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, 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?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?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.

The bloc has become increasingly attractive as a?new stage?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?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?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.

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