There seem to be three narratives about BRICS. The first is promotional and mainly comes from government and allied intellectuals; the second perspective is uncertainty, typical of fence-sitting scholars and NGOs; and the third is highly critical, from forces sometimes termed the \u2018independent left.\u2019<\/i><\/p>\n
In Durban, South Africa, five heads of state meet on March 26-27 to assure the rest of Africa that their countries\u2019 corporations are better investors in infrastructure, mining, oil and agriculture than the traditional European and US multinationals. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-SA (BRICS) summit will also include 16 heads of state from Africa, including some notorious tyrants. A new $50 billion \u2018BRICS Bank\u2019 will probably be launched. There will be more talk about monetary alternatives to the US dollar.<\/p>\n
There seem to be three narratives about BRICS. The first is promotional and mainly comes from government and allied intellectuals; the second perspective is uncertainty, typical of fence-sitting scholars and NGOs; and the third is highly critical, from forces sometimes termed the \u2018independent left.\u2019<\/p>\n
The first narrative is represented in this special issue of Pambazuka through the most intellectually-engaged speech about BRICS we have found by any local politician: Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa\u2019s foreign minister. At a gathering of the 5th BRICS Academic Forum on March 10, she requested robust, critical engagement, and by reading the \u2018Recommendations\u2019 of that group\u2019s meeting at the Durban University of Technology, you can assess whether she can be satisfied.<\/p>\n
We think not. Historians will judge whether, indeed, BRICS \u2018have given African nations the ability to start to escape the clutches of neo-colonial dependence on foreign aid, and the policies and \u201cadvice\u201d of Western-controlled finance institutions\u2019 \u2013 as claimed by Pretoria\u2019s minister of higher education Blade Nzimande at the same meeting.<\/p>\n
Historians may judge this line of argument to be \u2018Pretorian\u2019 in thinking, with the term defined on one internet site this way: \u2018characteristic of or similar to the corruptible soldiers in the Praetorian Guard with respect to corruption or political venality; \u2018a large Praetorian bureaucracy filled with ambitious and often sycophantic people makes work and makes trouble\u2019 \u2013 Arthur M.Schlesinger Jr.\u2019<\/p>\n
From Pretoria, the Human Sciences Research Council will host the temporary BRICS \u2018think tank\u2019, drawn from researchers at sites like the SA Institute for International Affairs at Jan Smuts House (long considered an Anglo American Corporation braintrust), and we worry that if the Academic Forum\u2019s Recommendations are the basis for judgment so far, then Naomi Klein\u2019s definition of this sort of institution may apply here: \u2018people who are paid to think, by people who make tanks.\u2019<\/p>\n
So as you can already tell, the debate over BRICS is getting quite sharp, as witnessed both by Nkoana-Mashabane\u2019s use of Fanon\u2019s Wretched of the Earth to attack those of us who question BRICS, and by the personal invective unveiled in a story by Peter Fabricius of the Star newspaper. He was reporting on a February 28 debate in Johannesburg involving the SA deputy foreign minister, ActionAid-South Africa\u2019s director Fatima Shabodien (whose speech replete with pointed questions is reproduced below), and myself \u2013 followed by my reply to Fabricius documenting the local ruling party\u2019s \u2018sell-out to international capital.\u2019<\/p>\n
Also at the critical end of the spectrum, Anna Ochkina of Moscow\u2019s Institute for Globalisation and Social Movement Studies (not a think-tank by the Klein criterion) argues that there is merely a \u2018spectre of alliance.\u2019 However, Vladimir Shubin provides a vigorous counter-argument.<\/p>\n
The critics note how badly divided the Brics bloc is at several crucial junctures, and indeed the one major unifying initiative in Durban aside from a Brics Bank announcement, is the highly dubious \u2018Africa gateway\u2019 grab by South Africa. As I report (in \u2018From Nepad to Brics, South Africa\u2019s toll at the \u201cgateway to Africa\u201d\u2019), this is not likely to end well, if the last decade\u2019s experience is any guide.<\/p>\n
After all, as Tomaso Ferrando argues in great detail, the land grabbing underway by Brazil, India, China and South Africa is a shocking testimony of how the Berlin 1885 codification of colonial landgrabs is replaying now through Bilateral Investment Treaties and other legalistic attacks by Brics members and corporations. The victims are peasants and others reliant on land, water and related resources, as well as African food consumers.<\/p>\n
