Bola Tinubu’s visit to SA underscores the potential, and the problems, of South Africa-Nigeria relations.

Relations between sub-Saharan Africa’s two giants, South Africa and Nigeria, seem to be permanently frozen on the threshold of greatness. Why can’t they be the Germany-France of Africa, some ask, often invoking the golden era when presidents Thabo Mbeki and Olusegun Obasanjo collaborated to reform continental institutions.

The potential was apparent again this week when Nigerian President Bola Tinubu visited Cape Town to co-chair with President Cyril Ramaphosa their 11th Binational Commission.

Ramaphosa said he would use South Africa’s 2025 G20 presidency to ‘keenly’ support Tinubu’s bid for Nigeria to be admitted to that exclusive club. It would be joining South Africa, which has been a member all along, and the African Union, which joined last year, as the only African members.

And recently South Africa helped ensure Nigeria was offered BRICS partnership, along with 12 other countries.

Ramaphosa told the forum that much more needed to be done to improve trade and commercial relations between the two countries. ‘The strategic positioning of both countries in their respective regions presents enormous opportunities for collaboration.’

This included driving industrialisation, for example, by creating value chains in the auto industry for component and electric motorcycles; using lithium to manufacture electric batteries; pharmaceuticals; clean energy; and beneficiating critical minerals at source.

‘Our development finance institutions can work together to support infrastructure development,’ he said, noting that South Africa had embarked on a massive infrastructure investment drive.

Ramaphosa said, ‘the African Continental Free Trade Area, once fully implemented, will enable a massive growth in intra-African trade and investment,’ including through the building of integrated regional value chains.

The reality though is falling far short of this potential. The two countries have not yet concluded negotiations on their AfCFTA trade concessions, as Ramaphosa hinted in his remarks. One of the gripes from both sides has long been about the difficulty of getting visas to visit the other.

Ramaphosa seemed to make a generous gesture here by announcing five-year multiple-entry visas for business people and streamlining visa applications for Nigerian tourists. He said this was part of South Africa’s efforts to create a better business environment for Nigerian companies investing in South Africa.

Tinubu also spoke of the need to improve the environment for South African investors.

Which was certainly timely. For example, several South African companies invested in Nigeria (South African Airways, Nampak, and MTN have been mentioned) have vast amounts of money stuck in Nigeria because the government doesn’t have the foreign exchange to pay them, sources say.

On the other side, South Africa must do more to address the xenophobia that Nigerians experience in South Africa, along with nationals of other, mostly African, countries. This has sometimes prompted retaliation by Nigerians against South African businesses in Nigeria.

So one of the key agreements between the two governments, cited in their joint communiqué, was to finalise the ‘[Memorandum of Understanding] on the Early Warning Mechanism.’ The communiqué doesn’t elaborate, but the mechanism’s purpose is evidently to monitor and prevent violence and criminal acts involving nationals of both countries against each other.

It has apparently been five years in the making, seemingly prompted by the 2018 xenophobic flareups. It was agreed the MoU would be signed by March 2025.

Part of the problem in relations is that even at the leadership level, there has often been more competition than cooperation, seemingly prompted largely by the fact that both countries are vying to be Africa’s top dog. South African officials were aghast when Nigeria rebased its economy some years ago, emerging as Africa’s largest, surpassing South Africa.

The two countries and Egypt have been jostling for top spot ever since. Latest figures suggest, however, that Nigeria’s GDP has fallen precipitously from US$475-billion in 2022 to an estimated US$200-billion this year, putting it a rather poor fourth behind South Africa, Egypt, and Algeria.

Waziri Adio, head of the Agora Policy think tank in Nigeria, told ISS Today that this was largely because of the depreciation of the naira by more than 70% to the US dollar in 18 months. This was mainly due to Tinubu’s floating of the currency.

In the long term that will probably be good for Nigeria, and Adio says foreign reserves have risen, so Nigeria should now be able to pay the South African investors. But in the short term, Nigeria’s economic woes don’t augur well for ambitious collaboration with South Africa.

And Nigerian journalist and commentator Ifeanyi Uddin worries that poor physical and social infrastructure ‘will constrain the responsiveness of the export sector to improved price signals’ – that is, that Nigeria will be unable to take full advantage of the weaker naira.

That partly echoes the plight of South Africa, where the 0.3% shrinkage in third-quarter GDP has been blamed partly on persistent infrastructure weakness (though largely on a 28% contraction in agricultural output).

And Uddin expresses the concern of many that neither the South African nor Nigerian government suffer from ‘an ideological blindness to the gifts from more open economies.’

Chiamaka Okafor, Nigerian journalist and international relations analyst, told ISS Today that Tinubu’s South Africa visit had generated little public interest at home.

‘When you mention South Africa in Nigeria, the first thing that comes to mind is xenophobia. Generally, Nigerians feel that South Africans don’t like them. One might imagine that these two continental giants could leverage their strengths and make good of it for the betterment of the continent. But the reality is different.’ She and others hope the Tinubu-Ramaphosa meeting will be the long-awaited catalyst.

Perhaps, though hopes have risen before. Certainly Ramaphosa’s quite generous visa concessions, his offer to punt Nigeria’s bid for G20 membership, and the joint efforts to address early warnings of violence, should all help. But it seems Nigeria, in particular, will have to resolve its internal economic problems before both countries can lift their eyes to the horizon and realise, at last, the perpetual potential of a strong and prosperous partnership.

Written by Peter Fabricius, Consultant, ISS Pretoria