• Following the end of the Cold War in 1991, Nigeria’s military played a leading role in preventing regional political instability (for example, in 1997 it helped to reverse a military coup in Sierra Leone).

• Now, however, Nigeria’s multiple and overlapping security crises are increasingly spilling over into neighbouring countries such as Niger, where Nigerian refugees have fled a growing bandit threat in the country’s north-west, or the other Lake Chad states (where jihadi groups operate).

• Pirate groups based in Nigeria’s Niger Delta also remain an ongoing threat to maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea, including the territorial waters of Nigeria’s neighbours.

• The increasing ungovernability of the country’s peripheral regions means that Nigeria has become an exporter of instability in West Africa, and the need to reserve the country’s military to address internal security threats means that Nigeria’s role as a regional hegemon is much diminished, although its economic size relative to its neighbours still allows it enormous influence within the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), West Africa’s most important bloc.

With its huge population and economy, its oil wealth and the strongest military in the region, Nigeria was West Africa’s regional hegemon during most of its post-independence period (with France its only rival, at least in the region’s francophone states). Especially after the return of civilian governance in 1999, Nigeria’s regional role was positive from the perspective of peace-building, countering coup culture and the promotion of civilian rule. The country also supplied large numbers of UN and African Union peacekeepers. Historically, Nigerian independence leaders embraced the vision of a huge, multi-ethnic, democratic state with the heft to give Africa a seat at the highest international table—”the Nigeria project”. Successive military and civilian regimes and their political classes since independence embraced that implicit hegemonic role, underpinned by the strongest military in West Africa and funded with oil riches.

Nigeria previously played stronger role in resolving regional crises

Hegemonic ambitions became even more explicit following Nigeria’s transition from military to civilian rule in 1998-99. During the administration of a former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, in 1999-2007, Nigeria was at the forefront of regional efforts to make military coups unacceptable, to end civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia and to resolve territorial disputes peacefully, as Mr Obasanjo did with Cameroon over the Bekasi peninsula. The Obasanjo presidency also worked to strengthen regional organisations and UN peacekeeping agencies, to which Nigeria was a major supplier of peacekeepers. 

At present however, Nigeria is losing its capacity to effectively exercise regional political and security leadership, and there is no replacement for it in sight (as France is increasingly cutting back its security engagement too), owing to increasing instability at home, the effects of which are often exported to other ECOWAS countries. Nigeria’s government is increasingly able to assert its dominance over only “core” Nigerian regions and cities of imperative economic or political importance. Meanwhile, the peripheral regions of the country, such as the bandit-stricken north-western state of Zamfara, or the north-east, where conflict rages with Islamist groups, will become increasingly lawless over the course of 2022-26. At the same time, the country’s entrenched economic problems show little sign of generating the kind of prosperity that would help to achieve social peace and provide Nigeria’s youth with better alternatives to joining militant groups or criminal gangs.

Nigeria’s weakness parallels similar problems elsewhere in West Africa

Nigeria’s current situation mirrors that of many states in West Africa, which is unstable as a whole. In 2020-21 there were two coups in Mali and one each in Chad and Guinea, as well as an attempted coup in Niger. Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mali, Nigeria and Niger are under siege from jihadi insurrections, separatist groups and “bandits”, the latter a mélange of criminal, ethnic, religious and domestic insurgent elements. There is anxiety among the political classes of coastal West African states like Senegal, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire that their countries might be next to face incursions by jihadi terror cells.

Governance across ECOWAS states generally remains weak, as local elites are often isolated from the people whom they ostensibly lead and fail to respond proactively to challenges ranging from climate change to the covid-19 pandemic. Economic growth is largely dependent on the export of commodities and results in little development for most of its inhabitants. Poverty and insecurity drive cross-border migration and perhaps set the stage for future waves to outside the region, first to elsewhere in Africa and subsequently across the Mediterranean. 

