Never at a loss for simpering, oleaginous words, UN Secretary General Antonió Guterres was in customary form at the recent 15th BRICS summit when he declaimed: ‘We take great inspiration from the Rainbow Nation’s extraordinary path to unity through action and justice. That is what our world needs. Unity for action. And unity for justice.’
Reaching these objectives, he went on, ‘requires full respect for the UN Charter, international law, universal values, and all human rights – social, cultural, economic, civil, and political’.
In fact, BRICS was originally identified for the purpose of highlighting investment opportunities, not for the creation of a formal intergovernmental organisation.
The original acronym “BRIC” was coined in 2001 by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill to describe fast-growing economies that he predicted would collectively dominate the global economy by 2050.
In 2009 the BRICs actually decided to form a cohesive geopolitical bloc: their governments meet annually at formal summits and coordinate multilateral policies. Bilateral relations among BRICS are conducted mainly ‘on the basis of non-interference, equality, and mutual benefit’.
BRICS encompasses about 26.7% of the world’s land surface and 41.5% of the global population, but as the Democratic Alliance’s shadow minister for international relations and cooperation, Emma Powell, says, until now BRICS has been pretty innocuous.
In August 2023 at the 15th BRICS Summit, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had been invited to join the bloc. Full membership will take effect on 1 January 2024.
The BRICS nations are considered a geopolitical rival to the G7 bloc of leading advanced economies, announcing competing initiatives such as the New Development Bank, the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement, the BRICS payment system, the BRICS Joint Statistical Publication and the BRICS basket reserve currency. Little appears to have come from all this.
Stick it to the West
Despite Ramaphosa’s forked tongue ‘non-alignment’ stance underlying BRICS, its raison d’être’ is to stick it to the West. It provides the comfort of an alliance which isn’t bound by human rights considerations, even though they say they are concerned about human rights, non-alignment is the ANC’s formal basis for the lack of condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
More likely is that the ANC needs the multi-million-dollar funding it gets from Russia through United Manganese, which has oligarch Viktor Vekselberg, an ally of President Vladimir Putin, as a shareholder.
China is an authoritarian country. Its disregard for human rights doesn’t have to be elucidated. Russia is a dictatorship pretending to be a democracy. India is a democracy which fluctuates under prime minister Narendra Modi, but it is not a serial human rights abuser. Brazil is a democracy and economically significant. The BRICS’ new partners are in another league: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Argentina can be taken out of the human rights abusers category. However, it is on the brink of economic implosion and its politics are really weird. Its inflation rate is 114%.
Egypt is an authoritarian state dominated by the president, the ruling party, and the security services. There are limitations on freedom of association, peaceful assembly, and expression; unlawful or arbitrary killings and enforced disappearances; torture, and cruel and inhuman treatment; arbitrary arrests and detentions; prosecutions of journalists; crimes targeting the LGBTQI community; and significant restrictions on workers’ freedom of association.
South Africa, which always had the highest GDP on the continent, is now bested by Egypt. Nigeria has the highest GDP in Africa.
Ethiopia’s president Abiy Ahmed pledged to reform Ethiopia’s authoritarian state, has held elections, and has implemented some liberal policies. However, Ethiopia remains beset by civil war; inter-communal violence; abuses by security forces; violations of due process; and many restrictive laws. Since late 2020 and until November 2022, fighting between the Federal Government and the Tigray Defence Force (TDF) has led to the displacement of millions of people, and credible allegations of atrocities and violence have spilled over into neighbouring regions.
Growing impressively
However, Ethiopia’s economy has been growing impressively, albeit from a low base. Ethiopia’s rise has been largely driven by an increase in industrial activity, including investments in infrastructure and manufacturing.
Iran is a brutal theocracy. We all know about last year’s massive protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman arrested for by the “morality” police for allegedly violating Iran’s strict Islamic dress code by wearing her head scarf ‘the wrong way’. The protests became about very much more than raising chronically poor economic conditions.
Iran has promised and is preparing to wipe Israel off the face of the earth because it hates Jews, and it really does mean it. Iranian weightlifter Mostafa Rajai has just been given a lifetime ban by the Iran Weightlifting Federation for speaking to and taking a photo with an Israeli competitor.
But perhaps a real flavour of the regime is to be found in the history of the current president Ebrahim Raisi.
In 1988 Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa ordering the execution of members and supporters of the main opposition group, the banned People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran (MEK). It included those who had already been tried and were already serving their sentences.
Raisi sat as deputy prosecutor general in a 4-member committee codenamed the “death commission” charged with carrying out the fatwa. Thousands of political prisoners were murdered.
We know about the absolutism of Saudi Arabia’s monarchy and its human rights abuses, but attempts at modernising appear to be bearing fruit.
The UAE, which is a federation of absolute monarchies, has a president and a prime minister but they are not elected. It has kept its people docile with services and subsidies, using their huge oil revenues. The UAE has been modernising and trades with a fair number of African states. Abu Dhabi hopes advancements towards global standards in these areas will improve the quality of services for its residents as well as attract future investment.
Firing squad
The Emirates, however, use the death penalty carried out by firing squad for, inter alia, apostasy, rape, aggravated robbery, terrorism, treason, sodomy, homosexuality, adultery, drug trafficking and environmental pollution.
Whatever benefits these countries may offer South Africa, South Africa is not going to get out of economic trouble unless the ANC changes its policies or a new government implements growth-friendly policies.
When Ramaphosa addressed the nation on the results of the BRICS summit, he said that BRICS was ‘challenging Western hegemony’. Presumably by ‘hegemony’ Ramaphosa was referring to the fact that Western countries have too much say on global bodies because they are successful.
A look at some trade figures is enlightening: 22% of our exports go to the EU, 9% to the USA (trade comprises a fair amount of value-added manufacture) and 7% to the United Kingdom. So, 36% of all our trade is with these three Western countries. And 77% of our foreign direct investment comes from them.
In 14 years of BRICS membership, exports to Russia run at 0.3% and exports to China run at 9.5%. However, we have a trade imbalance, as 20% of our imports come from China.
As the West has learned through Germany’s Russian gas crisis, no country can afford overexposure to undemocratic countries – it usually doesn’t end well.
[Image: Gordon Johnson for Pixabay/Gabriel Ziegler, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123557724]
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