Just before the expanded Brics+ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, SA, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates) met in the Russian city of Kazan last month, a policy dialogue was convened by the University of Pretoria’s (UP) Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship to review SA’s chairing of the bloc in 2023, attended by the UP scholarly and student community, diplomats and civil society activists.

Brics has its foundations in the co-operation developed between SA, India, and Brazil in the IBSA Dialogue Forum from 2003. Brazil, Russia, India, and China (Bric) held their first meeting in 2005, with Pretoria formally joining in 2011. SA’s chairing of the bloc last year saw the expansion of the group to nine countries. Brics has sought to establish a more equitable global trade system, as well as to increase commerce, and promote socioeconomic development, among its members. A Brics New Development Bank was established in Shanghai in 2014, and has approved $32bn of infrastructure projects, though the bloc has no permanent secretariat. The grouping has convened 15 summits, with SA hosting in 2013, 2018 and 2023.

At the recent UP dialogue, it was noted that SA’s foreign policy has often punched above its weight despite that it has limited technical and financial capacity, accounting for only 1.3% of the Brics+ economy. Having been the first new member to join Bric, Pretoria strongly championed the expansion of the group, bringing in two new African members — Egypt and Ethiopia — to bolster its African Agenda strategy. The non-inclusion of Nigeria — with Africa’s largest population and economy — was discussed, with reports that Abuja retains an interest in joining the grouping along with other regional powers, such as Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

It was, however, noted that Brics’s expansion from five to nine members has made consensus more difficult to reach, and there was a feeling that the group needed to digest new members to ensure cohesion before taking in new ones. Tensions were noted between China and India, and Ethiopia and Egypt, which could disrupt the bloc’s unity. The reported opposition of Addis Ababa and Cairo to endorsing Brazil, India and SA as members of an expanded UN Security Council was highlighted. This decision was, however, said to have been made at the Johannesburg summit last year, at which the four new members were not yet present. The statement endorsing their council membership was part of a grand bargain that supported Beijing’s push for the expansion of Brics.

The bloc has also strongly pushed for reform of global governance institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation, and championed greater South-South economic and political co-operation. The grouping has further increased — to 23% — the use of its own currencies in conducting trade with each other, though it was noted that the idea of delinking from the dollar could be achieved onlyin the long term. Brics+ members have further been critical of the pernicious role of Western ratings agencies, though they are yet to create their own alternative.

The bloc was described by critics as a status quo organisation pursuing a sub-imperial approach of “talk left, walk right”. China and India benefited from an increase in weighted voting at the IMF in 2015 at the expense of countries such as SA. The pursuit of market-orientated agricultural policies was said to have damaged small farmers across the bloc. Brics+ countries — particularly China and India — were described as among the world’s heaviest polluters not doing enough to compensate the environmental damage to the world’s poorest countries. New Delhi was also fingered as a major supplier of arms to Israel, even as Pretoria continues to pursue a genocide case against Tel Aviv at the International Court of Justice.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.

This article was first published by Business Day on 11 November 2024.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and do not represent the official stance or policies of the University of Pretoria.