British economist Jim O’Neill wrote a paper in 2001 on the world's leading emerging economies — Brazil, Russia India and China — and coined the term “Bric” to encapsulate them. Soon after this SA was invited to join those countries in forming an actual emerging markets bloc, and Brics was born. It seemed a good idea at the time.
It should be mentioned up front that O’Neill was not in favour of SA’s inclusion as he believed the country was small and economically insignificant in comparison with those of the original Bric members. The economic data supported this but the acronym was catchy and left-leaning politicians in particular were keen to encourage the development of a multipolar world that was not run by America and its surrogates.
Keep on sipping the Kool-Aid, guys. American military might remains far greater than the military strength of the rest of the world combined, and that situation is likely to persist for the foreseeable future no matter how much Brics expands beyond its current configuration, which is clearly the intention.
In the real world, apart from its development bank and a business council the Brics club is a ragtag bunch of politically and economically volatile countries, many of them led by scoundrels. There is no treaty, and in several important areas its members are direct competitors, but the leaders do hold regular summits and their minions beaver away to find common ground. In the more than 20 years since Bric/Brics was conceived it has achieved remarkably little in economic terms. There has been little progress in boosting trade flows, for example.
That said, in last week’s UN Security Council vote that condemned Russia for invading Ukraine all of the Brics members abstained apart from Brazil. And it is now easier to go on holiday to Russia as a South African, so there’s that. Just don’t get any Ukrainian stamps in your passport.
Corruption and dodgy politics are the Brics bloc members' most evident common characteristics. Covid denier and Amazon deforester Jair Bolsonaro will not be missed as Brazilian president, but it was a little sad to see such jubilation when a politician who was convicted and jailed for corruption was re-elected in his place.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has consistently denied the charges and the legal battles continue, but one can’t help thinking that he was essentially the lesser of two evils. Interestingly, at a meeting with US President Joe Biden a couple of weeks ago Lula kept referring to Indonesia when he was talking about the Brics. A Freudian hint of the next Brics member?
The less said about Russia’s Vladimir Putin the better. He is a former KGB thug who was almost certainly responsible for the premature deaths of many political opponents. Whatever the merits of his concern about the treatment of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, his assault on that country involved indefensible breaches of human rights. By all accounts Putin and his oligarchs “did a Zuma” on Russia, hollowing out the Russian state to the tune of more than $1-trillion over the years. Little wonder that the Russian military is such a shambles.
India’s leader, Narendra Modi, leads a divided nation where many among the large Muslim minority feel unsafe. The recent BBC documentary about his deliberate inaction in 2002 during anti-Muslim riots, when he was chief minister of Gujarat, was a deep embarrassment, but the allegations came as little surprise to the Indian people. His reaction — retaliating by ordering a raid on the BBC’s offices in India — was hardly an enlightened response to criticism.
Democracy in Russia may be paper-thin under wannabe tsar Putin but it is entirely absent in China, a country where there is no freedom of expression and where abuses of human rights abound through the repression of minorities and dissidents. Yet Chinese leader Xi Jinping is due to join Putin, Lula and Modi at the next Brics summit in Gauteng in August as guests of Cyril Ramaphosa, whose ANC is itself riddled with corruption. Just look at Eskom.
The five existing Brics heads of state are planning to expand their merry band and will be considering applications from other states. Some of these would tarnish the Brics even further, however impossible this may seem. Iran, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, countries where LGBTQ+ and women’s rights are nonexistent and fanatical religious leadership has made citizens’ lives miserable, are all candidates.
Some of the other applicants are less dodgy, but few if any are squeaky clean. Argentina, Senegal, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Egypt, the UAE, Thailand, Indonesia and Turkey have all been mentioned, though as a Nato member the latter would almost certainly be vetoed by Putin.
Commentator Chris Devonshire-Ellis writes in the Silk Road Briefing on the trade implications of the possible Brics expansion that “it is apparent that while the current focus has been on the shifts created by the West’s imposition of sanctions on Russia and trade sanctions upon China (including semiconductors), a rather more significant change in global trade and supply chains has been simultaneously occurring — and one likely to have even more profound implications”.
His standpoint is more an economic than a political one and does echo the strong anti-Western motive that brought the bloc’s original members together, as a combination of paranoia, defensiveness and resentment of Western dominance over the global economy led them to form their cluster.
The new applicants share similar geopolitical and economic concerns. However, in terms of morality and politics it is inevitable that judgments will be made by those to whom the Brics’ hostility is directed. What we have seen with the commentary on the recent visit to our supplicant country of Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and with this year’s naval manoeuvres involving SA, Russia and China, is that countries will be judged by their friendships.
It is widely recognised that SA now stands to lose the trade concessions it enjoys under the US African Growth & Opportunity Act structure if we push the Americans too far. It stands to reason that if we continue to deliberately antagonise the West we cannot expect them to love us as much as in the past.
Nelson Mandela had the respect, authority and charm that enabled him to stride the globe, and his Rainbow Nation was universally admired and courted. The same cannot be said of any of our later presidents. We cannot afford to stand by as pariah states latch onto Brics, especially since SA, with one of the world’s more enlightened constitutions, should have little in common with them.
It is time for SA to bid the Brics farewell. The trade ties we enjoy — particularly with China and India — are unlikely to be affected. However, distancing SA from the other Brics members would put us in a better position to preserve the still vital existing economic links with Brexit Britain, Europe, the US, Japan and others.
Do we really want to turn our backs on the West so we can jump into bed with the polecats of the world? As SA prepares to roll out the red carpet for some of the globe's nastiest leaders at the looming Durban anti-West fest, it appears that we do.
• Gilmour is an investment analyst and Fraser a financial journalist.
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