Moreover, if the strength of commitment to Africa\u2019s basic survival is measured in part by the way the Brics have helped to cook the climate \u2013 given an anticipated 200 million unnecessary African deaths this century due to floods, storms, droughts, famines and vastly increased disease burdens (carried especially by women) \u2013 then the gateway metaphor is easily transformed into a rather hellish entryway, as I argue in another article.<\/p>\n
It doesn\u2019t have to be this way, according to University of California sociologist Chris Chase-Dunn, who believes Brics are not necessarily \u2018sub-imperialist\u2019; nor Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros who call for a Brics revivial of Non-Aligned strategies; nor University of Delhi political scientist Achin Vanaik. They see trajectories from the Brics semiperiphery that can move in counter-hegemonic directions, though Vanaik leans across the fenceline into Brics-sceptic territory. Another more mainstream voice who is doubtful that the Brics can overcome their \u2018useful idiot\u2019 role is the prolific Sao Paolo geopolitical commentator Oliver Stuenkel.<\/p>\n
These searching essays require a final argument to help specify, well what exactly is this idea \u2018sub-imperialism\u2019, and can it travel across space and time from its early use in Brazil nearly a half-century ago? Or is Nkoana-Mashabane correct that this is simply outmoded, lazy intellectualism? You decide.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
But if you are thinking about these matters from \u2018below\u2019 (or like me, within \u2018brics-from-the-middle\u2019), you will intrinsically understand that the debate is only beginning. Given how much is at stake, critical civil society must scrutinise the claims, the processes and the outcomes of the BRICS summit and its aftermath. Civil society critics point to four groups of problems in all the BRICS:<\/p>\n
\u2022 socio-economic rights violations, including severe inequality, poverty, unemployment, disease, inadequate education and healthcare, costly basic services and housing, constraints on labour organising, and extreme levels of violence, especially against women (such as the high-profile rapes\/murders of Delhi student Jyoti Singh Pandey last December 16, and in South Africa, of Anene Booysen on February 2 in Bredasdorp, Reeva Steenkamp on February 14 in Pretoria, and countless others);<\/p>\n
\u2022 political and civil rights violations, such as widespread police brutality, increased securitisation of our societies, militarisation and arms trading, prohibitions on protest, rising media repression and official secrecy, activist jailings and torture, debilitating patriarchy and homophobia, and even state-sanctioned massacres (including in Durban where the notorious Cato Manor police hit squad executed more than 50 suspects in recent years);<\/p>\n
\u2022 regional domination by BRICS economies, including extraction of hinterland raw materials, and promotion of \u2018Washington Consensus\u2019 ideology which reduces poor countries\u2019 policy space (for example, in the Brics 2012 donation of $75 billion to the International Monetary Fund with the mandate that the IMF be more \u2018nasty\u2019, according to South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan, or in the desire of China, Brazil and India to revitalise the World Trade Organisation to maximise their trading power against weaker neighbours); and<\/p>\n
\u2022 \u2018maldevelopment\u2019 based on elite-centric, consumerist, financialised, eco-destructive, climate-insensitive, nuclear-powered strategies which advance corporate and parastatal profits, but which create multiple crises within all the Brics (as witnessed during the Marikana Massacre carried out by police on behalf of Lonmin platinum corporation last August, and in South Durban where R225 billion ($25 bn) in white-elephant state infrastructure subsidies for chaotic port, freight and petrochemical industry expansion \u2013 and more labour-broking exploitation \u2013 are being vigorously resisted by victim communities).<\/p>\n
Confusingly to some, BRICS regimes carry out this agenda at the same time they offered radical, even occasionally \u2018anti-imperialist\u2019 rhetoric, accompanied by mainly trivial diplomatic actions. Yet the BRICS alliance is incoherent, as shown in the elites\u2019 debilitating disagreement over who would lead the IMF and World Bank in 2011-12. In the UN Security Council, BRICS countries seek greater power for themselves, not the collective: repeated bids for permanent membership by India, Brazil and South Africa are opposed by Russia and China.<\/p>\n
