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Paper short abstract

As Nigeria balances Belt and Road with traditional aid, does multipolar competition expand sovereignty or simply replace old conditionalities with new dependencies?

Paper long abstract

As traditional Western development architecture fractures, African states face both unprecedented opportunities and complex dilemmas in accessing development finance. This paper examines Nigeria's strategic positioning within emerging South-South cooperation frameworks, particularly Chinese development financing through the Belt and Road Initiative, while maintaining relationships with traditional donors. Drawing on recent infrastructure projects and policy negotiations, I analyze how Nigeria exercises agency in navigating competing donor interests, leveraging geopolitical competition to negotiate more favorable terms while confronting new forms of conditionality.

The paper interrogates whether this multipolar moment enables more equitable power relations or simply reproduces colonial hierarchies under new guises. While China's "non-interference" rhetoric contrasts with Western governance conditionalities, emerging dependencies around debt sustainability, technology transfer, and strategic assets suggest that sovereignty struggles persist in different forms. I examine how development assistance becomes weaponized in great power competition, with Nigeria positioned as contested terrain between declining Western influence and rising Chinese economic presence.

Through analyzing Nigeria's engagement with African Development Bank initiatives, Chinese infrastructure loans, and responses to Western aid reductions, I trace how recipient countries develop sophisticated strategies of forum shopping, playing donors against each other, and selectively appropriating development models. Yet I also explore the limitations of this agency within structural constraints of global capitalism and unequal technological capabilities.

The paper contributes decolonial critiques of both Western multilateral institutions and emerging South-South frameworks, questioning whether geographic origin of capital fundamentally transforms power relations or whether extractive logics persist regardless of financier identity.