BRICS Expansion and Africa: New Power Bloc or New Dependency?

Six new members. More African nations lining up. But joining BRICS is not the same as gaining power.

The expansion of BRICS has been one of the most discussed diplomatic stories of the past two years. At the 2023 Johannesburg summit, the original five members invited Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to join. Egypt, Ethiopia, and the UAE formally entered in January 2024. Indonesia joined in early 2025 as the tenth member, and nine additional nations were named as official partner countries, including Nigeria and Uganda.[1] Dozens more have expressed interest or submitted requests.

For African leaders and analysts, the expansion raises questions that are both urgent and unresolved. Is this a genuine shift in the global balance of power toward the Global South? Or are African nations trading one form of dependency for another, this time anchored in Beijing and Moscow rather than Washington and Brussels?

The honest answer is that both possibilities are real. Which one materialises depends almost entirely on how African governments manage their BRICS relationships over the next decade.

What BRICS Actually Is in 2026

BRICS is not a formal international organisation. It has no founding charter, no permanent secretariat, and no common fund. It operates on consensus and relies on annual summits and rotating presidencies to set its agenda. That informality is both its strength and its weakness.[2]

What it does have is significant economic weight. In 2025, BRICS member states collectively account for 28 percent of global nominal GDP. Measured by purchasing power parity, that share rises to 35 percent, which is more than the G7.[3] The bloc represents roughly 48 percent of the world's population. Its members include some of the world's largest oil producers, the leading supplier of cobalt and manganese, and three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.

It also has the New Development Bank (NDB), a multilateral development institution capitalised by BRICS members and designed to offer infrastructure financing without the governance conditionalities attached to World Bank loans. The bank has committed over $30 billion in projects since its founding in 2015, though it remains small relative to the overall development finance needs of its members.[4]

35%  BRICS share of global GDP (PPP), 2025
 More than the G7. Source: IMF 2025 data, cited in OIIP Policy Analysis 2025

48%  Share of world population in BRICS states
 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 2025 assessment

7+  African nations as members or partner states
 South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia (full members); Nigeria, Uganda (partners); others expressing interest

Why African Countries Are Drawn to BRICS

The motivations for African governments wanting BRICS membership are not complicated. They are also largely rational.

Alternatives to Western conditionality. Financing from Western institutions, whether the IMF, World Bank, or bilateral donors, typically comes with governance and policy requirements. BRICS, particularly through the NDB and China's bilateral lending channels, has historically offered financing without demanding structural adjustment programmes or democratic governance reforms. For governments frustrated with those conditions, that is a genuine appeal.

Multipolarity as leverage. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed put it plainly at the 2024 Kazan summit: BRICS membership strengthens Ethiopia's ability to advance its national interests in a world that is no longer unipolar.[1] For small and medium-sized African economies, having more partners to choose from means having more room to negotiate. That is simple strategic logic.

Trade and investment access. China is already Africa's largest bilateral trading partner, with two-way trade reaching $295 billion in 2024.[3] BRICS membership deepens that economic relationship and opens doors to the New Development Bank's project financing pipeline. For countries like Ethiopia, which are actively building manufacturing sectors and infrastructure, those are tangible goods.

"BRICS is not anti-western but non-western." - Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, paraphrased by President Putin at the Kazan Summit, 2024

The Dependency Risk That Nobody Wants to Name

Here is the uncomfortable reality. The same structural critique that African scholars have applied to Western engagement applies, at least partially, to BRICS as well.

