Yesterday, March 18, 2026, in London, President Bola Tinubu and the Presidency of Nigeria would be daft not to recognise what is unfolding before our eyes. What we are witnessing is nothing short of a new “scramble” for Nigeria, subtle, sophisticated, and far more strategic than the crude colonial conquests and contests of the past. The actors have changed, the methods have evolved, but the objective remains the same: influence, access, and control.
Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Nnadi-Oforgu, contributing analyst to USAfricaonline.com, is the Editor of Oblongmedia. He is based in London.
On one flank, you have the United States, increasingly bullying and leaning on ideological and religious soft power, deploying narratives of democracy, freedom, and moral alignment as instruments of influence. Yet behind that language often sits hard-nosed strategic interest, energy security, rare earth minerals, military positioning, and geopolitical containment. On another flank stands China, less concerned with preaching values and more focused on building roads, rail, ports, and digital infrastructure, offering partnerships that are transactional, pragmatic, and visibly developmental, even if not without long term strategic implications of their own.
Then comes the European Union, historically intertwined with Nigeria’s economic and political architecture, hoping, perhaps expecting, that Nigeria remains within its traditional orbit, aligned with its regulatory frameworks, trade systems, and diplomatic posture. But even Europe today is not monolithic; it is recalibrating, fragmented, and increasingly inward looking, struggling with its own economic and political contradictions.
Nigeria, therefore, finds itself at the intersection of a shifting global order, caught between a rising BRICS bloc pushing for multipolarity and a disintegrating Western consensus now redefining its interests in a more transactional, less unified manner. This is not a time for sentimental alliances or inherited loyalties. It is a time for cold, calculated realism.
The danger lies in being seduced by the optics, the glitter, the state visits, the handshakes, the communiqués, the ceremonial promises. Diplomacy today is theatre as much as it is strategy. But beneath the theatre lies the real game: who gets access to Nigeria’s resources, who shapes its policy direction, who builds its infrastructure, who controls its data, and ultimately, who influences its sovereignty.
The Presidency must keep its eyes firmly on the ball. Nigeria cannot afford to be anyone’s pawn in this emerging geopolitical chessboard. Alignment must not be ideological, it must be developmental. Every partnership must be interrogated through one simple lens: what does Nigeria gain in concrete, measurable terms? Infrastructure. Technology transfer. Industrialisation. Energy security. Jobs. Sovereign capacity.
This is the moment for Nigeria to be unapologetically strategic, yes, even selfish. Not reckless, not isolationist, but deliberate. A nation of over 200 million people, with vast natural and human resources, has no business playing second fiddle in a world scrambling for its attention.
The era of passive alignment must give way to assertive engagement. Nigeria must sit at every table, but belong to none. It must extract value from all sides while surrendering nothing of its sovereignty.
This is not just diplomacy. This is survival in a rapidly changing world order.
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