Nigeria’s Strategic Weight Comes Into Focus at BRICS Summit

Vice President Kashim Shettima landed in New Delhi on September 11, a day ahead of the 18th BRICS Summit, heading a Nigerian delegation that includes Foreign Affairs Minister Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu. He is standing in for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu at what has become one of the most consequential gatherings on the global diplomatic calendar — the September 12–13 summit at Bharat Mandapam, bringing together leaders of an 11-member bloc that now speaks for roughly half the world’s population.

Nigeria’s presence is not ceremonial. The country joined the expanded BRICS framework as a partner nation in January 2025, giving the grouping its most direct institutional link yet to Africa’s most populous country and one of its largest economies. According to the Presidency, Shettima’s agenda in New Delhi centres on trade and investment, energy, agriculture, solid minerals, and technology — a working list, not a photo opportunity, and one consistent with Tinubu’s broader push to widen Nigeria’s international economic partnerships.

The numbers behind that ambition are hard to ignore. Nigeria’s population has passed 240 million, a market larger than most of Europe combined. Its territory covers roughly 924,000 square kilometres, running from the Gulf of Guinea into the Sahel and bordering Benin, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. An 853-kilometre Atlantic coastline puts it squarely on the shipping routes that connect West Africa to global markets — geography that matters as much to Beijing, Moscow and New Delhi as any trade figure does.

That geography does more than sit on a map. Nigeria anchors West African diplomacy and regional security, and its cultural export machine — Nollywood, Afrobeats, fashion, a diaspora spread across every continent — gives it a reach that outstrips its GDP rankings. It is this combination of scale, position and soft power that explains why a bloc as large as BRICS wants Nigeria inside the tent rather than outside it.

And BRICS itself is no longer the niche grouping it was a decade ago. With Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Indonesia having joined as full members since 2024, the bloc now counts 11 members and a widening circle of partner states — together accounting for close to half the global population and roughly 40 percent of world output measured at purchasing power parity. For India, China and Russia, deeper ties with Nigeria mean access to one of Africa’s largest consumer markets and a foothold across the Atlantic-facing side of West Africa.

For Abuja, the calculation runs the other way. The New Delhi summit is built around expanding cooperation in trade, finance, technology, energy and supply chains, alongside a push for greater Global South representation in institutions still shaped by a post-1945 order. Nigeria arrives with real assets — population, territory, resources, market size, diplomatic weight. None of that converts automatically into leverage. It becomes leverage only if Abuja can turn summit access into investment commitments, industrial partnerships, technology transfer and expanded export markets.

The question hanging over Shettima’s visit, then, is not whether Nigeria draws closer to BRICS — that trajectory is already set. It is whether Nigeria can use its position as Africa’s demographic and economic heavyweight to negotiate a bigger seat at the table, for itself and potentially for the continent, in a global system that is visibly becoming multipolar.