Expansionist Nigeria

xsampa

Banned
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and has often been ruled by military dictators. Suppose the Nigerian civil war is averted due to some last-minute arrangement that creates more provinces than the North, West and Eastern provinces that remained from the colonial era, and that a particularly expansionist military leader comes to power in a more stable First Republic for whatever reason. Expansion would be of course dependent on less French meddling in its former colonies and perhaps a different outcome to the Algerian war, which is another POD in itself. That being said, where would Nigeria look to expand into, and how would it deal with international rules regarding annexation and long-term occupation of other countries?
 
How popular was/is pan-Africanism in Nigeria?

Putting aside the “why?”, a useful cover for assuaging the United States and other Western countries during the Cold War might be to invade neighboring radical leftist states under the pretext of fighting communism.
 
Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and has often been ruled by military dictators. Suppose the Nigerian civil war is averted due to some last-minute arrangement that creates more provinces than the North, West and Eastern provinces that remained from the colonial era, and that a particularly expansionist military leader comes to power in a more stable First Republic for whatever reason. Expansion would be of course dependent on less French meddling in its former colonies and perhaps a different outcome to the Algerian war, which is another POD in itself. That being said, where would Nigeria look to expand into, and how would it deal with international rules regarding annexation and long-term occupation of other countries?

I don't think an expansionist Nigeria (via military means) is possible. Nigeria is surrounding on all of its land borders by former French colonies. Their territorial integrity would likely be backed up by France. Even the Cameroons region which left Nigeria via plebiscite to join Cameroon in 1961.

Even peaceful expansion seems unlikely due to linguistic differences which exist between former French colonies and Nigeria, alongside Francafrique.
 
I think at best without a radical change in Nigerian internal politics from 1960 onwards would be for Nigeria to actually gain control of the Bakassi peninsula (perhaps as part of an initiative to support the secessionists in southern Cameroons after 1961-1964) and for Nigeria to annex Fernando Po/Bioko from Equatorial Guinea due to there being 40,000 Nigerian labourers on the island at one point when the total population of the island (including the labourers) was around 60,000+. This was during a period of Nigerian labour migration and before Equatorial Guinea expelled the Nigerians. There was an earlier thread on the prospect of Nigeria annexing Fernando Po.

What would be interesting about that is that Fernando Po contains the capital of Equatorial Guinea (Malabo). Naturally the island of Bioko and city of Malabo would not be known by those names if Nigeria had annexed them (perhaps they might have been called Etula and Port Clarence respectively).

So Nigeria might look like this today (with marine borders (EEZ borders) included; light grey are the current borders with Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea; JDZ = Joint Development Zone with Sao Tome e Principe):

greater nigeria.png
 
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