The announcement from 10 Downing Street that Prime Minister Keir Starmer had spoken over the phone with the Nigerian President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, gives renewed hope to many Nigerians and friends of Nigeria. This hope is that more serious efforts may be afoot to bring true peace and prosperity to Nigeria – an achievement that would benefit both countries.

The UK and Nigeria have deep historical and cultural ties that have been left unmaximized for years. Signed in 2018, a security and defence partnership pact between the two countries was intended to transform how the UK and Nigeria worked together to tackle shared threats and keep people safe.

At the time, the then-Prime Minister Theresa May said: “The new partnership will lay the foundations for us to step up efforts to promote our shared stability, prosperity and growth, through a series of new initiatives to help Nigeria defeat Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa.”

Unfortunately, the pact has hardly fostered an increase in peace and security. According to the Council of Foreign Relations’ Nigerian Security Tracker, since 2012 the number of deaths has been on an upward trajectory.

And then earlier this year in February, when she was the business secretary, Kemi Badenoch MP, who herself is of Nigerian descent, signed an Enhanced Trading Pact designed to open up the possibilities of improving UK and Nigeria’s trading relationship, beyond its current paltry £7billion in such a vast nation.

So, do we dare hope that this phone call between Starmer and Tinubu heralds the removal of any barriers for Nigeria and the UK to achieve the objectives they have always talked about? Could this untapped potential now turn into realized potential and result in a positive turnaround of fate for millions of Nigerians and Brits?

The breakdown of security in Nigeria which has affected each of the six geo-political zones in the country has left this significant commonwealth partner stuck in gear one of development and progress – some would argue that it has moved into reverse gear.

Nigeria’s North-East region has seen recent attempts by the extremist terrorist groups Boko Haram and ISIS West Africa to re-kindle the heights of the decade-long atrocities to infiltrate further into Nigeria with their warped ideological intentions, to deny Nigerian children education and to bring down the government.

Other terrorists known locally as ‘bandits’ operate from various other cells and have wreaked havoc in the way of killings and mass abductions, particularly in the North-West region of the country.

The North-Central region of Nigeria, known as the middle-belt, has experienced a lot of deadly attacks. While many people view those attacks as religiously and ethnically motivated, the government of Nigeria and Western powers often describe them as mainly inter-communal clashes occasioned by conflicts arising from the migratory push southwards as climate change and ecological degradation force herders to seek other sources of nourishment for their cattle.

The Nigerian government has also, over the last decade, been accused repeatedly of failing to protect its citizens, with allegations of complicity among some officials, including involvement in human rights violations and extrajudicial killings under the pretext of combating insecurity.

While there are some hopeful signs that the current administration is a lot more inclined towards addressing the insecurity collapse and impunity which has hitherto pervaded the land, greater action is needed.

Heightened insecurity over the years has exacerbated the cost of living crisis alongside the impacts of the Nigerian government’s major reforms. This has cumulated in the recent protests across the country tagged – End Bad Governance.

The phone call between Starmer and Tinubu might well have been a diplomatic and political formality. However, the hope among Nigerians in the diaspora lies in the fact that the leaders welcomed this moment as an opportunity to reset and strengthen this relationship by working closely together to drive economic growth and prosperity between our countries.

The new minister of Africa, Lord Collins of Highbury, who works in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office run by Secretary of State David Lammy, said of his appointment he was looking forward to reconnecting with African countries, putting trade and growth at the heart of partnerships.

In Nigeria’s case, the starting point for this must be to bring peace, stability and the rule of law across the country.

PSJ UK, a diaspora-mobilising think-tank and advocacy group, calls on the UK and Nigeria to show readiness to ramp-up their commitment to leverage the security and defense partnership by ensuring the implementation of immediate and effective measures to protect all citizens and halt the cycle of ethno-religious violence and mass abductions.

Nigeria is a large and complex country which the British midwifed at birth. It is comprised of around 300 ethnic groups, with over 500 languages spoken. So, it is hardly surprising that the challenges it is experiencing in its stages of growth are equally complex. However, the UK now has both a moral obligation and unique opportunity to birth a ‘new relationship’ of sovereign equals that could really benefit the citizens of both countries at this critical time of multiple existential threats in the world.

The case for change in Nigeria is urgent and needs to be addressed now.