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| Nigeria’s Foreign Policy, Peace Keeping And Domestic Challenges: Towards A Realistic Foreign Policy. |
Obi Emeka Anthony Ph.D
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Abstract:
A nation’s foreign policy is its domestic policy pursued abroad in the pursuit of its national interests. Ideally, a nation’s foreign policy is supposed to mirror its domestic realities and future ambitions and expectations As an independent state, Nigeria has been involved in numerous peace keeping operations as part of its foreign policy. This paper looks at Nigeria’s foreign policy generally but with particular emphasis on peace keeping operations. Its main objective is to evaluate the place of national interest in Nigeria’s foreign policy. We relied on Snyder’s decision making model. As an ex post facto research, data was gotten from secondary sources and content analysis used for the analysis. The findings indicate that the consideration of Nigeria’s national interest has not been the major factor propelling the country’s foreign policy, secondly, the present economic challenges of Nigeria does not justify its bogus foreign policy pursuits, and finally, the country’s current security challenges do not justify its continued involvement in peace keeping operations. Based on this therefore, the paper suggests that Nigerian decision makers must be made to base the country’s foreign policy on purely its national interest, while Nigeria’s economic realities must be considered in foreign policy making and implementation. Finally, since Nigeria is currently facing serious internal security challenges which seem to have overwhelmed its security forces, the international community that have involved Nigeria in solving similar problems in the past elsewhere, should be involved in tackling this challenge.
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