Nigeria’s acceptance into the BRICS club as a partner country is a slap in the face for Nigerian leaders, the foreign policy establishment and citizens who believe that Nigeria is a powerhouse in Africa and can play a big role in world affairs. 

In years gone by, Nigerian leaders projected an active foreign policy that not only made Africa the centrepiece of the country’s foreign policy but also branded Nigeria as the lead voice on the global stage for matters pertaining to Africa. 

The announcement by Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that the country has been admitted into the BRICS club, which seeks to challenge Western hegemony in the world economy, as a partner country, raises unsettling questions. It suggests how low perceptions of Nigeria have been as a key player in African and global geopolitics in recent years by world leaders.

How can Ethiopia (which has a smaller GDP than Nigeria), and Egypt and South Africa (which only leapfrogged Nigeria on the GDP metric in 2024 after the massive devaluation of the naira in 2023) be full members of BRICS and Nigeria confined to the status of a partner member? 

This, surely, must be insulting to many Nigerians. It seems that Nigeria’s dysfunctional domestic politics has affected the foreign policy establishment and weakened its posture on the global stage. 

The statement from the spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs accepting the BRICS’ offer reads like Nigeria’s foreign policy has become largely transactional, without any lofty ideals, vision or strategic goals. It sees the BRICS as ‘a unique platform for Nigeria to enhance trade, investment, and socio-economic cooperation with member countries.’ 

How a second tier membership role in an organisation like BRICS will impact Nigeria’s aspirations for regional power status and global influence is not addressed. If Nigeria can’t gain full or permanent membership of BRICS, why should it expect to be granted permanent membership of the UN Security Council?—a long-standing position it has canvassed for Africa’s voice in world affairs.

The love affair with Macron and the tragedy of ECOWAS

In November last year, Nigeria’s president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, visited Emmanuel Macron, the French president, in Paris, and was given a lavish welcome. That visit rattled the leaders of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali—the so-called Alliance of Sahel States (AES)—who have withdrawn their countries from the Economic Community of West Africa (ECOWAS). 

Niger even accused Nigeria of working with Macron to send troops to Nigeria and invade Niger. The secretary general of the civil society organisation, Citizen’s Alternative Spaces in Niger, Moussa Tiangari, who around the same time attended a symposium in Abuja on the life and times of a friend and public intellectual (an event that I also attended), Jibrin Ibrahim, was detained when he returned to Niger, on suspicion that he was part of the plot to attack Niger.

It is clear that the AES leaders do not trust Nigeria’s deepening alliance with France, whom they perceive as a mortal enemy. These leaders have kicked French troops out of their countries and are fiercely opposed to what they correctly brand as French neocolonialism. French troops have also been evicted from Chad, and have been given notice to withdraw from Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire. 

The Ivorian quit notice announced by Alhassan Ouattara, however, is dubious, because he’s well embedded in French governmental networks and played a big role in pushing ECOWAS to threaten to invade Niger in 2023. Analysts believe he’s asked French troops to leave his country to placate the anger of Ivorian youth, who’re also opposed to French neocolonialism and French troops in their country. Critics surmise that he doesn’t want the controversy over French troops in Côte d’Ivoire to be an issue in the forthcoming Ivorian national elections in which he has hinted to run for a fourth term. 

The AES leaders are jittery about Nigeria and Tinubu’s close ties with Macron, especially in light of the aggressive posture Tinubu, who, as Chair of ECOWAS, adopted when the organisation threatened to invade Niger and imposed some of the most punitive sanctions in Africa ever on the country, including cutting off electricity supply and trade relations, and blocking financial transactions between ECOWAS and Niger. Macron, the EU and the US were fully behind ECOWAS in the objective of either reversing the military coup by force or making life terribly uncomfortable for Nigériens, who, they hoped, would rise up against the regime and topple it, or force the regime to relinquish power. 

That ill-judged and disastrous policy has cost ECOWAS dearly. The three countries, which account for more than half of the ECOWAS land area, are determined to remain outside the organisation and deepen economic and political ties within the AES. 

According to ECOWAS rules, their membership should expire on 29 January, 2025. The organisation has, however, given the three countries an extended exit date of six months (up until 29 July), hoping that negotiations between ECOWAS and the AES would resolve the problem and the AES countries would return as full members. 

As Chair of ECOWAS, and instigator of the conflict with the AES leaders, one would have thought that Tinubu and his foreign policy establishment would spend more time rebuilding the damaged relations with the AES leaders than cozying up to Macron, a hated figure in not only the AES countries, but in West Africa generally. 

There’s no significant economic or geostrategic value in deepening ties with France, unless if one adopts a simplistic transactional view of international relations. 

France has had a strategic interest in weakening Nigeria since its independence in 1960. It views Nigeria, which accounts for about half of West Africa’s population and more than 60% of its GDP, as a threat to France’s neocolonial designs in the Francophone West African countries. It doesn’t want the Francophone countries, which it considers its sphere of influence, to be lured by, and deepen their ties with, a powerful Nigeria. 

Instructively, France doesn’t have the power resources that define the status of a great power to merit a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. It’s project of holding on to its former colonies by constructing debilitating patron-client monetary and military relations with them is to bolster its image as a world power. 

If France is stripped of its military bases and neocolonial power in its former colonies, which are largely in Africa, and we judge it solely on the basis of the size of its economy, India deserves to replace it in the UN Security Council, especially as India is also a nuclear power. 

France supported the breakup of Nigeria during the Biafra war in the 1960s, and has been implacably opposed to the ECOWAS monetary integration plan, which seeks to create a single West African currency, the eco.

In December 2019, following growing opposition to the monetary arrangements that underpinned the CFA franc in West Africa, and fears that the proposed ECOWAS eco currency would end the CFA franc as a currency and French economic influence in the region, Macron and Ouattara hurriedly announced new rules for the CFA franc and renamed the currency eco—clearly challenging ECOWAS and making it difficult for ECOWAS to forge ahead with its eco plan. 

As France faces unprecedent opposition in its former colonies , one would have thought that Nigeria would be in the driver’s seat in protecting these countries from French attempts at destabilising them. Instead, it has projected an image of a willing enabler of French and Western neocolonial interests in its backyard. That is not the hallmark of an aspiring great power. 

The perception by the AES leaders that France and Nigeria want to invade their countries endangers the democracy project in those states. It forces the leaders of those states to prioritise their survival over demands for the restoration of democratic forms of government. The struggles against neocolonialism and the laudable campaign for democracy are currently at a stalemate. How to support the popular movement unfolding against French neocolonialism in West Africa and at the same time back demands for democratic rights and institutions is very taxing.