Andy Ezeani
Tuesday, December 16,2025
For all of ten years and two, Nigeria has muddled along on the global arena without an identifiable foreign policy.
The All-Progressives Congress (APC) which has being in government for the period in reference, appears to have come to office with an ideology and vision that began and ended with dislodging the Peoples Democratic Party from power. That goal was met in 2015.
Led around now by the nose, Nigerians under the APC are wondering what hit them. The policy of no foreign policy by the government has left the African continent in particular, and many friends of Nigeria utterly perplexed, even as the country is grossly impaired.
On May 29, 2023, when he formally emerged as successor to the nescient Muhammadu Buhari, whose underwhelming presidency expired that day, Bola Tinubu promised, glibly, to continue where Buhari stopped. It is doubtful that anyone believed that he knew what he was saying.
Less than three years into his presidency, Tinubu has indeed continued where his predecessor stopped. He has gone further to drag Nigeria into a most intriguing foreign policy posture, one that is totally unmindful of the imperatives of the country’s geopolitical reality. It is difficult to decode what Bola Tinubu is doing.
In the 65 eventful years since Nigeria extracted its sovereignty from Britain, shaking off the old colonial lord from even the basic administrative affairs of the country has been a tug of war. Britain has simply refused to let go.
Determined as it appears, to sustain George Macartney’s 18th century vainglorious notion that “the sun never sets on the British Empire”, the British has been deploying all manner of tricks, both diplomatic and undiplomatic, to keep Nigeria on the leash. It strives through sundry disingenuous devices to keep the sun of an expired empire still shining, at least in locations such as Nigeria.
Younger generations of Nigerians find persistent traces of British influence on the country’s economic and political polices extremely vexatious.
Now, out of nowhere, Nigeria’s stagnant foreign policy is receiving a jolting, a discombobulating shift.
President Bola Tinubu, moving with such characteristic firmness that is only seen when there is a personal interest to protect, is replacing the British yoke on Nigeria with the French yoke, a prospect far more pernicious and with far-reaching geopolitical implications. What does Tinubu think he is doing?
There is very little that recommends the paramountcy of France over Nigeria, even if Nigeria has been condemned by its political rulers to a servile existence.
The circumstances of the unholy romance with France that President Tinubu is foisting on Nigeria are, at once, expensive and injurious to Africa. The embrace is even occurring at a most awkward of times.
Nigeria should have a better sense and taste than to start a mid day romance with France at the moment, whatever the pitch from Emmanuel Macron to Tinubu.
This juncture in the prolonged agonizing effort by former French vassal states in Africa to finally break away from the century-long choke hold of France, is the most inauspicious time for a brother African country to launch a romance with France. What is Bola Tinubu doing to Nigeria?
Not too long ago, young soldiers in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali revolted against their respective servile civilian governments beholden to France. The displacement of those civilian governments that easily acquiesced to the dictates of France was, by every sane interpretation, an expression of nationalistic struggle against the continuation of French devastation of Africa.
It remains part of the inexplicable tendencies in Tinubu that he not only refused to appreciate what every true African ought to appreciate, he even made a hollow threat in the early days of his presidency and chairmanship of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), to use force to restore the sacked subordinates of France.
That was how the Nigerian president lost a chunk of ECOWAS, now constituted as Alliance of Sahel States. All because of an indecorous relationship with France!
Nigeria is not only the leading light and guide of ECOWAS, members of the sub-regional body called him father, to loosely adopt a phrase from Chinua Achebe’s classic, Things Fall Apart. That deference goes with responsibility and an obligation.
What level of historical and ideological abnegation will make a regional leader like Nigeria abandon his brother African nations and take sides with their violator? What does Tinubu think he is doing?
The price of the unfolding romance with France will be steep. Contending with the hostility and lack of cooperation from the Alliance of Sahel States is a price that Nigeria must now be ready to shoulder.
It would have been inconceivable that Burkina Faso or any other country in the West African sub-region would arrest and detain a Nigerian military plane and officers for violation of their airspace, as Burkina Faso just did. There is not much that France can do in the matter. Tinubu is on his own. And this is only the beginning.
In combating terrorism and Jihadist assaults from across the Sahel, a challenge that may considerably define Tinubu’s presidency, it would have been of strategic value to have a common front with Niger, Chad, Mali and Burkina Faso. That is hardly possible now. Tinubu has chosen to be with France.
Meanwhile, while attention is focused on the precarious situation in Burkina Faso, and the contentious military expedition to Benin Republic, purportedly embarked upon with French backing, a new economic foray into Nigeria has been initiated for France.
The Tinubu government moved last week to open a new highway into the Nigerian economy for France. The Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with France, granting her prime supervisory role in Nigeria’s new tax regime, an emerging dispensation that is being marketed with suspicious intensity.
The MOU between FIRS and Directorate Generale des Finances Publiques (DGFIP), signed on December 10,2025, gives France unprecedented access to tax data and programmes in Nigeria.
Following the uproar in various enlightened quarters across the country over the new worrisome French kiss, the government, through the FIRS, has been struggling to explain that the MOU gives France no control over Nigeria’s tax information and processes.
Yet, it remains a fact that the new ‘partnership’ “expands collaboration on international tax matters, information exchange, transfer pricing and Base Erosion and Profit Shifting mechanisms”, giving France a significant role in tracking tax in Nigeria and for Nigeria, as well as monitoring revenue in Nigeria that are taxable or not, etc.
Not even Britain, the old colonial master was conceded such direct, open supervisory role of the economy. Interestingly, there is no prior cultural, historical, or political affinity between Nigeria and France prior to the Tinubu presidency.
With a National Assembly that largely exists in a virtual mode, there may be no organized front to stop the Tinubu government from making Nigeria a new French colony, a viable replacement for the former colonies that have just thrown off the yoke of France.
