Leveraging BRICS’ Expansions for Africa’s Security and Development: A Dependency Perspective

This study examines the opportunities and challenges that BRICS expansion presents for Africa’s security and development. It adopts Dependency Theory as its analytical framework and uses qualitative documentary research based on scholarly literature, official BRICS documents, development-finance reports, and publications of international and regional institutions. The study employs qualitative content analysis to identify recurring patterns concerning development finance, economic diversification, security cooperation, power asymmetry, and dependency. The analysis produces three principal findings. First, expanded BRICS engagement can broaden Africa’s external economic options through additional sources of infrastructure finance, investment, technology cooperation, and South-South economic relations. Second, BRICS provides channels for political and security dialogue, including cooperation on counter-terrorism and peace and security, while individual BRICS members such as China have contributed to African peacekeeping capacity. Third, expansion does not automatically remove structural dependency: unequal bargaining power, commodity-oriented trade, divergent interests among BRICS members, and geopolitical competition may reproduce or diversify existing forms of dependency. The study therefore argues that the developmental value of BRICS engagement depends less on alignment with the bloc itself than on African agency, institutional capacity, value addition, and coordinated bargaining. It recommends an African Union-supported framework for articulating common interests, stronger scrutiny of financing arrangements, promotion of local industrial capacity, and a pragmatic foreign policy that preserves diversified external partnerships.