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Nigeria Relations with International Organizations
Nigeria played active roles in various international
organizations and vied for positions in them. For example,
Joseph
Garba, Nigeria's former permanent representative to the
UN, was
elected in 1989 to a one-year term as president of the UN
General
Assembly; Adebayo Adeedji was executive secretary of the
Economic
Commission for Africa, a UN affiliate; and Emeka Anyaoku
became
secretary general of the Commonwealth of Nations in 1989.
Former
military head of state Obasanjo also had become a
recognized
world statesman and spokesman on African issues. Nigeria
contributed personnel to many UN peacekeeping missions,
including
operations in Congo, Tanzania, and the UN India/Pakistan
Observer
Mission in the 1960s, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon in
1978,
and UN forces observing the Iran-Iraq cease-fire and the
AngolaNamibian accords in 1988.
The importance that Nigeria placed on international
organizations grew out of a striving for peace and
international
cooperation. In the cases of the OAU and ECOWAS, these
organizations also served to increase African unity,
another
important Nigerian goal. Nigeria played an initiating role
in the
creation of both organizations and was active in both
thereafter.
Although Nigeria's positions on various issues have
changed over
the years, its level of activity in international
organizations
has increased.
In 1987 Nigeria initiated a Concert of Medium Powers,
more
widely known as the Lagos Forum, to facilitate
multilateral
cooperation and to enable member states to exert greater
collective influence on world affairs. Forum members
included
Sweden, Austria, Zimbabwe, and Egypt. The initiative,
which could
be seen as an effort preceding the end of the Cold War,
seemed to
collapse, however, after its initiator, Boleji Akenyemi,
was
removed as minister for external affairs in 1987.
* * *
A wide range of books and articles exists on Nigerian
government and politics. On the colonial period and the
First
Republic (1960-66), the major studies are those by Eme O.
Awa,
Federal Government in Nigeria; James Smoot Coleman,
Nigeria: Background to Nationalism; Larry Diamond,
Class, Ethnicity, and Democracy in Nigeria: The Failure
of the
First Republic; Billy J. Dudley, Parties and
Politics in
Northern Nigeria; Robin Luckham, The Nigerian
Military: A
Sociological Analysis of Authority and Revolt:
1960-67; J.P.
Mackintosh, Nigerian Government and Politics;
Kenneth W.J.
Post, The Nigerian Federal Election of 1959;
Richard L.
Sklar, Nigerian Political Parties; and C. Sylvester
Whitaker, The Politics of Tradition: Continuity and
Change in
Northern Nigeria, 1946-66.
On the Gowon government (1966-75), there are major
studies by
Henry Bienen, Political Conflict and Economic Change in
Nigeria; Billy J. Dudley, Instability and Political
Order; Oye Oyediran, Nigerian Government and
Politics
Under Military Rule, 1966-79; and S.K. Panter-Brick,
Nigerian Politics and Military Rule: Prelude to the
Civil
War. A.H.M. Kirk-Greene's two-volume Crisis and
Conflict
in Nigeria: A Documentary is a valuable resource on
the civil
war period. There are also excellent studies by John J.
Stremlau,
The International Politics of the Nigerian Civil War,
1967-
1970, and by John de St. Jorre, The Nigerian Civil
War.
On the Obasanjo government and the transition to the
Second
Republic, the central studies are those by J. Bayo
Adekson,
Nigeria in Search of a Stable Civil-Military
System; Larry
Diamond et al., Democracy in Developing Countries;
Richard
A. Joseph, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria:
The
Rise and Fall of the Second Republic; and Shehu
Othman,
"Classes, Crises, and Coups: The Demise of Shagari's
Regime."
Overviews on Nigerian politics and government can be
found in
Peter P. Ekeh and E.E. Osaghae, Federal Character and
Federalism in Nigeria and William Graf, The
Nigerian
State. (For further information and complete
citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of June 1991
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