One major task – and one major success – of Obasanjo's first presidential term was to restore Nigeria's international reputation, damaged by Abacha's years of repression and isolation, and to regain the prominent role in continental affairs that the country had played when Obasanjo had been its military leader. He realised that his personal experience as a victim of repression was an asset to be exploited. ‘This is a country that has been isolated, this is a country that needs to come into the mainstream of the international community,’ he explained, ‘and … you don't sit at home to do that, you need to go round and say well look, we have a new Nigeria and I'm the epitome of other new Nigeria.’ The need to secure debt relief was a further reason to seek maximum international exposure. Even before his inauguration, Obasanjo visited over twenty foreign countries in every continent except Australia, making a special point of South Africa, the United States, France, and Britain. By October 2002 he had travelled to 92 countries as President, spending more than a quarter of his first term out of the country, a display of energy that brought him much domestic criticism and little immediate profit in terms of debt relief or foreign investment, but would eventually have its reward. Throughout his tenure he was essentially his own foreign minister, leaving little to the enlightened but relatively inexperienced Sule Lamido.

During his twenty years out of power, Obasanjo had recognised that decolonisation and the Cold War had been replaced by problems arising from Africa's marginalisation, economic decline, state weakness, and civil strife within an increasingly globalised context.