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Trade and investment can be said to be the 'fulcrum" of, or turn-key in, bilateral relations between Nigeria and India. Even long before the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1960, they were already engaged in trade relations. Gopalkrishna (2008, 16) has noted that Indian businessmen took advantage of sea transport to travel to Nigeria during the early part of the twentieth century. Among the early arrivals were the Sindhi traders who reached Lagos in 1919, while the Kishinchand Chelleram Group established its business in Nigeria as far back as 1923. The success recorded by these early entrants encouraged and paved the way for other businessmen of Indian origin to follow suit.
Nigeria is an important export market for India in Africa. In the past, the challenge India encountered in gaining access to markets in developed countries in order to sell its capital goods made Nigeria and other African countries more attractive trading partners. Initially, India imported only palm oil from Nigeria (Badejo, 1986, 410). The concern for the future implication of this one-sided pattern of trade relations led Mathews (1967, 17) to observe:
The fact that India is buying from Nigeria only one commodity is inhibiting the future prospects of India's exportfs] to Nigeria. It will be a folly on our part to believe that any country will be interested in continuing to buy from us, while we are not inclined to buy from [them] ....
Whether the Indian government paid any attention to this warning remains unclear as the importation of Nigerian crude oil introduced a new phase in relations between the two countries from 1985 onwards. Presently, oil constitutes more than 96 per cent of exports from Nigeria to India (Singh, 2007, 4). With the ascendance of crude oil as a dominant commodity in trade relations between Nigeria and India, the picture one gets is that Nigeria benefits more than India from this interaction. Thus, Nigeria should be deeply concerned about the future implications of the dominance of oil as a major commodity in trade relations with India. However, there has been an increased focus on trade in other commodities between Nigeria and India, and investment flows from India to Nigeria. In fact, the acceleration in South-South trade...