Nigeria's FM arrives in New Delhi for 18th BRICS Summit as major powers gather

Nigeria's foreign minister touched down in New Delhi on Thursday morning to join one of the year's most consequential gatherings of emerging-market powers. Bianca Odumegwu-Ojukwu was met at the airport by senior diplomats from India's Ministry of External Affairs—a ceremonial welcome that marked something larger than a single arrival. Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation and one of its economic anchors, had just been formally admitted to BRICS as a partner country, a move Brazil announced during its 2025 chairmanship. The timing was deliberate. With the 18th BRICS Summit set to convene in New Delhi on September 12 and 13, Nigeria's entry signaled the bloc's continued expansion and its deepening reach into the African continent.

The summit was shaping up as a gathering of serious weight. Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived ahead of the main sessions, greeted by India's Union Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh. Traveling with Putin were Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and First Deputy Prime Minister Denis Manturov—a delegation that underscored Moscow's commitment to the forum despite international isolation over its war in Ukraine. Brazil sent its foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, to represent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who remained in Brazil managing his election campaign. The Philippines' foreign affairs secretary, Maria Theresa P. Lazaro, also arrived. Even the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the development institution that has become a symbol of non-Western financial architecture, sent its president, Zou Jiayi.

India, holding the 2026 BRICS chairmanship, had framed the summit around the theme "Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability." The choice of language mattered. It reflected the bloc's preoccupation with a world fracturing along economic and technological lines, buffeted by climate pressures and resource scarcity. BRICS had evolved from a loose acronym into something more structured—a platform where the world's major emerging economies could coordinate strategy and push back against institutions they saw as designed for a different era.

The numbers told part of the story. The eleven BRICS members—Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the UAE—collectively represented nearly half the world's population. They accounted for 40 percent of global GDP and 26 percent of global trade. That scale gave the bloc leverage in conversations about development finance, technology standards, energy transitions, and the future shape of multilateral institutions. For countries in the Global South, BRICS had become a counterweight, a place where their interests could be articulated without deference to the institutions built in Washington and Brussels.

India's challenge in the chairmanship was to translate that expanded membership—Nigeria's admission was part of a broader enlargement—into concrete outcomes. The bloc's diversity was both its strength and its friction point. Bringing consensus among eleven countries with different geopolitical alignments, economic structures, and regional priorities was not simple work. But the stakes were clear. The summit would address development, climate action, technology cooperation, energy security, and financial resilience. It would also continue BRICS's push for reform in global institutions—a long-running agenda that reflected the members' conviction that the current order no longer reflected the world's actual distribution of power and population.

As delegates settled into New Delhi, the backdrop was one of genuine turbulence. Global supply chains remained volatile. Artificial intelligence was reshaping labor markets and geopolitical competition. Climate disasters were accelerating. Resources were tightening. In this environment, BRICS offered something its members valued: a space to build alternatives, to coordinate without the constraints of institutions they did not control, and to demonstrate that the future did not have to follow the script written in the West. Nigeria's arrival was one more signal that this bloc was not a temporary coalition but a durable feature of the emerging global order.