Assessing Chinese Infrastructure Development Discourse in Nigerian Parliamentary Records: A Thematic Analysis

Nigerian legislators engage with Chinese infrastructure financing and development questions through debates, committee hearings, motions, and oversight proceedings, but their deliberative positions and analytical frameworks remain underexamined as a source of evidence on how political elites process China's role in Nigerian development. This study conducts a thematic analysis of Chinese infrastructure development discourse in Nigerian National Assembly proceedings from 2015 to 2023. A documentary analysis design was adopted, with a corpus of 340 National Assembly debate excerpts, committee report passages, and motion records referencing Chinese infrastructure financing identified through systematic keyword searching of published Hansard records and committee reports. Thematic coding was performed using an inductive constant comparative method. Results identify five dominant themes in parliamentary discourse: loan conditionality and sovereignty concerns, local content and employment expectations, debt management and fiscal sustainability, infrastructure quality and maintenance transfer, and comparative analysis with other international development partners. Sovereignty and debt concerns dominate by volume, with local content and employment ranking second. Positive engagement with Chinese development financing is less frequent and tends to originate from constituencies with active Chinese construction projects. The study fills a critical gap in understanding elite political discourse on China in Nigeria and provides a longitudinal perspective on how parliamentary attitudes toward Chinese development assistance have evolved across legislative sessions.

Keywords: parliamentary discourse, Chinese infrastructure, Nigeria National Assembly, thematic analysis, political communication