President Bola Tinubu returned from London this week with $1.5 billion in infrastructure financing deals, but questions about who benefits from the agreements overshadow the headline-grabbing figures.
The package includes a $990 million financing arrangement for British companies to complete two port projects in Lagos State and a $496 million dairy development deal involving British firms building an agricultural-industrial complex in Nigeria. While the deals promise modernized infrastructure, the structure reveals familiar patterns of foreign contractors securing lucrative contracts while Nigerian workers and companies remain on the sidelines.
"This is classic neocolonial economics dressed up as partnership," says Chioma Okonkwo, an economics researcher at the Lagos Business School. "British corporations get guaranteed contracts paid for by Nigerian debt, while local construction firms that could do this work are locked out."
The port financing will benefit British engineering giants who've lobbied for years to access Nigeria's massive infrastructure market. The dairy deal, meanwhile, raises immediate questions about its impact on Fulani pastoralists—Nigeria's traditional cattle herders who have clashed with farmers over grazing rights in recent years. How a British-run industrial dairy complex will navigate these tensions remains unclear.
Perhaps most troubling to critics is a side agreement that facilitates UK deportations of Nigerian asylum seekers and undocumented migrants. The provision makes it easier for Britain to return Nigerians who've fled the country's economic hardships and security challenges—the very problems these infrastructure deals purport to address.
"We're essentially paying Britain to take our citizens back while giving British companies billion-dollar contracts," notes Yusuf Abdullahi, a civil society activist focused on diaspora issues.
