South Africa proudly wears the label 'emerging power', with its membership in BRICS and G20 probably the most visible signs of this conferred status" (Schoeman, 2015). However, the immediate prediction and reaction has been a contested hegemony from African countries against South Africa's foreign policy that sought to exercise most of the cultural, political, economic and military influence on the continent. This paper discovers the notion of emergent donors within the context of current global power shifts from traditional Western donors to non-Western donors and locates South Africa within the latter group described by the notion of 'from recipient to donor'. It analyses South Africa's development model in Africa from the perspective of development theories, chiefly, dependency theory. The basic hypothesis is that South Africa's development model, albeit an emergent donor has attributes of dependency relations and thus exploitative 'cooperative ties' (Jackson and Sorensen, 2010). I argue that underdevelopment in the SADC region and in other countries with proximity to South Africa is an intentional byproduct of the development in South Africa. The paper unpacks its outgoing aid under the pretext of South-South co-operation and explores the economic and political drivers that inform Pretoria's development agenda. In the last section, the paper gives a brief contrast of the Chinese and South African development model to argue that both exhibit stark divergence from tenets of mutual gain espoused in the South-South co-operation model. The findings derived from the study is that the agenda-setting power of development cooperation still resides within dependency practices of exploitation, emergent donors like South Africa have not overhauled the contentious development agenda associated with the West.South Africa proudly wears the label 'emerging power', with its membership in BRICS and G20 probably the most visible signs of this conferred status" (Schoeman, 2015). However, the immediate prediction and reaction has been a contested hegemony from African countries against South Africa's foreign policy that sought to exercise most of the cultural, political, economic and military influence on the continent. This paper discovers the notion of emergent donors within the context of current global power shifts from traditional Western donors to non-Western donors and locates South Africa within the latter group described by the notion of 'from recipient to donor'. It analyses South Africa's development model in Africa from the perspective of development theories, chiefly, dependency theory. The basic hypothesis is that South Africa's development model, albeit an emergent donor has attributes of dependency relations and thus exploitative 'cooperative ties' (Jackson and Sorensen, 2010). I argue that underdevelopment in the SADC region and in other countries with proximity to South Africa is an intentional byproduct of the development in South Africa. The paper unpacks its outgoing aid under the pretext of South-South co-operation and explores the economic and political drivers that inform Pretoria's development agenda. In the last section, the paper gives a brief contrast of the Chinese and South African development model to argue that both exhibit stark divergence from tenets of mutual gain espoused in the South-South co-operation model. The findings derived from the study is that the agenda-setting power of development cooperation still resides within dependency practices of exploitation, emergent donors like South Africa have not overhauled the contentious development agenda associated with the West.