China is by far the most dominant actor within BRICS when it comes to African engagement. Beijing's trade volume with Africa dwarfs that of any other BRICS member. China is Africa's largest bilateral creditor. Chinese companies hold the majority of infrastructure contracts built under BRICS-adjacent frameworks. The concern is not that BRICS is malicious. It is that a grouping nominally designed to create multipolarity may in practice deepen African dependence on a single dominant partner within the bloc.[3]

There are also the internal contradictions of BRICS itself to contend with. At the 2025 foreign ministers' meeting in Rio de Janeiro, Egypt and Ethiopia refused to endorse the consensus communique because of disagreements over how BRICS framed UN Security Council reform, specifically the perceived preferential treatment given to South Africa's longstanding permanent seat ambitions.[5] The incident illustrates something important: African members of BRICS are not a bloc within the bloc. They have competing interests and different relationships with the founding members.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, meanwhile, created significant strain. The BRICS New Development Bank stopped doing business with Russia in 2022 because none of the other members wanted to lose access to dollar-denominated international financial systems.[6] That episode revealed a basic truth: BRICS solidarity has limits when the costs of that solidarity are real and immediate.

The European Parliament's research service captures the tension succinctly: while the new African members bring geopolitical weight and legitimacy to BRICS, they also bring with them potential conflicts, including longstanding tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and water rights in the Nile Basin.[7] Getting those two countries to agree on BRICS foreign policy positions will not be straightforward.

What Africa Should Actually Demand From BRICS

The question is not whether African governments should engage with BRICS. Most already are, and for good reasons. The question is what they should demand in return for that engagement.

First, African nations should push for greater African representation in BRICS governance structures. Right now, South Africa holds the only African permanent membership that predates the recent expansion. The original five members dominate decision-making. If BRICS is genuinely about multipolarity, African countries should be pushing for the group's decision-making architecture to reflect that.

Second, African governments need to insist on technology and skills transfer, not just financing and infrastructure. The pattern of Chinese-built railways that primarily employ Chinese workers, or NDB loans that fund projects with minimal domestic value addition, replicates rather than corrects the extractive logic of earlier development finance models.

Third, African BRICS members need to coordinate their own positions within the bloc rather than engaging individually. The Egypt-Ethiopia dispute over the communique wording at the Rio foreign ministers meeting showed what happens when African members go in with different agendas. A coordinated African caucus within BRICS, aligned with the African Union's broader positions, would give the continent far more leverage.

The Phenomenal World's analysis of BRICS in 2025 offers a useful frame: the grouping is increasingly held together not by opposition to the old order, but by shared interest in building a new material basis for sovereignty in a rapidly changing world.[6] That is a frame that African governments can work with. But it requires active agency, not passive membership.

BRICS expansion represents a genuine and significant shift in how the world organises its economic and diplomatic relationships. For Africa, it is an opportunity. But opportunities are not outcomes. Whether BRICS membership delivers real sovereignty or simply replaces one set of external dependencies with another will be determined not by the bloc's rhetoric but by the specific terms that African governments negotiate, the policies they align with, and the coordination they build among themselves. The history of African engagement with external powers is long enough to know that good intentions at the point of joining rarely predict good outcomes at the point of implementation. African governments would do well to remember that.

REFERENCES

[1] Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2025, March). BRICS Expansion and the Future of World Order: Perspectives from Member States, Partners and Aspirants [Ethiopia Abiy Ahmed quote; Indonesia Jan 2025; partner countries list]. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/03/brics-expansion-and-the-future-of-world-order-perspectives-from-member-states-partners-and-aspirants?lang=en

[2] Council on Foreign Relations (2025, June). What Is the BRICS Group and Why Is It Expanding? [Informal structure; no charter/secretariat; consensus-based; UN Security Council reform tensions]. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounders/what-brics-group-and-why-it-expanding

[3] OIIP Policy Analysis (2025, November). Africa's Growing Interest in BRICS: Between Pragmatism and the Strive for More Sovereignty [35% GDP PPP; 48% population; China-Africa $295bn trade 2024; African nations interested]. https://www.oiip.ac.at/en/publications/africas-growing-interest-in-brics-between-pragmatism-and-the-strive-for-more-sovereignty/

[4] Wikipedia / BRICS (updated April 2026). BRICS [NDB; Contingent Reserve Arrangement; Kazan Declaration; 10 members; partner countries; dedollarization debate; Indonesia joins Jan 2025]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRICS

