“As South Africa, we have been putting on the table that we need to think about our trade relations and our investment relations in a rather different way. One of the things we have been saying is that when we talk about building trade relations perhaps we need to do it somewhat different to what is the conventional way.”


DTI Minister Dr Rob Davies


This interest in Africa, with a combined population of more than 1 billion – 277 million of them in the Southern African Development Community – lends special significance to South Africa’s BRICS presence. Davies says, “We are very conscious of the fact that we are in there in part as an emerging economy in our own right but also in part because we are a presence in the African continent.


“We continue to be a significant gateway into the African continent. We make a distinction between being a gateway and a gatekeeper. We do not try to say that all trade and investment relations from other BRICS countries must come through us. It would be a lost cause if we tried to do that. But we know that many companies from BRICS and from elsewhere find it convenient to work with South Africa and South African institutions in terms of their broader continental programmes. In one way or another, our fellow BRICS members realise that in choosing us.”


As noted by those who were surprised that South Africa got the nod to join BRICS, this country’s domestic economy is not big enough to drive global growth, a point Davies recognises, “We also need to build a stronger proxy for a domestic market, which is a regional market. All the other members of BRICS have sizeable populations and large domestic markets and those domestic markets either have been or are going to become the engines of growth for them.”


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