And recall the humiliation when Beijing told Pretoria\u2019s Home Affairs Minister (now African Union chairperson) Nkozasana Dlamini-Zuma not to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama to attend Archbishop Tutu\u2019s 80th birthday party in 2011, or attend a 2009 Tibet solidarity gathering. We seem to have lost foreign policy autonomy to Chinese whims.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the African continent has been overwhelmed by BRICS corporations. The rate of trade between Africa and the major emerging economies \u2013 especially China \u2013 rose from 5 to 20 percent of all commerce since 1994, when apartheid ended. Destructive though it often is, one of Pretoria\u2019s leading objectives, according to deputy foreign minister Marius Fransman, is that \u2018South Africa presents a gateway for investment on the continent, and over the next 10 years the African continent will need $480 billion for infrastructure development.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Resource Curse\u2019 maldevelopment often follows such infrastructure. This is also true, geopolitically, when it comes to facilitating Brics investments. In January 2013, for example, Pretoria deployed 400 troops to the Central African Republic during a coup attempt because \u2018We have assets there that need protection,\u2019 according to deputy foreign minister Ebrahim Ebrahim. Allegations by a former South African official are that these mineral interests include uranium arranged via corrupt heads-of-state collaboration, and has Ebrahim confirmed that Pretoria sent sophisticated arms to the brutal regime of Fran\u00e7ois Boziz\u00e9.<\/p>\n
Other extreme cases are the Democratic Republic of the Congo where Johannesburg-based mining capital (AngloGold Ashanti) paid off warlords in a region where five million people were killed mainly to get access to minerals such as the coltan we use in our cellphones, and Zimbabwe where Chinese firms and a military junta \u2013 along with SA businesses, Indian and Israeli traders, Dubai middlemen and other vultures \u2013 prop up President Robert Mugabe\u2019s rule, together looting the country of billions of dollars worth of diamonds.<\/p>\n
In 2010, 17 out of Africa\u2019s top 20 companies were South African, even after extreme capital flight from Johannesburg a decade earlier, which saw Anglo American, De Beers, SA Breweries and Old Mutual relocate to London. Just as in Cecil John Rhodes\u2019 day, the greed of South African business is backed by government officials, through the (failed) New Partnership for Africa\u2019s Development \u2013 praised as \u2018philosophically spot on\u2019 by the Bush Administration \u2013 and useless African Peer Review Mechanism. More recently, South Africa\u2019s National Development Plan conceded that there is a \u2018perception of the country as a regional bully.\u2019<\/p>\n
In bullying Africa, the traditional SA, US, European, Australian and Canadian corporations have been joined by major firms from China, India and Brazil. Their looting has mainly built upon colonial infrastructural foundations \u2013 road, rail, pipeline and port expansion \u2013 connected to mines, plantations, petroleum and gas.<\/p>\n
There is similar collusion with Washington when it comes to global finance: in July 2012, the BRICS treasuries sent $75 billion in fresh capital to the IMF, which was seeking new funds for bailing out for banks exposed in Southern Europe. Like Africa\u2019s experience since the early 1980s, the resulting austerity in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus, Ireland and other failing European states does far more harm than good to both local and global economies. As for voting power within the IMF, the result of this BRICS intervention was that China gained many more votes (for dollars rule at the IMF), while Africa actually lost a substantial fraction of its share.<\/p>\n
For these reasons, will Durban 2013 be known as the logical successor to Africa\u2019s initial carve-up: Berlin 1885?<\/p>\n
Building a bottom-up civil society network to analyse, watchdog and represent silenced voices of dissent has never been more important. One part of this process involves an analysis of the pros and cons of BRICS.<\/p>\n
We hope you the reader can join the conversation because from Africa, too little has been said about BRICS, given how much is at stake.
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Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society.<\/i><\/p>\n