[5] ISS Africa (2025, May 16). New Africa BRICS Members Decry Preferential Treatment for South Africa [Egypt-Ethiopia vs South Africa UNSC disagreement; Rio foreign ministers meeting; failed communique]. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/new-africa-brics-members-decry-preferential-treatment-for-south-africa

[6] Phenomenal World (2025, September). BRICS in 2025 [NDB stopped Russia business 2022; solidarity limits; bloc held together by new sovereignty vision rather than anti-Western repulsion]. https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/brics-in-2025/

[7] European Parliament Research Service (2024, March). Expansion of BRICS: A Quest for Greater Global Influence? [37.3% nominal GDP; Egypt-Ethiopia potential conflicts; consensus difficulties; partner country tier]. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2024)760368

[8] SAGE Journals / Journal of Political Studies (2025). BRICS Expansion: Emerging of New Semi-Peripheries or Sub-Imperialism? A Comparative Analysis of Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa [Nigeria and Uganda as BRICS partners 2025; South Africa semi-periphery debate]. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00219096251336371

[9] Taylor & Francis / Pacific Review (2025). BRICS Expansion: Adaptive Response or Proactive Restructuring of Global Governance? [Digital BRICS task force; BRICS energy cooperation; RMB cross-border settlements; dedollarization limits]. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10220461.2025.2523507

[10] European Parliament Research Service (2024). BRICS New Development Bank: $30bn+ committed since 2015; smaller than World Bank; governance conditionality-free financing model. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_BRI(2024)760368


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The African Union’s Agenda 2063: Vision Document or Political Fiction?

Image
A genda 2063 is Africa’s most ambitious continental plan. It is also largely unknown to the 1.5 billion people it promises to transform. Adopted at the 24th Session of the African Union Assembly of Heads of State and Government in Addis Ababa in January 2015, Agenda 2063 is the AU’s 50-year blueprint for transforming Africa into “the global powerhouse of the future.” [1] Organised around seven aspirations — from a prosperous, integrated continent to one characterised by good governance, peace, and African cultural renaissance — it is, on paper, the most comprehensive development framework Africa has ever produced. The honest question, eleven years after its adoption and thirteen years before its midpoint, is whether Agenda 2063 is translating its ambition into measurable transformation — or whether it is joining the long archive of pan-African declarations that inspired at adoption and gathered dust thereafter. What Agenda 2063 Actually Is Agenda 2063 is operationalised th...
Read more

The New Scramble for Africa: China, Russia, and the West in 2026

Image
A frica is no longer a passive recipient of foreign interest — it is the arena where 21st-century great power competition is being decided. The original Scramble for Africa, formalised at the 1884 Berlin Conference, took less than two decades to partition an entire continent among European powers. Today’s competition is less cartographic but no less consequential. It is being fought across port concessions, military basing agreements, debt instruments, and diplomatic votes in multilateral institutions. The actors have multiplied. The stakes — for Africa’s sovereignty, development, and strategic autonomy — are higher than they have been in generations. This piece is the first in a 30-day series examining the forces shaping Africa and the world. There is no better place to begin than the question that underlies almost every other: who wants what from Africa, and what are Africans doing about it? China: Infrastructure as Influence China’s engagement with Africa over the past t...
Read more

Reforms in Multilateral Institutions and The Challenges of Maintaining a Rule-Based International Order Amid Geopolitical Shifts

Image
  1.       Introduction to Multilateral Institutions and the Rule-Based International Order Multilateral Institutions Multilateral institutions are international organizations or frameworks that involve multiple countries working together to address global issues, promote cooperation, and establish norms and rules for international behavior. Examples include the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and regional organizations like the European Union (EU) or the African Union (AU). These institutions are founded on the principle of “multilateralism”, which emphasizes collective action, shared responsibilities, and adherence to agreed-upon rules to manage global challenges such as security, trade, human rights, and environmental issues. The key features of Multilateral Institutions included collective decision-making, norms and rules, global public goods, institutional structure, am...
Read more