Nigeria’s perilous French gambit

At first glance, Nigeria and France make for an unlikely pair. Nigeria, after all, is the “giant of Africa,” whose vast potential has too often been undermined by weak institutions and poor governance. France, by contrast, is a former imperial power clinging to a military posture that looks increasingly anachronistic in a postcolonial world. Yet the two countries share some striking similarities. Both possess an inflated sense of their own importance—a politique de grandeur that often privileges style over substance, sustained by nostalgia for past glory. They have also cultivated national identities associated with fashion, good food, and joie de vivre. And both must contend with more economically powerful regional rivals: South Africa and Germany. These shared traits help explain the increasingly warm relationship between Nigeria and France. Since taking office in 2023, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu has developed an unusually close rapport with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, making Paris his most frequent foreign destination. In 2021, the two countries established the France-Nigeria Business Council, which met at last month’s Franco-African summit in Nairobi. This entente marks a stark departure from six decades of Nigerian foreign policy. Since gaining independence, Nigeria has sought to promote West African integration, most notably through the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which it helped establish in 1975. One of the bloc’s central objectives was to reduce the dependence of Nigeria’s neighbors on France, whose regional policies Nigeria had long viewed with suspicion. Distrust of France has deep historical roots. During Nigeria’s civil war in the late 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle used Côte d’Ivoire and Gabon to funnel arms to Biafran secessionists. The aim was to weaken and fragment Nigeria, thereby undermining British influence in a country that de Gaulle regarded as central to the United Kingdom’s interests in Afr