BRICS at 25: What should Ghana make of the changing global order?

BRICS has come a long way. Twenty-five years after the term “BRIC” was coined to describe the emerging economic importance of Brazil, Russia, India and China, the grouping has expanded into a significant international platform embracing major economies across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

For Ghana, the important issue is not whether BRICS will eventually rival the West. It is what the changing balance of global economic power means for our development.

A more multipolar world gives countries such as Ghana more choices. We can seek investment, technology, infrastructure finance, markets and development partnerships from a wider range of countries. This potentially strengthens our bargaining position.

But having more partners does not necessarily mean achieving more development.

Africa Has More Choices

For decades, African economies have depended heavily on relationships with Europe and North America. The emergence of China, India and other economies has widened the options available to the continent.

BRICS reinforces this shift. With South Africa, Egypt and Ethiopia among its African members, the continent has a presence within a grouping seeking greater influence for developing countries in global economic governance.

This is welcome, but Africa should look beyond membership and diplomatic representation.

If our economic relationship with emerging powers continues to consist largely of exporting oil, gold, lithium, cocoa and other raw materials while importing machinery, technology and manufactured goods, then the structure of our economies has hardly changed.

We may simply be changing trading partners without changing the nature of our dependency.

Ghana's Resources Must Build Ghana

This is where the BRICS discussion becomes particularly relevant to Ghana.

We are richly endowed with gold, cocoa, oil and other natural resources, while lithium and other strategic minerals are attracting increasing international attention.

The question should no longer be simply how much foreign investment these resources attract.

We should ask what remains in Ghana after the resources have been extracted or exported.

How many Ghanaian companies become part of the value chain? How much processing takes place locally? What technology is transferred? What new skills are developed? What research capacity is created? How many sustainable jobs result?

Consider cocoa. Ghana has exported cocoa for generations, yet much of the higher value associated with chocolate and other finished products is generated elsewhere.

Gold presents a similar challenge. Being a major gold producer does not automatically translate into broad industrial transformation.

We should not repeat the same pattern with lithium and other critical minerals.

Ghana's natural resources must increasingly become foundations for building Ghanaian industries rather than commodities that primarily feed industrial development elsewhere.

From Foreign Investment to Development Partnerships

This requires a change in how we assess international economic agreements.

Announcing a billion-dollar investment may sound impressive, but the headline figure tells us little about its long-term developmental value.

We should also ask what productive capacity the investment creates.

Foreign investment that builds local industries, transfers technology, develops Ghanaian suppliers and strengthens skills can contribute significantly to development. Investment that extracts resources for export while leaving limited domestic capacity behind may generate revenue without producing structural transformation.

Our diplomacy should therefore become more closely connected to our national development objectives.

Whether Ghana is negotiating with China, India, the United States, Europe or any BRICS country, the principle should remain the same:

What will Ghana be able to produce, manage or develop for itself as a result of this partnership?

That should become one of the tests of successful economic diplomacy.

BRICS Cannot Do Our Work for Us

There is also a danger in believing that a changing global order will somehow solve Africa's development problems.

It will not. BRICS cannot improve Ghana's institutions for us. It cannot prevent waste of public resources, maintain our infrastructure, improve the quality of education or ensure continuity of important national projects when governments change.

Those responsibilities remain ours.External partners naturally pursue their own national interests. China acts in China's interest, India in India's interest, and Western countries in theirs. There is nothing unusual about this.

Ghana must therefore become equally serious about defining and pursuing its long-term national interest.

Our problem is not simply that other countries benefit from our resources. The deeper problem arises when we repeatedly enter relationships without sufficiently connecting those resources to our own long-term productive transformation.

Ghana Needs a Long-Term Strategy

The changing global order presents Ghana with an opportunity to diversify its partnerships and negotiate from a wider range of options. But we need to know what we want from those partnerships.

That requires a national development strategy extending beyond electoral cycles and changes of government. Industrialisation, education, technology, infrastructure, energy and natural-resource policy should reinforce one another rather than operate as disconnected programmes.

BRICS is important because it reflects a world in which economic power is becoming more dispersed. For Ghana, however, the central question is not whether power is moving from West to East. It is whether we can use the competition and opportunities created by that shift to build a stronger economy at home.

The world may offer Ghana more partners than before. What matters now is whether we can turn those partnerships into Ghanaian industries, Ghanaian skills, Ghanaian technology and sustainable opportunities for future generations.

That would be the real benefit of a changing global order.