What is the Significance of Nigeria Joining BRICS as a Partner Country?

Nigeria's partner status is not equivalent to full membership in BRICS, leaving Ethiopia and Egypt as the only full members from Africa alongside South Africa. However, this development opens trade opportunities with member and partner countries. It will also help the country's ability to access the bloc's financial resources, mainly through theNew Development Bank, which has approved over $30 billion in loans since its inception in 2015.

Nigeria joining BRICS is intriguing for several reasons, including the fact that itrecently strengthened ties with France, a G7 country. Below, Ovigwe Eguegu, policy analyst at Development Reimagined, shares insights on the potential impact of Nigeria being admitted into BRICS as a partner country.

OkayAfrica: What's Nigeria's diplomatic incentive for becoming a BRICS partner country?

Ovigwe Eguegu: If you follow the statements of Nigeria's foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, and the reasoning of Nigeria's government under Tinubu, how they want to approach the world is very similar to what we've seen before, which is non-alignment. Some are describing it as multi-alignment, whereby each country understands that it stands to benefit from long-standing partners like the U.S. and Europe, and at the same time, seeing the benefits that also come from working with long-standing partners like China and Russia and seeing the world they are building via BRICS.

For a country as ambitious as Nigeria, it wants to be a player in world politics. Still, the current system, constructed in many ways by the G7 countries, is closed because you don't get accepted into the G7 – it's an exclusive club. On the other hand, BRICS is not. So, the Nigerian government sees BRICS as a new, dynamic, and innovative grouping of countries that prioritize the interest of developing and emerging economies.

Will this have any impact on Nigeria's Western relationships?

I don't think it will because BRICS is not an anti-West grouping; it's a non-Western grouping. Although we hear that BRICS is meant to challenge the West, it is doing so in areas where it sees its interests as not being respected. For instance, one of the key initiatives of the bloc is to build an alternative payment system, a financial architecture that includes payment tools for cross-border trade. BRICS countries want to do that to avoid sanctions so they can trade amongst themselves regardless of the relationship their trading partners in BRICS have with the Western countries.

Nigeria will remain a reliable partner of the U.S. and European countries; I don't see that changing soon.

Should more African countries push to be BRICS members/partners?

Already, we have South Africa, Ethiopia and Egypt, and Nigeria has become a partner country, so this means that African countries see the benefit of being embraced by this new and emerging grouping that wants to shape the world in a way that benefits their growth and development. [However,] not all African countries can be part of BRICS; the criteria and the profile of countries are different, so some countries are going to fit more into what BRICS is and want to develop themselves into, and some will not.