A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS OF NIGERIA–ANGOLA ECONOMIC RELATIONS, 1980–2015

Abstract

This paper reviews the historical economic relations between Nigeria and Angola from 1980 to 2015, mainly looking at their mutual trade behavior, the kind of competition that shows up inside OPEC, and the wider push for regional economic joining through ECOWAS and SADC. Despite being Africa’s two largest oil producers and sharing membership in a few multilateral organizations, direct bilateral economic engagement between Nigeria and Angola stayed rather limited during this period, even though it sounds like it should be more straightforward. Findings shows that their economic ties seemed more like rivalry than teamwork, sort of driven by different political alignments during the Cold War period, plus those kinds of institutional hurdles that come when regions are divided into separate economic communities. Also, the oil centered development model was pretty influential, it pushed growth toward exchanges beyond the continent, rather than inside African commerce. In short, it is like cooperation got crowded out, while competition kept being the main thing, even if both sides also had incentives to do otherwise. The paper argues that the structural limitations of Africa's regional integration architecture and the primacy of oil export economies prevented the emergence of substantive bilateral economic ties between these two regional hegemons.