The pressure on African governments to signal alignment has never been more visible. The Hormuz crisis, the war in Ukraine, the expansion of BRICS, and the return of US transactionalism under Trump have each created moments where external powers read Africa’s positioning as either endorsement or rejection. Most African governments have responded with studied ambiguity. That ambiguity is not evasion. It is a policy.
The clearest current illustration is South Africa. Pretoria joined BRICS in 2010 and hosted the 2023 expansion summit that welcomed Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE into the bloc. In January 2026, it hosted the Will for Peace naval exercises alongside China, Russia and Iran, drawing a sharp reaction from Washington. India, as BRICS chair, publicly distanced itself from the exercises. South Africa’s domestic political framing presented the drills as a routine expression of sovereignty. The Trump administration read them as alignment with adversaries. The gap between those two readings is the space where African multi-alignment operates, and where it carries real economic costs. US-South Africa relations had already deteriorated over Pretoria’s ICJ case against Israel and its pattern of UN abstentions on Ukraine.
West Africa’s picture is differentiated and does not reduce to a single posture. The Sahel juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have made an explicit break with the West, expelling French forces, expelling US forces from Niger, and turning to Russia for security support through the Alliance of Sahel States. Their alignment is stated, not ambiguous. But these are landlocked, security-fragile states whose economic leverage is limited and whose trajectory is driven primarily by domestic survival logic rather than geopolitical strategy.
The coastal states operate differently. Nigeria is the clearest case of deliberate multi-positioning. Tinubu attended the BRICS summit in Rio in 2025 as a partner state representative while simultaneously pitching Nigeria’s investment case to Western audiences at the Africa CEO Forum in Kigali. Nigeria has applied for BRICS partner status but has not pursued full membership. Its primary interest in BRICS is access to alternative financial mechanisms and a seat in multilateral reform conversations, not anti-Western alignment. Senegal under Faye and Sonko has taken a assertive sovereignty posture on resources, pushing France’s military out and renegotiating extractive contracts. That posture has been read in some quarters as a tilt toward China or Russia. The evidence on the ground is more pragmatic. Dakar attended Africa Forward in Nairobi alongside Macron, and Senegal remains engaged with the IMF, Western development banks and Gulf capital simultaneously.
Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana occupy the most explicitly Western-leaning positions in the subregion, partly by structural exposure and partly by political orientation. Ouattara has maintained close ties with French capital and Western institutions throughout his tenure. Ghana’s peaceful democratic transition in 2024 was received in Washington and Brussels as a regional anchor. But even these governments are not immune to the competitive logic. Chinese infrastructure financing, Gulf investment vehicles and Indian commercial presence are all active in Abidjan and Accra.
What the current environment is producing across West Africa is not alignment but leverage management. The proliferation of external actors, including not only the US, Europe, China and Russia but also Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey and Gulf sovereign funds, gives African governments more negotiating options than at any point since independence. The question is whether they are structured to capture that leverage. The Sahel juntas have chosen a hard break that has narrowed their options. The coastal democracies are managing a competitive field. Nigeria and Senegal are doing something more sophisticated: using the ambiguity of their alignment as a bargaining tool across multiple simultaneous negotiations. Whether that produces better material outcomes than a clearer choice would remains the open question.