Downward trajectories vary from country and country, but the general context is pervasive poverty, the effects of climate change on traditional agriculture and fishing, food insecurity, competing militant religious revivals, soaring population growth, corrupt and poor governance and out-of-control urbanisation, all of which are exacerbated by the ravages of covid-19. Bright spots are few: with respect to security, governance and economic management, among the region’s larger states Senegal, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire are grounds for fragile optimism. 

Nigeria’s internal security issues also affect regional security

Given that the West African region is awash with weapons—some from the collapsed regime in Libya, others of local origin (Nigeria’s auditor-general reports that 178,459 weapons disappeared from government armouries there in 2018)—it seems likely that zones of conflict along Nigeria’s international borders will continue to worsen in 2022-26. Nigeria’s growing loss of control over the country’s peripheral regions presents other West African states with a particular problem, however, owing in part to the size and number of countries whose land or maritime borders lie near Nigeria’s. Bandits and other armed groups move easily across Nigeria’s international borders into other countries (and vice versa). Nigerians displaced by any internal breakdown of security also move easily across borders and are often hosted by members of the same ethnic group in neighbouring states. Locals report that up to 5,000 Nigerians of Yoruba ethnicity have fled insecurity in Nigeria to settle in Yoruba-majority areas of neighbouring Benin, for example. In the east and north of Nigeria, other Nigerian nationals have fled to Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Meanwhile there are sizeable numbers of Nigerien, Chadian and Cameroonian refugees in Nigeria. 

Regional efforts to jointly address violence and insecurity remain patchy

Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, has sought regional co-operation against armed groups, including the jihadis that plague Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon, although to date the results have been meagre. Sometimes West African states also co-operate in arresting dissident leaders who have fled from neighbouring states. However, in some cases, such as that of a Biafran militant, Nnamdi Kanu, their handover further inflames separatist sentiment. Rebel groups can also mirror state-led efforts to contain them, and Biafran separatists claim that they are working with anti-regime, mostly anglophone rebels in Cameroon against the dictatorship of the president, Paul Biya (as well as fighting the Nigerian security services), for example.

Moreover, Nigeria’s sheer size (especially in economic matters) in comparison with its francophone neighbours can inhibit closer co-operation, and the Nigerian government is sometimes reluctant to consistently respect bilateral and transnational commitments that it has made to other ECOWAS countries. Mr Buhari was unenthusiastic about the African Continental Free Trade Agreement, and Nigeria was among the last states to join. It remains to be seen whether he or his successor after the upcoming general election in February 2023 will rally to regional economic integration and the free movement of goods, population and services, which could develop West African national economies more rapidly and raise regional living standards. National borders throughout the region have been closed and reopened in response to the covid-19 pandemic, which had a profound effect on “modern” economic activity (a huge amount of informal and traditional trade across borders, often within the same ethnic group, goes on without reference to governments opening or closing borders). 

External attempts to change region will fail without local support

West Africa’s challenges are formidable, and it is difficult to see how one of the world’s poorest regions can overcome them. However, it is also unrealistic to see transformation coming from the outside, be it from the US and the old colonial powers or non-Western powers, such as China, India, Russia or Turkey. Foreign countries might have some influence, but only at the margins. Meanwhile, their fundamental interests lie elsewhere, and they lack the political will to devote the resources necessary to be transformative in the context of West Africa’s formidable challenges. What would help the region in practical terms would be the receding of the covid-19 pandemic, the stabilisation of commodity prices and a lessening of the flood of weapons into private hands. The restoration of a sense of security across Nigeria is also an imperative, if the region’s largest economy and most powerful security actor is to be free to play a more productive role in resolving West Africa’s security and development crises over the course of 2022-26.

The analysis, forecasts and data featured in this article can be found in EIU Viewpoint, our new country analysis solution. EIU Viewpoint provides unmatched global insights covering the political and economic outlook for nearly 200 countries.