Diplomatist Magazine Diplomatist August 2018 | Page 50

AFRICA DIARY
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Brazil's
President Michel Temer at the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, on July 26, 2018.
BRICS IN SANDTON
BY FRANCIS A. KORNEGAY, JR.*
T
he 10th summit of the BRICS hosted by South Africa
(25-27 July) in its posh Johannesburg corporate
suburb of Sandton marked about as fi tting a point for
refl ecting on the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa
club as any - given the current international backdrop of
geopolitical chaos and economic warfare. Indeed, the United
States going rough validates what motivated the launching
of the BRIC quartet in 2009 at Yekaterinburg in the fi rst
place. That year memorably got underway with both China
and Russia lamenting the hegemonic dollar as the premier
global reserve currency amid the G8’s failure, as a result of
German opposition, to incorporating its Outreach 5 – Brazil,
China, India, Mexico and South Africa – into what would
have become G13. Thus, does 2009 go down as a watershed
year of what might have been as well as what was. This was
not only at a time when the global economy was regrouping
from the fi nancial shock of 2007-8 ushering in the Great
Recession, but at a time when the west found itself forced to
begin sharing the power of economic governance with the
non-west. BRIC, which was to become BRICS in 2011, with
the addition of South Africa, meant that since the G8 couldn’t
accommodate an O5, why bother? It would, henceforth have
to contend with its alternative among the world’s leading
emerging markets (plus Russia) and become a caucus along
with BRICS in the G20. 2009 could well go down as the
year marking when the accelerated relative decline of the
west got underway.
But let’s refocus on the reserve currency issue and see
where we have come in almost a decade as the BRICS
Sandton summit got underway. One of the fi rst initiatives
undertaken by BRICS was establishment of the BRICS
Interbank Cooperation Mechanism to facilitate trade and
investment transactions in local currencies, thereby bypassing
the US dollar, while setting in train a process of lessening
dependency on it. This trend will accelerate under the Trump
administration’s drum-beat of sanctions and tariffs coercion.
50 • Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Diplomatist • Vol 6 • Issue 8 • August 2018, Noida