In the past two decades, studies on ‘regional power dynamics’ have emerged detailing the potential leadership role of rising powers across regions. However, contributions on regional powerhood in Africa neglect the utility of ‘soft power’ for conceptualising the foreign policy behaviour of African regional powers. Given the evident incapacity of a single actor to command absolute strength and secure overwhelming influence within its regional sphere, the ideational value of soft power is a relevant consideration for identifying a state in this category. In Africa, only South Africa and Nigeria consistently display this qualifying feature of an Afrocentric foreign policy posture woven around sufficient material preponderance and strong soft power influence. African foreign policy dynamics present a unique illustration of the tangibility of soft power influence in the estimation of regional powerhood. This study addresses the conceptual limitation in most definitions of regional power’s application to the African context and raises the need to introduce the soft power variable in such conceptualisation. I conclude that a complementary regional hegemonic dispensation is evident in Africa where Nigeria, portrayed as a secondary power, is as formidable as South Africa – with both distinguished by the unstable symmetry of their power features.
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Olusola Ogunnubi (2019) studied this question.