One of the most revealing moments of Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan’s state visit to South Africa this week was when Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote – reputed to be the richest person in Africa – complained about South Africa’s black economic empowerment (BEE) policy. Dangote has a majority stake in a local cement factory so he has experienced the policy directly. He grumbled at a South African-Nigeria business forum during the state visit that he had had to lend his South African BEE partner the money to buy his share of the cement business.

Dangote observed that Nigeria itself had once had a policy that foreign investors had to take on a Nigerian partner. That policy had eventually fallen away because it simply discouraged investment. Xolani Qubeka, CEO of the Black Business Council said he was puzzled by this attitude, saying ‘we had taken it for granted that we had fought the liberation struggle together, our Nigerian brothers would have understood the need for BEE’. Whereas Dangote suggested conversely, that, by the same token of African solidarity, South Africa should have exempted Nigerian investors from the burden of having to comply with BEE.

This clash of cultures in some ways exemplified a quite significant broader difference in approach between the two countries to both economic and political issues. Nigeria has experimented with state intervention in the economy and tired of it so is moving towards a freer market. For example, Jonathan has just privatised power generation. The ANC, comparatively new to government, is going the other way.

Referring to the nine agreements which the two governments had just signed for cooperation across many fields – including oil and gas exploitation, mining and ICT – Jonathan said the two countries were opening up all these areas of cooperation mostly for their private sectors to exploit ‘because government cannot provide for all the needs of man. Government can only play the role of facilitator, providing the right environment. So we have opened virtually all sectors of our economy to private participation and we want to encourage other African business people to invest in Nigeria. At the same time we request that Nigerian men and women be given the opportunity to invest in their sister country’, he added, in an apparent reference to the obstacles to Nigerian investment in South Africa such as BEE.

For a head of state to say that government can only play the role of facilitator for business, providing the right environment, is almost trite in global terms today. But not in South Africa where the government is moving in the opposite direction from Nigeria, towards greater state control of the economy.

One can also discern the same contrasting approaches by the two governments to African policy. Jonathan said that he and President Jacob Zuma had agreed in their meeting in Cape Town that Nigeria and South Africa are significant countries: ‘If the African continent is to move forward, then the world expects maximum cooperation between South Africa and Nigeria … if we refuse to cooperate … we will be considered failures’. Jonathan upstaged Zuma by more clearly articulating the theme of the visit in this way although neither he nor Zuma elaborated on how exactly the two countries should or would work together for the good of Africa.

The extensive cooperation outlined in the nine agreements and also in plans disclosed during the visit for South Africa to help Nigeria establish an automobile production industry similar to South Africa’s will presumably benefit just the two countries, in the main. As far as Africa is concerned, the points of friction have been in different approaches by the two countries to conflicts in Libya, Ivory Coast and elsewhere. Jonathan has been criticised for the weakness of his foreign policy, particularly in Nigeria’s sphere of influence, West Africa. Commentators have suggested, for instance, that it was Nigeria’s culpable absence from the field which ‘allowed’ France to take the lead in blocking the advance of Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in Mali last year, a major embarrassment for West Africa and for Africa in general.

This analysis implies that France was eager to play that role – a dubious assumption, surely – since it seems more likely that Paris stepped into the breech because it was painfully obvious that no one else would.¨It has likewise been suggested that earlier Jonathan had failed to assert sufficient African independence against French and, more broadly Western, designs in Libya and Ivory Coast which were, in this analysis, to effect ‘regime change’ by ousting Muammar Gaddafi and Laurent Gbagbo in 2011. This was also the South African government view of course. But was this really weakness and compliance by Jonathan? Or did he simply discern a common interest with Western powers?

In other words, to draw an analogy with economic policy, did he realise the limitations of Nigerian and even African military power in these instances and so ‘facilitate’ the deployment of Western power directed towards the same goals? After all, Nigeria did vote for UN Security Council Resolution 1973 which authorised the deployment of military force in Libya. But, unlike South Africa, Nigeria did not almost immediately begin backpedalling from its decision. And under Nigeria’s leadership, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) had threatened to forcibly eject Gbagbo from office if he did not go quietly; well before French and UN forces helped Alassane Ouattara’s forces achieve that end.

Would it be unfair to contrast Jonathan’s approach to that of South Africa which perhaps too hastily deployed troops to Central African Republic (CAR) in January this year – arguably because Zuma felt that France was scheming there – and as a result suffered the apparently unnecessary loss of 13 South African National Defence Force (SANDF) lives. In short, it could be argued that neither in economic policy nor in foreign policy, does Jonathan suffer from the same ideological aversion to either capitalism or – automatically – to Western interests in Africa which Zuma does. If that is true, it is hard to see how exactly the two leaders will work together for the good of Africa, politically. That might explain why they did not elaborate on that point – or indeed take questions – after their meeting.

Zuma was perhaps hinting at a solution when he said that the need to establish the proposed African Union Standby Force for rapid deployment into crises had now become more crucial in the light of crises in CAR, Mali and the eastern DRC. That would no doubt address the points of friction between South Africa and Nigeria over Western military intervention in Africa – and indeed such misgivings Nigeria might feel about South Africa’s intervention in CAR, for instance. But that is a long way off. Meanwhile, Jonathan evidently believes that one must make do with what one has.

Written by Peter Fabricius, Foreign Editor, Independent Newspapers
As published on the Institute for Security Studies website