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Bolaji Akinyemi’s Concert of Medium Powers 02 Jan 2013

In 1987, Bolaji Akinyemi, Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, initiated the Concert of Medium Powers; an informal and flexible consultative organ, comprising a regionally representative number of sixteen countries which were regional powers, or which exercised a significant amount of regional influence.  These countries were expected to act together in mediatory capacity in pressing global conflict-situations as well as act as a bridge between competing interests in the international system.
 
The general purpose of the Concert was to enable its membership to exert greater collective influence in world affairs.  So doing, it would ensure that questions of international peace and security would no longer be the exclusive preserve of the super-powers and their respective alliance systems.  This would attenuate the level of distrust and suspicion in inter-state relations.  It was intended, furthermore, to strengthen the faith in multilateral cooperation by addressing global problems, in the enhancement of international peace and security.
 
Akinyemi’s medium powers were neither exclusively Northern nor Southern; Eastern nor Western; developed nor developing; capitalist nor socialist; but an agglomeration of all these countries.  The emphasis was on those countries which had tended to pursue a neutralist or independent foreign policy, drawn from the four regions of Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America.
 
The usual sceptics
 
Some of the scepticism raised in certain quarters in Nigeria concerning the desirability or viability of the project derived from the very fact that it was of Nigerian conception.  Nigerians were not used  to having their country sponsor a major initiative of this nature and then getting serious-minded and regionally influential countries such as Brazil, Argentina, India, Sweden and Switzerland to come on board.  
 
But under Akinyemi’s leadership, Nigeria became the first black African country to project itself so vividly at the centre-stage of international politics.  The very fact that the sixteen countries which attended the exploratory senior officials meeting in Lagos in March 1987 decided to christen the initiative as the Lagos Forum, out of respect and appreciation for Nigeria as the initiator of the venture, meant that Nigeria’s leadership was recognized and accepted.
 
The Concert was conceived as an avenue for promoting Nigeria’s national interest.  In the first place, it provided a major platform for the projection of Nigeria’s image on the world scene, and for carving out a major role for Nigeria in world affairs.  In the second place, it provided an extra-African forum where Nigeria could enlist the cooperation of certain other countries, in the pursuit of its foreign-policy goals and objectives.
 
Before then, Nigeria’s international posture had been defined strictly in terms of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.  The country’s implacable opposition to apartheid had imbued its foreign policy with a certain ideological fervour.  But it had also given it such a singularity of focus that it created the danger of making Nigeria a country with a one-issue foreign-policy.  Certainly, support or opposition to South Africa had become the principal yardstick by which Nigeria determined its friends and opponents.
 
Therefore, for Bolaji Akinyemi, the challenge of Nigeria’s diplomacy was not only to take the anti-apartheid struggle to its logical conclusion, but also to define for Nigeria a larger foreign-policy focus and vision than that which was confined to the anti-apartheid struggle.  This was even more imperative because Akinyemi understood that the eradication of apartheid in South Africa was then a matter of years and not of decades.  In effect, there was urgent need for Nigeria to lay down the foundations of a post-apartheid foreign-policy.  This was the thinking behind his Concert of Medium Powers.
 
The criteria of medium-power status on which the membership of the Concert was based attracted considerable debate and discussion.  This was inevitable because non-inclusion in the Concert served to disqualify a host of countries which might otherwise have been interested in participating.  One of the issues raised by local commentators in this regard was whether Nigeria itself, the originator of the project, could be said to be a medium power, in the same league as such countries as Brazil and India.
 
Such scepticism partly derived from the tendency of Nigerians to underestimate the status and capacity of Nigeria.  Nigerians are notorious for being the worst critics of Nigeria.  It is true that there were still acute problems of poverty and under-development in Nigeria in the 1980’s.  But just in the same way as there were large pockets of poverty and economic backwardness in India and Brazil in this period, these in no way contradicted the objective power-position of Nigeria.
 
Nigeria’s status
   
Bolaji Akinyemi’s initiative defined a medium power in regional terms and there can be no doubt that Nigeria was the preeminent military, economic and political power in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1980’s.  Nigeria was the largest African country.  Its GDP, then estimated by the World Bank at $71 billion dollars, surpassed that of every African country except South Africa ($74 billion); and was double that of every other African country except South Africa and Algeria ($44 billion).
 
In the ECOWAS sub-region, Nigeria’s GDP was twice that of all the other countries combined.  In addition, Nigeria had the second largest army in Africa after Egypt.  It can be maintained, therefore, without any fear of contradiction, that as far as Africa was concerned, Nigeria had all the makings of a regional power.
 
