Risks in pushing African agenda too hard

THE government intends to make next month’s Brics summit a Brics summit for Africa. But how helpful will that be in practice to the continent and how much will it help South Africa?

This will be the fifth summit of the Brics bloc of major emerging nations – Brazil, Russia, India and China. South Africa has decided to bring Africa more forcefully to the attention of the Brics leaders who will attend the summit in Durban – Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

The theme will be “Brics and Africa – partnerships for integration and industrialisation”. The heads of the AU and Africa’s regional economic communities will attend the summit for an outreach retreat.

South Africa clearly wants to leverage its Brics membership to help Africa. That would improve its standing on the continent and justify its membership of Brics. A key instrument of this leverage is the proposed Brics bank which will evidently be launched at the summit.

South African officials have given the impression that this bank would focus on Africa, channelling some of the financial surplus of China, especially, into the continent’s ambitious but underfunded infrastructure and industrialisation plans. And they certainly hoped that it would be based in South Africa.

Yet analysts do not seem to share this optimism. At a Brics seminar organised by the SA Institute for International Affairs last week, the consensus seemed to be that the bank would probably be based in Shanghai and that it would, at most, spend 10 to 15 percent of its funds in Africa, at least in the beginning.

The analysts did not seem to agree that the summit would the place for South Africa to forge a more structured relationship between the Brics and Africa.

Simon Freemantle of Standard Bank pointed out the trade between the Brics countries and Africa outstripped even the commerce among themselves. That trade, largely in exports of raw materials from Africa and imports of finished goods, had created a large trade deficit for Africa.

Judging by the summit theme, Pretoria intends to use Brics, as it has used the Forum for China Africa Co-operation, to try to correct the trade imbalances between Brics and Africa by getting the Brics to invest more in African industry – particularly the processing of raw materials – and in infrastructure, to boost local production and exports or manufactures.

Yet Freemantle and others also cautioned that if South Africa tried to push the Africa agenda too hard, too fast, that could overburden Africa’s relations with Brics.

They believe there is not yet much agreement among the Brics governments about the priorities of the proposed bank – or about the benefits of an African agenda. It would thus be better if the bank focused first on development projects in the Brics countries themselves. They noted that India has vast infrastructure backlogs and would probably be looking to the Brics bank to help overcome them.

Candice Moore of the University of Johannesburg also cautioned that some African countries – notably Nigeria and Senegal – resent what they regard as South Africa’s presumption in representing Africa in Brics. Garth Shelton of Wits University wondered why South Africa was facilitating the entry of its Brics partners into Africa so these giants could compete against us in our most lucrative market.

All of which suggests that we should regard next month’s summit not so much as a celebration of our triumph in joining Brics but as an opportunity to interrogate the merits or otherwise of membership.