All matters financial took a back seat this week as South Africa hosted the much-anticipated 2023 BRICS Summit, the 15th annual get-together of the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Top of the agenda this year, apparently, was whether or not the five current members of the bloc would allow other countries to join, sending this writer on a nostalgic Spotify.com trawl for one of the few songs he knows to have BRIC in the title. Thank you, Pink Floyd for your 1979 hit tune ‘Another BRIC in the wall’.
BRICS commentary in shades of Pink, the older
Is it possible to reflect on the admission of new nations to the BRICS bloc in the context of a Pink Floyd single? Well, in this writer’s experience you can link anything to everything, and vice versa … much like 80% of statistics are made up on the spot!
As proof, consider the ominous undertones in the second line of the song’s lyrics: ‘we don’t need no thought control’. You see, dear reader, apart from South Africa, who were incidentally a late-joiner to the original BRIC club, BRICS feature rather poorly on the 2023 World Press Freedom Index (WPFI). South Africa sits pretty in 25th place, with Brazil (92), India (161), Russia (164) and China (179) languishing near the tail of the 180-country ranking. The ultimate champion of human rights and personal freedom, North Korea, is bottom-of-table. Oops, we inadvertently tripped up over Pink Floyd’s ‘no dark sarcasm in the classroom’ command!
The throng of alleged or would-be BRICS joiners have no respect for an independent media either. Scanning way down the press freedom list you find Egypt (166), Iran (177), Pakistan (150) and Saudi Arabia (170). Why should you care? And surely it is nonsensical to declare the BRICS a club of repressive states on the basis of a single online ranking. You should care, dear reader, because the independent media, assisted by a still-independent judiciary, are among the handful of institutions that have prevented South Africa from going down the slippery slope of a North Korea, Venezuela or Zimbabwe. The widely publicised State Capture investigation would not have happened absent press freedom; nor would the outcome of this commission be common knowledge among the broader citizenry today.
Our free and independent press prevents our government from entering the ‘thought control’ world that the big four BRIC members seem quite comfortable with: Brazil, Russia, India and China are all, in varying degrees, experts at deciding what their citizens get to know, and what they cannot know.
Some fun with BRICS headlines
The ‘free’ news wires were buzzing with BRICS-related news 21-25 August 2023; some generated by the summit, and some relating to in-country happenings. As the BRICS representatives debated the roadmap for a community of repressive states, China faced severe growth constraints; India did something impressively extra-terrestrial; and Russia looked to the skies to settle old scores. Here are some news headlines to expand on these points. First, courtesy Financial Times, ‘China hits east Asian demographic wall’. Second, from The Guardian UK, ‘India lands spacecraft near south pole of moon in historic first’. And finally, from BBC News, ‘Wagner chief presumed dead after Russia plane crash’.
As for summit-related news, it becomes difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, a saying described by Oxford Languages as meaning ‘distinguishing valuable people or things from worthless ones’. The South African government reportedly tripped up over this saying early on, sending a mere Cabinet Minister to meet the Indian Prime Minister’s jet upon landing … and having to hastily summon the Deputy President to coax the unhappy head of state on to the tarmac, allegedly.
Local news site DailyMaverick.co.za discussed the faux pas in their article ‘Tough love triangle: While Ramaphosa focused on Xi, Modi threw a tantrum and refused to get off his plane’. After running the aforementioned article, Daily Maverick claims its website was all but shut down by a denial-of-service attack coming out of India. You cannot make this stuff up! Incidentally, this writer found some of the images from the various BRICS Summit platforms quite entertaining.
One shows both Luna, the President of Brazil, and Cyril Ramaphosa, president of South Africa, enthusiastically hand-holding with China’s President Xi. Modi was all but snubbed, barely managing to keep pinkie contact with Ramaphosa. PS, the writer concedes that the photo was cropped in a most unfortunate manner, probably to illustrate that the BRICS is more about chumming up to Xi than anything else.
Choosing friends with future benefits
There is some irony in this ‘befriending China’ approach, as India offers far better prospects from a long-term economic growth standpoint. The Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR), a thinktank based in the United Kingdom, offered a wonderful China versus India analysis recently. Extrapolating economic data out to 2100, they estimate that China’s GDP “never gets much bigger than that of the US and eventually falls back behind it”. They reckon the US ends 2100 with an economy 45% bigger than China. But here is the real shocker; by 2100, the CEBR said India would boast a GDP 90% larger than that of China, and 30% larger than the US. And that, dear reader, is why Ramaphosa should have been cuddling up to Modi rather than Xi.
South Africa’s long-suffering citizenry will have breathed a collective sigh of relief that Russia’s president chose to attend the summit virtually. There was enough pre-conference bluster to support that had Putin attended, Ramaphosa would indeed have hugged him warmly; thankfully no such honour was bestowed upon the computer screen that bore Putin’s image.
As expected, Putin used his pre-recorded address to the summit to defend his country’s invasion of Ukraine, blaming the west for the conflict. “Our actions in Ukraine are dictated by only one thing; to end the war that was unleashed by the west and its satellites against the people who live in the Donbas,” he said. The rest of the BRICS leaders were non-plussed, with Brazil, China and South Africa making scant mention of the conflict, and India ignoring it outright.
The closing touches to today’s opinion piece were rudely interrupted by confirmation that six countries would be joining the BRICS bloc from 1 January 2024. Listed alphabetically the new joiners include Argentina, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. The lucky six will join a bloc that already represents around a quarter of the global economy, 20% of global trade, and 40% of the world’s population. PS, the largest of the new joiners, Saudi Arabia, boasts a GDP that is a mere 5% that of China’s … while South Africa’s economy reaches a mere 2% of same.
Just another BRIC in the wall
Briefly returning to the press freedom ranking, you will find Argentina (40th) as the best of the joiners; Ethiopia (130) and the UAE (145) are down in the doldrums alongside the three other ‘winners’. And the writer has not bothered to dip into the long list of human rights abuses that some of the ‘new six’ have been accused of over time… Ah well; all ammunition for the argument that BRICS are fast becoming a club of repressive states!
What benefits will befall the new hangers-on to the original BRIC ‘big four’? Returning to our theme song, and with further apologies to Pink Floyd, the writer concludes: you can join BRICS, but when the dust settles you will realise that “all in all, you are just another BRIC in the wall”.
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