Nigeria’s admission into BRICS enhances its role as a strategic African gateway for emerging partnerships and South–South cooperation. This status gives it influence in shaping Africa’s engagement in the energy transition, infrastructure, technology innovation, services, and agriculture. Its leadership in AfCFTA negotiations, particularly on services and investment, strengthens its ability to drive continental industrialisation and value chain integration.
Following decades of liberalisation, the global trade-and-investment regime is undergoing a structural recalibration. Major economies are increasingly deploying targeted protectionist measures and “economic-security” controls to shield critical industries and supply chains, even as Bretton Woods institutions continue to promote openness as the optimal long-term growth strategy. This coexistence of competing logics, pragmatic state intervention alongside multilateral advocacy for openness, has generated policy uncertainty and pushed compliance costs higher for firms.
For Africa, these shifts carry mixed implications. On one hand, heightened competition among major economies for strategic minerals, agricultural products, and new markets creates opportunities to attract diversified investment, negotiate improved trade terms, and strengthen leverage in global forums. The deepening engagement of blocs like BRICS, underpinned by China’s infrastructure financing and resource-linked investments, offers alternative capital and technology partnerships that could reduce dependence on traditional Western markets.
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On the other hand, selective protectionism in advanced economies threatens African export growth, particularly in sectors where preferential market access underpins competitiveness. Stricter rules of origin, carbon border adjustment mechanisms, and tougher supply-chain security standards could limit Africa’s access to high-value markets without substantial domestic upgrading. Heightened investor caution in a costlier, less predictable global environment risks diverting Foreign Direct Investments toward established markets or resource enclaves, thereby bypassing broader industrial and service-sector development.
In Nigeria’s agribusiness and manufacturing sectors, firms face an increasingly complex and sometimes contradictory policy environment. Exporters must meet AfCFTA rules of origin, quality certification, and customs requirements, while complying with Nigeria’s local content mandates, import restrictions, and backward integration policies. This dual compliance burden forces companies to absorb high legal and advisory expenses, reconfigure supply chains to meet divergent standards, and maintain parallel operational systems.
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For SMEs, lacking dedicated compliance teams, these requirements cause shipment delays, higher working-capital needs, and deferred investments. Over time, such pressures erode Nigeria’s competitiveness, raise input costs, and feed into persistent inflationary trends. The result is an elevated cost of living and diminished purchasing power, part of a wider global squeeze.
As Africa’s largest economy and most populous nation, Nigeria is uniquely positioned to benefit from the global economic recalibration. Its vast endowments in oil, gas, and critical minerals, including lithium, gold, and rare earths, combined with political influence, should make it an irresistible investment destination. Yet, these advantages have not translated into sustained transformation.
Africa’s Development Prospects
BRICS, though often perceived as a political bloc, is expanding its global economic relevance through new members, China’s dominance in Asia, and its deepening African footprint. This is reshaping Africa’s strategic options for sustainable development and political influence in the evolving global order.
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The African Union (AU) has made notable efforts to establish a coordinated development framework, empowering the African Union Commission to spearhead integration. However, progress remains uneven. Fragmented implementation, capacity gaps, and competing national priorities slow the translation of frameworks like Agenda 2063 and AfCFTA into tangible outcomes. As BRICS members, the EU and the US intensify their African engagement, the continent’s ability to leverage these relationships will depend on aligning national and regional strategies with the AU’s sustainable development agenda.
Africa’s trade and investment growth will hinge on its ability to:
- Leverage geopolitical competition for concessional finance and partnerships that prioritise value addition.
- Deepen regional integration via AfCFTA to offset external trade barriers.
- Upgrade capacity and standards to meet new technical, environmental, and security requirements.
- Develop innovation hubs by supporting countries with emerging startup ecosystems.
- Strengthen investment facilitation frameworks to cut transaction costs and boost investor confidence beyond extractives.
The central challenge is converting this recalibration into a strategic opportunity, channelling investment into a technology-driven value-creation base, fostering inclusive development, and avoiding resource dependency. African industrial goods must compete globally on equal footing, shifting the continent from a supplier of raw materials to a hub of value creation and political influence.
Nigeria’s Strategic Position in the Emerging Trade and Investment Order
As Africa’s largest economy and most populous nation, Nigeria is uniquely positioned to benefit from the global economic recalibration. Its vast endowments in oil, gas, and critical minerals, including lithium, gold, and rare earths, combined with political influence, should make it an irresistible investment destination. Yet, these advantages have not translated into sustained transformation. Reliance on primary commodity exports has constrained the emergence of a diversified, value-addition base capable of propelling Nigeria into the global manufacturing and services elite.
To maximise these gains, Nigeria must align its industrial policy, digital economy strategy, and energy transition plan with continental objectives, while ensuring governance reforms channel capital into productive, job-creating sectors. Done right, Nigeria could serve as a continental blueprint – showing how targeted industrial policy, resource beneficiation, green branding, and facilitation reforms can spur intra-African trade.
While reforms have sought to streamline processes, enact investment-friendly laws, and institutionalise cost-effective procedures, high entry and operational costs persist. A duplicative, inconsistent, and revenue-driven regulatory framework, combined with the challenge of balancing openness and protectionism, has raised compliance costs, curbing investment and innovation.
These structural constraints limit Nigeria’s industrial potential, erode competitiveness, and weaken geopolitical leverage. Without deep, investor-centred reforms, fully institutionalised, transparently implemented, and embraced across governance levels, Nigeria’s edge will continue to erode. Investors are increasingly focused on present-day fundamentals and predictable growth pathways, not distant promises of industrial greatness.
Nigeria’s admission into BRICS enhances its role as a strategic African gateway for emerging partnerships and South–South cooperation. This status gives it influence in shaping Africa’s engagement in the energy transition, infrastructure, technology innovation, services, and agriculture. Its leadership in AfCFTA negotiations, particularly on services and investment, strengthens its ability to drive continental industrialisation and value chain integration.
To maximise these gains, Nigeria must align its industrial policy, digital economy strategy, and energy transition plan with continental objectives, while ensuring governance reforms channel capital into productive, job-creating sectors. Done right, Nigeria could serve as a continental blueprint – showing how targeted industrial policy, resource beneficiation, green branding, and facilitation reforms can spur intra-African trade.
By anchoring regional supply chains in manufacturing, minerals processing, and renewable energy technologies, Nigeria could reduce vulnerability to external shocks and help AfCFTA achieve its goal of increasing intra-African trade by over 50 per cent within a decade. This requires clear strategic priorities within a careful balance of liberalisation and protectionism – keeping the economy open to quality investment, while safeguarding national interests.
Oladipupo Baruwa is a business climate development analyst.
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