In the wider international framework, Nigeria’s position was no less salient.  Nigeria was the 9th largest country in the world and, by far, the largest black country.  Indeed, one out of every five black persons in the world was a Nigerian.  In terms of GDP, Nigeria was in 1987 the 25th most powerful country in the world.  It was the world’s 23rd largest exporting country and the 22nd largest importer.  
 
In addition, it was blessed with primary commodities, including cocoa, hides-and skins, groundnuts and palm oil.  Nigeria was the seventh largest producer of oil.  It was also rich in gas.  Indeed, it was endowed with four times as much the financial value of its oil resources in gas.  Most important of all, Nigeria was endowed with an aggressive, energetic and enterprising population.  Arguably therefore, Nigeria could be described as a potentially great country waiting for the leadership to challenge it into actualizing its greatness.
 
This was what Akinyemi sought to provide: a vision for Nigeria that transcended its backwardness.  His definition of Nigeria as a medium power was not only based on objective realities, it was also a call to action.  Akinyemi understood that Nigeria needed to aspire to greatness.  He took up the challenge that it was up to the leadership to instil in the people the self-confidence that the aspiration was attainable.
 
He believed that Nigeria should not merely seek to remain in the “commonwealth of poverty” which the Third World represented.  While not advocating that the country should turn its back on the Third World, he sought to put equal emphasis on its association with the second-tier level of middle-ranking states of the international system which were defined more by their newly-industrializing status than by their abject poverty.  In Akinyemi’s conception, the medium powers would thenceforth be Nigeria’s reference-points, and not the poverty-ridden countries of the Third and Fourth Worlds which had very little leverage and influence in world affairs.
 
Membership structure
 
The countries he included in the Concert of Medium Powers were also countries with which Nigeria could profitably develop greater links in the necessary process of economic diversification from its traditional trading partners in the developed market-economy countries.  Most of those countries, including Brazil, Mexico, India and Malaysia were characterized by intermediate technology which was of greater relevance and applicability to Nigeria than was western technology.  
 
Such developed countries as Sweden and Austria were not colonial powers, and were not characterized by the type of exploitative capitalism typical of other western countries.  Thus, the Concert of Medium Powers was envisaged as the political and diplomatic anchor of the process of economic diversification which was a sine-qua-non of Nigeria’s structural adjustment programme under the Babangida administration.
 
Given the centrality of Nigeria’s national interest in the conceptualization of the Concert of Medium Powers, the challenge of Nigerian diplomacy was that of persuading the appropriate countries to participate in the venture.  This required its conceptualization in a manner sufficiently broad and flexible to accommodate the interests of the other participating countries.  It is easily forgotten that this was the primary achievement of the founding-members of the Non-aligned Movement.
 
This was also the challenge of the Concert of Medium Powers, and it was the challenge to Nigerian diplomacy.  Initial opposition to the project came naturally from India and Yugoslavia, which saw the Concert as a threat to their leadership of the Third World through the instrumentality of the Non-aligned Movement.  However, this opposition was effectively counteracted by the Latin American states of Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela.  Unlike in the Non-aligned where some of those countries were either only observers or regarded as poor cousins as a result of their late membership, the Concert offered them a platform for exerting influence in world affairs on the basis of equality with the other participating states where they were all regarded as founding-members.
 
The basic concern of the Latin American countries was that the Concert should not overshadow the mediatory Contadora Group in Latin America in which they all belonged.  This concern was taken care of by the understanding reached at the exploratory Lagos meeting that the Concert would not deal with issues that are parochial in scope, or regional in orientation.
 
Similarly, the European states of Austria and Sweden saw the Concert as a vehicle for strengthening the United Nations system, and for increasing the voice of the medium powers in the international system, without compromising their neutrality by the creation of a formal or group structure.  For its part, the Swiss government saw the informal consultative framework of the venture as a means of escaping from the entrenched isolationism thrust upon it by the Swiss people, without contravening the strictures of Swiss neutrality as enshrined in the constitution of Switzerland.
 
Conclusion
 
Akinyemi refused to accept what many saw as Nigeria’s limitations.  For him, Nigeria was an unbound prometheus with a manifest destiny to bring the black race firmly into the centre of international relations.  It is a testament to and an indictment of the lack of continuity in Nigeria’s foreign policy that many of the initiatives he brought to Nigeria’s diplomacy were discontinued once he was out of office.  His Concert of Medium Powers was subsequently jettisoned by Nigerian officialdom, but it has re-emerged on the international scene in some fashion as the D8 group of middle-level countries of Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey.  There is need to revisit Bolaji Akinyemi’s Concert of Medium Powers today.