Margaret Thatcher's January 1988 trip to Nigeria — her first to West Africa as Prime Minister — was diplomatically charged from the moment her RAF VC10 landed at Murtala Muhammed International Airport on 7 January 1988. The British Government remained the only Commonwealth member opposing comprehensive economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa; the Nigerian Government of Ibrahim Babangida was the most vocal African advocate for those sanctions and had hosted the previous year's Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group review.
Thatcher held three hours of talks with Babangida at Dodan Barracks, Lagos, on 7 January, and a further session at Government House, Kano on 8 January with the Emir of Kano in attendance. The communiqué finessed the sanctions dispute by agreeing to a Commonwealth review at Vancouver — but Thatcher faced flag-burning anti-Thatcher demonstrators at the University of Lagos gate and was heckled at her Kano press conference. The visit produced bilateral agreements on British Aerospace training contracts for the Nigerian Air Force, on debt rescheduling under the Paris Club, and on Commonwealth scholarship places. Thatcher's official biographer Charles Moore later treated the Nigeria leg of the trip as 'the most uncomfortable single bilateral she undertook on African soil'.