Why African nations are keen to join the expanding BRICS club

 

When the BRICS summit gets under way in South Africa next month, much of the international attention will be on whether Russian President Vladimir Putin, with an International Criminal Court warrant out for his arrest^[1], will attend.

But for many African countries, the summit is an opportunity for something much bigger. Various African countries, including Egypt, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Nigeria, Sudan and Tunisia, have expressed interest^[2] in joining BRICS, a group of emerging nations formed in 2009 comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

A number of economies in Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe are also angling^[3] to become members, including Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Iran, Mexico, Syria, Turkey and Venezuela. Last year, Argentina also said it had received China's formal support for its bid to join BRICS.

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The bloc has become increasingly attractive as a new stage^[5] for diplomacy and development financing. Many countries, especially those in Africa, see it as an organisation that can challenge the dominant US and European-led global governance structures, according to observers.

With BRICS members accounting for more than 40 per cent of the world's population and around a quarter of the global gross domestic product (GDP), there is growing frustration over the West's dominance of financial systems.

This was highlighted during an exchange at the Summit for a New Global Financial Pact, held in Paris in June, where leaders from the Global South voiced their concerns.

Addressing the summit Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said: "Some people get scared when I say that we need to create new currencies^[6] for trade ... So this is a discussion that is on my agenda and, if it's up to me, it'll happen at the BRICS meeting ... we'll need to get more African colleagues to participate."

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa responded: "President Lula, don't worry, when we have the BRICS meeting [in August], the issue of currency is top on the agenda. So, we are going to discuss it."

Ramaphosa also said a solid consensus was needed on the reform of the global financial architecture.

"The boards of directors of your multilateral institutions are not made up of independent directors; they are largely internal people or shareholders. That in itself is an important reform," he said of the International Monetary Fund^[7] and World Bank. There were similar calls from other African leaders such as Kenya's William Ruto and Congo-Brazzaville President Denis Sassou Nguesso.

The issues of a BRICS currency and the admission of new members to the bloc will be top of the agenda when South Africa hosts the 15th BRICS Summit next month.

Mihaela Papa, assistant professor of sustainable development and global governance at Tufts University in the US, said there had been a lot of anticipation that next month's summit would discuss a new currency, but there was no BRICS-wide consensus on this. She pointed out that Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar was clear that India did not have such plans.

"The summit is relevant for exploring how to jointly respond to major global issues, strengthen local BRICS currencies and cross-border trade, and manage BRICS expansion," Papa said.

Meanwhile XN Iraki, an economics professor at the University of Nairobi, said many nations saw BRICS as a chance to escape from Western dominance both economically and politically. He said China and India were emerging powers and saw Africa as their new playground.

"They will probably compete with each other to 'impress' Africa with goodies like aid, soft loans or trade," he said. "New members would be an issue because of their loyalty and expectations."

Cameron Hudson, a senior associate at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies' Africa programme, said BRICS offered African nations a possible avenue for creating leverage and influence internationally by joining other Global South countries that shared many of the same challenges and perspectives.

Hudson said there was clearly an interest among African countries in seeing a more multipolar world emerge that gave them a greater opportunity to shape the issues that affected them, from climate change to development finance to global politics.

Many saw BRICS as another way of helping to advance those interests, he said, in addition to efforts to reform the existing instruments of global power at the G20, United Nations, IMF and World Bank.

For instance, Egypt, which is struggling with a currency crisis, formally applied in June to join BRICS. According to the Russian ambassador to Egypt Georgy Borisenko, Cairo sees BRICS' focus on currency as a major reason to join.

"One of the initiatives that BRICS is currently engaged in is the maximum transfer of trade to alternative currencies, whether national or the creation of some kind of joint currency," he said.

In February, the North African nation joined the BRICS New Development Bank - with the five founding members as shareholders. Bangladesh and the UAE are also recent members while Uruguay is a prospective member.

Ethiopia, which is just recovering from the deadly Tigray war, also applied to join the group in June.

Paul Nantulya, a research associate at the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies at Washington's National Defence University, said some potential new members like Iran, which are heavily sanctioned, were looking to expand their international access in part to circumvent isolation. He said others like Ethiopia, Algeria and Egypt were competing fiercely to gain new international markets.

Nantulya said Indonesia wanted to buttress its regional standing as part of a foreign policy that sought to capture international leadership to satisfy its self-perceived role as an undervalued regional player.

Strengthening links to China had also been a key motivator for some countries in wanting to join the bloc, he said.

"In Africa, some of China's strongest friends believe - rightly or wrongly - that closer alliances with China can gain more influence for African countries at the multilateral level," Nantulya said.

Saudi Arabia had been looking to expand and strengthen its ties to China in particular and joining BRICS was therefore seen as attractive and strategic, he said. Argentina was motivated by similar factors.

Joe Sullivan, a former White House official, said many countries, especially those in Africa, had long yearned for a multilateral organisation that reflected the interests of the Global South.

"In the BRICS, they see the possibility that this dream becomes a reality. And they're eager to become a part of it," Sullivan said.

But it will not all be smooth sailing; there are some stumbling blocks.

While China, Russia and South Africa want an expanded BRICS, Brazil and India fear losing influence in the group, which they believe would benefit Beijing, according to observers. In April, when Tunisia announced it was considering joining the group, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the 14th BRICS Summit in Beijing had supported discussions on the bloc's expansion.

"China will continue to follow the BRICS' spirit of openness, inclusiveness and win-win cooperation ... jointly advancing the BRICS' expansion process," ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said.

Sullivan said the geopolitical rivalry among BRICS members was real but was unlikely to affect the entry of new members.

"All of the BRICS benefit from bulking up their membership," he said, adding that issues would only arise if a prospective member was perceived to be both a satellite of a rival and enough of a heavyweight in its own right to matter.

Meanwhile Papa said even after the peak of the China-India border clashes in 2020, BRICS stayed resilient owing to its internal processes and focus on multilateral initiatives.

"New members can change the nature of BRICS, and all BRICS countries need to be aligned about their acceptance and the future trajectory of the group. It is more difficult to build this consensus when China and India disagree," Papa said. "While China champions expansion, it is also important to look at its potential downsides and risks, so disagreements at this stage are healthy."

Nevertheless, a strong BRICS could serve as a counterbalance for the G7, a group of economies consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the US, as well as other Western-led multilateral organisations.

"The power of the BRICS lies in its potential to serve as a G7 or G20 for the Global South," Sullivan said. He said that would allow its members to coordinate responses to Western-dominated multilateral organisations like the G7 and G20. And in that potential for coordination, he said BRICS would gain bargaining power.

Nantulya said the bloc was offering concrete alternatives in critical areas like development finance through the New Development Bank, infrastructure finance through allied institutions like China's Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank which has a growing African membership, and the currency-swap arrangements between China and Russia.

But, despite its growing clout, BRICS was still a long way off becoming an effective counter to the G7, he said.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP)^[8], the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app^[9] or visit the SCMP's Facebook^[10] and Twitter^[11] pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

References

1. ^{^} for his arrest (www.scmp.com)
2. ^{^} expressed interest (www.scmp.com)
3. ^{^} also angling (www.scmp.com)
4. ^{^} SCMP Knowledge (www.scmp.com)
5. ^{^} new stage (www.scmp.com)
6. ^{^} create new currencies (www.scmp.com)
7. ^{^} International Monetary Fund (www.scmp.com)
8. ^{^} South China Morning Post (SCMP) (www.scmp.com)
9. ^{^} SCMP app (go.onelink.me)
10. ^{^} Facebook (www.facebook.com)
11. ^{^} Twitter (twitter.com)