Shuaib Salisu - Dependent Sovereignty in Africa: Cloud Infrastructure, Data Governance, and the Geopolitics of Digital Power in Nigeria

Digital sovereignty is commonly understood as a state's capacity to regulate data, protect citizens, and govern digital technologies. Yet such authority increasingly depends on infrastructures that states may not own or control. The study develops dependent sovereignty as a framework for understanding situations in which states possess formal regulatory authority while remaining materially dependent on externally controlled infrastructures. It examines how Nigeria's dependence on foreign cloud infrastructure shapes its capacity to exercise digital sovereignty and how state, corporate, and civil society actors negotiate this dependence - with South Africa, Kenya, and Ghana  providing comparative perspectives on alternative approaches to cloud infrastructure, data governance, and digital sovereignty.