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The year 2025 made unmistakably clear what had long been apparent but often denied: the post-World War II, post-Cold War global order is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The once-comforting belief that economic integration naturally produces mutual benefit, stability, and convergence has collapsed. In its place has emerged a harsher reality in which interdependence is selective, politicised, and frequently coercive.
Trade is no longer simply about buying, selling, and settling payment. Finance, supply chains, payment systems, logistics hubs, technology standards, microchips, and even climate policy have become instruments of power projection. In this environment, countries lacking strategic agency—particularly those on the wrong side of a hegemon—are not merely disadvantaged; they are exposed. Multilateralism has given way to the weaponisation of economic and technological dependence. We are witnessing this in real time and we know who the drivers of that change are.
It is against this backdrop that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent address at the World Economic Forum in Davos must be understood. His intervention was not merely Canadian in origin; it crystallised a growing unease among countries whose names are not China, Russia or the United States of America. Carney’s message was stark: nations cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration itself becomes the source of subordination. States that are absent when rules are written and coalitions are formed become objects rather than actors. More bluntly, “if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”
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This insight and its accompanying aphorism are not new. But the urgency of avoiding their truth playing out is unmistakable.
From Independence to Interdependence
For Nigerians, this moment should sound familiar. Almost fifty years ago, on 11th January 1976, General Murtala Muhammed stood before African leaders at the OAU Summit in Addis Ababa and declared that Africa had come of age. Eleven years later, in March 1987, Nigeria’s Minister of External Affairs, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, advanced the idea that countries such as Nigeria needed to move beyond declaratory sovereignty and organise themselves into a Concert of Medium Powers: states strong enough to matter, but not dominant enough to impose; acting collectively to stabilise the international system.
The intellectual progression from Muhammed to Akinyemi and now to Carney is neither nostalgic nor rhetorical. It forces uncomfortable but necessary questions. Do current global conditions make a concert of medium powers not merely desirable, but necessary? What qualifies a country as a medium power today? And when Nigeria looks honestly in the mirror, does it qualify? Underlying these questions is a deeper concern: how does a country preserve agency in a system increasingly being manipulated and suborned to marginalise all but the very powerful?
From Political Independence to Strategic Relevance
Murtala Muhammed’s intervention in the 1970s was primarily moral and political. Africa’s independence, he argued, was hollow if its foreign policy remained outsourced to external powers. Africa had to decide its own interests—even when those interests conflicted with those of powerful friends.
It was a necessary declaration for its time. But it assumed that moral clarity and political will can alone secure autonomy. History has shown otherwise. In a deeply interconnected world, agency is not asserted; it is constructed. It requires institutions, coalitions, and domestic material capacity capable of projecting influence abroad.
That was the leap Akinyemi sought to make. By the late 1980s, it was already evident that no individual African or Asian state—Nigeria included—could shape global outcomes alone. His answer was collective leverage: a consultative grouping of medium-sized, regionally influential states capable of mediating conflicts, bridging blocs, and stabilising the system precisely because they were not hegemonic.
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Akinyemi understood something still under-appreciated in Nigeria’s foreign-policy thinking: power is relational. It rests not only on size or moral posture, but on reliability, coordination, and institutional depth. His Concert of Medium Powers went beyond the aloof Non-Aligned Movement of the early Cold War era toward strategic coordination and functional influence.
Yet the idea never fully materialised. The Cold War ended soon after, globalisation accelerated, and the illusion of a benign, rules-based order took hold. Many prospective medium powers—including Nigeria—lacked the domestic stability and institutional capacity to sustain such a role. They became complacent participants in an order they did not shape.
Carney and the End of Comfortable Assumptions
Carney’s intervention matters because it publicly declares that the assumptions of the post-Cold War international/multilateral order are obsolete. That order has quietly given way to asymmetric dependence, in which trade, finance, technology, and currency systems are routinely used as tools of coercion. Economic openness without resilience has become vulnerability. Dependence without leverage invites pressure.
