IF anyone should ask me now what is the centrepiece of Nigeria’s foreign policy, I am afraid I will not be able to coherently and confidently offer a response! This is despite the fact that I read – and still read – Political Science, teach it, and was a Foreign Affairs correspondent for two reputable national newspapers for many years. In school and out of it, International Relations has always been my forte. I know that Africa used to be the centrepiece and cornerstone of Nigeria’s foreign policy; is it still so? A country’s foreign policy is its soul – you live it; you breathe it; it is your very essence. That was the case especially with the Murtala Muhammed/Olusegun Obasanjo regime, which many still regard as the golden age of Nigeria’s foreign policy.

Who can easily forget the Nigerian Head of State, Gen. Murtala Muhammed’s “Africa has come of age” speech at the first extraordinary meeting of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), on January 11, 1976, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia? The speech, fiery as Murtala himself, was a fitting response to a patronising letter from the United States President, Gerald Ford, opposing the Soviet-backed Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which had just assumed power in Angola after decades of gruesome guerrilla warfare against Western-backed Portuguese colonialism.

Ford had ordered African leaders to follow in America’s footsteps. Nigeria not only led the African continent to say “No” to the Yankees’ directives, it also followed it up by mobilising all levels of support (short of putting boots on the ground) for the liberation movements in the entire southern African sub-continent – Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa itself. Murtala was assassinated in a failed military coup a…