Director-General of Nigeria Institute for International Affairs, Prof Eghosa Osaghae, in this interview with ThisNigeria speaks on recent collaborative activities of the organization; the lingering Ukraine/Russia war and its effect on the global economy; as well as the issue of awareness and implementation of climate change

Lately, there had been some collaborative activities between the NIIA and some globally recognised institutions, countries, and notable individuals, what is your organisation aiming to achieve with this?

You know, the NIIA is Nigeria’s window to the world in the area of international affairs, so, the NIIA itself is a product of those international engagements and bilateral and multi-laterals that Nigeria has had. The NIIA is Nigeria’s version of the kinds of think tanks and research institutes that have been devoted to foreign policy and international affairs and you find them all over the world. NIIA in 1961 was thought of as a think tank that would enable Nigeria to understand with some decent level of adequacy the dynamics of the international system. The way several other agencies such as the Indian Council of World Affairs, such as the South African Institute of International Affairs, and the Chatham House in the United Kingdom, among others, this is what we have been doing. You will find that the NIIA is a global institute with all of those strong ties in different parts of the world. The leading think-tank in the world has been collaborating with NIIA because that is the whole essence. Global think tanks like the NIIA have a network and those networks, sometimes are non-state, and sometimes it is also stated. In the diplomatic channels, they say these are attire 1.5, Attire 2 Channels that complement the Attire 1 Diplomatic Channels that are state-to-state channels. So, if you say more recently, the NIIA has been doing things, it is simply a re-enactment of why the NIIA was established in the first place.

This is all we’ve been doing and maybe for some time, for reasons that we would have to consider another time, they disappeared, but I think they are being reasserted and reappearing.

What are the gains of some of these collaborative efforts?

There are gains, there have been gains, they allow us first to have the proper understanding of not only the dynamics of how the global system works but also how we can have partnerships that would allow us to move on in that direction. We have partnerships, for instance, that are strengthening the capacities that we have in West Africa, in Nigeria, in Africa, in the global South, and even have the capacity that will enable us to engage more equitably with the global North. You know that the global South countries got into the world system at the time when the world had been concretely taken over by today’s superpowers and initially, the trajectory was for positive non-alignment, all of these countries were also in search of how to properly engage the superpowers and the ones they call the gatekeepers of the international system, without losing their autonomies.

So, Nigeria as a state, and a country, recognised the importance of the NIIA and this has helped the formulation and implementation and capacities for foreign policies engagement because the NIIA can extend the frontiers of not only bilateral and multilateral operations but the NIIA has scholarly institute, scholarly think-tank, it has also been able to bring together networks of scholars who work in this areas and who can collaborate on projects and that will extend the frontiers of the ties that Nigeria has, with these various other countries and international organisations and in the process we have complimented the government to government, state to state elements of foreign relations.

In recent years, the issue of climate change has topped the front burner globally. A lot of agreements have been reached, but while some countries in the Global North have started a level of implementation, there is still a very high level of a slow approach to the matter in the Global South, which includes Africa, what, in your view, is responsible for this?

I mean you’ve raised many questions in one. For instance, you’ve talked about levels of awareness, you’ve talked about implementation, and intervention. The first thing you need to know is that climate change is something that the world has come to know through scientific and technological advancements and once you talk of climate change in those scientific and technological terms, you would immediately recognise that for many countries in the global south, we will be at the receiving end in the kinds of knowledge that have come out in that area. Things about emissions and their consequences, things about the bio-fuels and fossils, things about renewable energy, and so on.

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These are things that we have been concerned about dealing with them in their most crystal forms. So, if we are talking oil for instance in a place like Nigeria, it simply reflects the gas because this is the crudest way to deal with the oil industry outside of the so-called advanced countries in the world and so at some point, we started to realize that the kinds of emissions we are having, the kinds of very unfriendly activities of the humankind especially in the industrialised world that those things were having serious repercussions in all the world. The major sources of climate problems are also well known, like the industrialized world even though we in our global south but also Africa and some other parts of Asia were not so informed of the kind of changes that were beginning to happen and the consequences. Once we started to harvest the very adverse effects of climate change such as we have seen in the Lake Chad region where the Basins have shrunken over the years, such as we have seen with flooding in different parts of the world and so on, we then realised that climate change issues are finally here with us. Maybe we have not been proactive and pre-emptive as we should have been but the reason is, as always seem to be the case, we don’t have the resources to halt or even to respond adequately to climate change issues. Remember that in this part of the world in Nigeria, we had desertification as a major problem, we identified long ago that if, we didn’t take steps to prevent desertification which was increasing very fast coming from those Northern fringes, sooner or later we will be in trouble.

