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418 G iven its domestic challenges and attempts at forging a common agenda on the African continent, is there a synergy between South Africa’s domestic imperatives and continental ambitions and the agenda of BRICS? Is South Africa’s membership of BRICS going to enhance its position in the world or is it going to be an impediment when it comes to its domestic challenges and the African agenda? Does South Africa fit the BRICS profile or is it just another brick in the BRICS wall? These are some of the questions BRICS skeptics have put forth about South Africa’s role as a BRICS country, echoed by the ambivalent. For instance , Khadija Patel, a journalist for whom ‘words are her only defence against impending doom … and iniquity’, writing in a South African online newspaper, says that, ‘While BRICS has offered the ideal platform for South Africa to promote pet causes like United Nations reform, the fact that we are not a ‘natural’ member of the club is seen to leave us in a position of relative weakness.’1 Those who have invoked the issue of natural affinity have done so in terms of the notion that South Africa is not a quintessential BRICS country. This is consistent with the idea that a typical BRICS country must have a large population that is matched by high levels of economic growth. In other words, their assessment of South Africa as a BRICS country is informed by the belief that ‘size matters’. It is therefore not unreasonable to surmise that their logic is, in part, shaped by the view that, in international relations, if it is not the size of your guns, it must be the size of your population and economy that will determine your influence in global matters. Others have even commented that Nigeria is more deserving of a BRICS (maybe BRICN) status given the size of its population, its position in West Africa and the fact that by 2040, according to some projections, Nigeria will be the largest economy on the African continent. What, then, is a mouse like South Africa doing in the same club with elephants such as China, Russia, India and Brazil? If things CHAPTER 23 Domestic Challenges and the African Agenda: Is South Africa just another BRIC in the wall? Aubrey Matshiqi 419 DOMESTIC CHALLENGES AND THE AFRICAN AGENDA: IS SOUTH AFRICA JUST ANOTHER BRIC IN THE WALL? go according to the prediction that Nigeria’s economic performance is going to outstrip that of South Africa in future, will South Africa be able to afford the economic steroids it needs to justify its BRICS membership? According to Patel: South Africa was alive to the opportunity of forming strategic alliances and helping advance the role of emerging economies in restructuring global political , economic and financial architecture. If the Brics nations are too far apart geographically and too disparate politically to forge a useful alliance, then the ideology of multi-lateralism has brought together a subversive new power in politics as well as the world economy.2 The approaches that seek to dismiss South Africa as a serious player in BRICS, in particular, and global affairs, in general, are overly pessimistic and miss the point to some extent. There are two challenges in this regard that South Africa needs to appreciate: first, the management of its own complex identity as a player in international relations, and second, the complex identity of BRICS as a bloc and that of its non-South African components China, Russia,3 India and Brazil. BRICS should be understood and analysed in terms of the tension between the hard power potential of Russia and China, the soft power potential of South Africa, India and Brazil, and the non-interference approach of China to issues of national sovereignty, as well as the African agenda of South Africa. This, by any standard, is a daunting challenge. This and other challenges notwithstanding, I agree with Patel who contends that the decision by the BRIC component to admit South Africa as a member is not as unstrategic as it may have seemed at first. She insists that Brazil, Russia, China and India, to varying degrees, recognise the value that may be added by South Africa to the BRICS agenda. To put this another way, there is a recognition that South Africa is not merely a passenger that will be carried by its BRICS partners but its role is understood in terms of the mutual benefit that will...

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