The problem today is not insufficient integration; it is integration on terms others control. In this sense, the new American blunt transactionalism has had a clarifying effect. We are largely on our own, and self-deception—particularly in Africa—is no longer affordable.
Carney’s answer is not autarky or disengagement, but strategic selectivity. The countervailing order he proposes must be designed, not assumed. Autonomy must be pooled where scale and the ability to project power beyond borders is lacking. Coalitions must be flexible, pragmatic, and issue-specific. Nostalgia is not strategy.
In this, Carney converges powerfully with Akinyemi. A concert of medium powers is no longer aspirational. It is now a defensive necessity in a world where great-power rivalry increasingly spills into trade, finance, and technology.
Is the Moment Finally Ripe?
In many respects, conditions today are more favourable than in 1987. Great-power rivalry is structural, not transitional. There is no realistic expectation of a return to a stable, uncontested order. Not with China and Russia set to adopt the new thinking and the menacing words emanating from the White House and the precedents set in Venezuela with the “Donroe Doctrine”. Economic coercion is now overt and normalised. And coalition-building has become modular: countries align differently on trade, security, climate, and technology.
In such a world, medium powers face a simple choice: coordinate or be individually pressured and divided.
What Is a Medium Power?
Nigeria’s foreign-policy discourse has long confused size and declarations (not to mention delusions) of grandeur with influence. Population, GDP and territory matter—but they are insufficient. Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have amply demonstrated this reality in the ECOWAS sub-region. Drawing from Muhammed, Akinyemi and Carney, a credible medium power today exhibits five attributes. First, material scale: economic weight, demographic size, or strategic resources sufficient to matter to, or deter, others. Second, regional influence: the ability to shape outcomes within a defined region or sub-region or geographical space. Third, strategic autonomy: the capacity to make sovereign choices without catastrophic external retaliation. Fourth, domestic resilience: internal security, institutional competence, and policy continuity. Fifth, coalition utility: diplomatic credibility, the ability to act as a bridge across blocs and the convening authority to call other countries into the coalition. A medium power is not defined by ambition, rhetoric, or historical memory. It is defined by capacity, consistency and reliability.
Nigeria: A Medium Power in Waiting
On scale, Nigeria qualifies without argument. Demographically and economically, it is Africa’s most consequential country that sits at the heart of the Continent. Historically, it has exercised regional leadership and articulated global ideas that anticipated current debates. But scale alone does not confer agency. Nigeria’s principal weakness today is not a lack of ideas or aspiration. It is a deficit of domestic resilience, institutional consistency and continental reliability. Persistent insecurity, economic volatility, and fragmented governance constrain strategic bandwidth and invite external leverage, as we saw in Sokoto in December 2025. Our regional influence and convening authority suffered grievous blows when ECOWAS ruptured in 2023-2024. This matters because, as Carney argues, autonomy abroad depends on strength at home. Countries that are internally fragile pay a higher price for independence. Their choices are constrained not by lack of will, but by vulnerability.
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So, Nigeria, in this sense, is best described as a medium power in waiting—large enough to matter, but not yet reliable enough to lead or anchor coalitions over time. This is a tragedy for a Nigeria that has a sixty-year history of robust international convening authority, leadership and engagement all across Africa from Somalia to South Africa.
Looking at Ourselves Again
Nigeria does not need to abandon global integration. It needs to renegotiate its terms. Nigeria’s leadership elite need to get out of the sickness of feeding on the country and see for once that proclaiming greatness mean nothing but building reliability and resilience is everything.
Becoming a true medium power will require security reform, economic restructuring, institutional depth, credible regional leadership, and strategic diplomacy. The world is reorganising itself—quietly and without sentiment. Countries that prepare themselves will shape outcomes. Those that drift will be shaped by others.
Either Nigeria rebuilds deliberately and earns its place at the table, or it relies on nostalgia—and discovers that it is already on the menu.
Eyo O. Ekpo is the CEO, Excredite Consulting Limited and a
Past Commissioner, Nigerian El
ectricity Regulatory Commission