All of the Sambisa forest, all of those forests that today have become the haven for terrorist organisations and so forth, were products of the interventions that we had. When we had the sea movements, especially the ones that had to do with rising tides and so on, the kinds of things we experienced in this part of the country where we had flooding from across the Atlantic here in Victoria Island, was the time to begin to take some of these issues a little more seriously. We were lagging for reasons of resources, for reasons of science and technology and so it feels like even though we are not the greatest catalyst for climate change adversities, we couldn’t help ourselves, and therefore, until climate change became a global issue, there was very little that we could have done about those things individually or collectively. It’s the same thing there is conflict in Ethiopia, it’s gone on for so long, and the world carries on as though that war doesn’t matter, we’ve had war in the Sahel, these are not very important, Myanmar is a country in the world that has been so unstable and the problems we’ve had Yemen, other flashpoints in the world, these take, they are relegated when the world now has to deal with the situation in Ukraine. So, because we are not the ones who determine what will be the key interest and overall agenda of the global system, we are always at the receiving end of so many issues including conflicts, war, arms proliferation, and now climate change. You would go back to the days of COVID-19. It was a global pandemic and we were the most vulnerable in this instance. Not because we didn’t know what COVID-19 meant, but because we did not have the kind of resources that was required to fight the pandemic. The vaccines, continue to lag in this part of the world because we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the technology, and we don’t have the scientific base. We struggle with these things, so it is with climate change. You will find that all that our efforts have amounted to is trying to make the global North see reasons why they should support the terms, and the efforts we are making to reverse the things that are possible to reverse.

Do you think the global north is making a concrete effort to address these issues?

You know it’s a mixed back. I mean the new Prime Minister of England, for instance, had initially said he was not attending the COP-27, but at the last minute, he changed his mind. When Donald Trump was President of the United States, we had mixed signals in part because at that time it looked like the ravages of climate change were more in the impoverished part of the world than they were in the global North but I think now, there is enough reason for even guys that felt a little insinuated in the global North to see that we are all in trouble. So suddenly, we find that renewable energy, that’s what everyone is looking for now because the ones that are wasting assets are the ones that must disappear. Those are depleting very fast and therefore, everyone is now concerned but still, it looks like the global North is better able to cushion those effects because of the enormous resources at the disposal of those countries in that part of the world than those in the global south was to do. So, it’s all about the strength, the bargaining powers that we have to get those countries to see this as a problem for humanity as a whole. It’s about our shared future, our shared present, if, we all get into trouble as we seem to be doing, then everyone is in trouble but if you like the global North, is the major source of these problems but it also thinks that it can address the issues.

The Ukraine-Russia war and the effect it has had globally. Do you think the dual economy will continue to widen?

The world has always had dual economies, the whole idea of the shadow economies, black markets, parallel markets, all of those things are not recent inventions, and so we have always had the formal side economies- the known one and the hidden one. Each time we have had shocks, or global emergencies, the hidden economies have always tended to thrive, but today because the war in Ukraine has had a great effect on energy, the whole world has been plunged into an energy crisis and therefore people are looking for alternatives. One of which is how we can bring the war to an end to see if they can get Ukraine and Russia to reach agreements on some of those things because both Ukraine and Russia whether they like it or not would also have dire consequences from these changes in the global political economy. Amid that war, Turkey, Greece, and some of these countries had to broker peace to allow for seaways to be opened so that they could have movements moving through, so they could have gas movements and today Europe, especially has been looking for alternative gas roots. These are not things that can happen overnight. So in the immediate short run, it is in everybody’s interest that the war is brought to an end sooner than later and I think that’s the alternative that is best for everyone. Because otherwise, the cost will be too much for everyone to bear.