists were overrunning our own villages in Zamfara and Borno. That reluctance was pilloried by Afrocentrists at the time. Enikanolaiye has now vindicated it as policy: “Our neighbours, our security, prosperity and development are intrinsically linked to those of our neighbours,” he said, "We have decided to reprioritise that region before we move further to Africa without necessarily jettisoning Africa as the cornerstone.”

In other words: secure the neighbourhood, fix Nigeria first, then lead Africa. Not the other way round. That fixing is exactly what the Renewed Hope reforms have been about for three years. You cannot project power abroad with a 97% debt service-to-revenue ratio. The Tinubu administration crashed it to under 40% by 2024, paid off our IMF obligations, and cleared the Ways and Means overhang that threatened stability.

You cannot be taken seriously with $4 billion in net reserves. Reserves grew to over $23 billion by end-2024, with buffers above $38 billion.

You cannot lead Africa when you are subsidising fuel for the entire sub-region. The fuel subsidy and the forex round-tripping that fed fat a few cabals – was removed. Painful, yes, but it freed over N2 trillion monthly for domestic investment.

That fiscal headroom is now visible at home. FAAC allocations to states tripled, tax-to-GDP jumped from 10% to 13.5% in one year through the Nigeria Tax Act, non-oil revenue hit a record N20 trillion by August 2025, and the World Bank confirmed Nigeria grew at its fastest rate in nearly a decade in 2024.

This is the Nigeria First economy Enikanolaiye described, the Electricity Act decentralising power to the states, the ‘Nigeria First’ procurement policy mandating MDAs buy local, the order that lithium and gold partners must build processing factories in Nigeria, not ship out crude ore, and the $2 billion national fibre optic rollout that pushed digital FDI from $22m to $191m in a year.

It is also a Nigeria First social compact as 600,000 students are on NELFUND interest-free loans, with no ASUU strike in three years, 1,000 Primary Healthcare Centres revitalised with 5,000 more ongoing, free Caesarean sections for pregnant women, and a Cash Transfer Programme reaching 5.7 million vulnerable households.

And it is a Nigeria First security doctrine. For the first time, all unauthorised armed groups were classified as terrorists, police VIP attachments were withdrawn for rural deployment, and ?18 billion in military insurance arrears was cleared to restore morale.

Enikanolaiye is right that foreign policy is the flip side of defence policy. Both must be coordinated so “our country can be better secured, prosperous and have a better future.”

That coordination also means strategic autonomy with all powers. “We may have tilted a little to the West, but we have not abandoned our traditional partners,” the Minister said, listing China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. Defence cooperation with the United States was “reinvigorated… in a manner that addresses our current domestic security challenges.”

No more ideological clientelism. Wherever Nigeria’s interest blows, that is where we go.

Is Nigeria’s international visibility dimmer than in the Murtala/Obasanjo liberation era? Enikanolaiye concedes it: “Our visibility may have dimmed a little, but we’re trying to bring that back.”

But it is a deliberate dimming. A retrenchment to rebuild. As he put it “No aspect of Nigerian domestic policy can succeed unless you identify the external components of those policies and pursue them equally.”

That is the paradigm shift. Afrocentrism without a strong Nigeria was charity. Nigeria-centredness is strategy.

Tinubu is not abandoning Africa. He is doing what Lee Kuan Yew did for Singapore, what the Gulf states did in the 2000s, consolidate the home front economically, militarily, institutionally and then project.

When Nigeria is secure, stable, and economically resilient, Africa will listen again, not out of nostalgia, but out of weight.

That is the Renewed Hope foreign policy. Nigeria First. Nigeria always

•Dr Onibiyo Ezekiel is a Research Fellow at APIS, Abuja, and a Public Policy Analyst. He can be reached at temiowa@yahoo.com

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