Ramaphosa pushes BRICS to break Africa's cycle of raw material dependence

Cyril Ramaphosa landed in New Delhi on Friday with a clear message for the business leaders assembled at the BRICS Business Forum: the grouping must stop accepting an economic model that keeps Africa and the Global South locked into supplying raw materials while manufacturing and value creation happen elsewhere.

Speaking before an audience of business leaders, ministers and heads of state, Ramaphosa framed the moment as a critical juncture. Trade patterns are shifting, technological change is accelerating and climate pressures are mounting. In this flux, he argued, BRICS nations have a rare window to redirect investment toward their own productive capacity rather than perpetuating the extractive relationships that have long defined their role in global commerce.

“We cannot accept a future where Africa supplies the minerals on which the next generation of industries depends, while value addition and manufacturing take place elsewhere,” Ramaphosa said. The statement captured a core tension that has defined developing economies for generations: participation in global value chains as suppliers of raw commodities, while technology, capital and higher-value manufacturing remain concentrated in wealthier nations. The risk, he suggested, is that BRICS itself could reproduce that same pattern internally if members do not act deliberately to prevent it.

The President called on companies to shift their investment logic entirely. Rather than investing simply to access markets, businesses should establish production facilities and develop local capabilities within BRICS nations. Investment must flow toward manufacturing, beneficiation, industrial technologies, energy systems, infrastructure and logistics. That reorientation, he argued, is what separates genuine value creation from the old extractive model.

His challenge was also one of institutional ambition. “The question is no longer whether there is potential within BRICS, but whether we have the ambition, the instruments and the partnerships to convert this potential into economic value for our people,” he said. The Business Council, in his view, must function not simply as a consultation forum but as a mechanism for building real commercial relationships and productive partnerships between member economies.

The BRICS Business Forum carries genuine agenda-setting weight within the broader BRICS structure. It brings together business leaders and government officials to work through trade, investment, finance, technology and development challenges. The Business Council’s conclusions regularly feed into BRICS Summit declarations and follow-up work plans, covering areas from intra-BRICS trade and the digital economy to standards cooperation and value chain integration.

Ramaphosa was careful to distribute responsibility. “Instead, we need a compact: governments create the enabling conditions for trade and investment, and business seeks out the opportunities for production and commerce,” he said. Governments set the conditions; the private sector must then act on them. Neither alone is sufficient.

He closed with a thought on resilience that reframed the current global instability as something other than pure threat. “Resilience is not simply the capacity to withstand disruption. It is the capacity to transform disruption into new capabilities and partnerships.” The argument, in essence, is that the same volatility unsettling established trade patterns also creates openings for BRICS economies to reconfigure their relationships and build more diversified structures.

The 18th BRICS Summit runs September 12 to 13 under India’s chairship. Whether the Business Council’s recommendations translate into the kind of investment shifts Ramaphosa described, or remain aspirational language in a summit declaration, is the question that will define whether this gathering amounts to more than a forum.