“We must not be caught just lamenting the lack of opportunities or the declining range of opportunities in our established relations. We need to understand the big fundamental forces that are at work in the world economy and we need to try to position ourselves accordingly.”


The African continent faces a number of challenges in leveraging its combined economic strength and growing consumer market. Weak border operations and poor infrastructure – rail, road and power – are among the issues that hamper continental economic integration. But Davies is optimistic, “The African continent is in a very favourable position. After China and India, the African continent is the next big growth story. So we need to work to consolidate that as well as consolidate our own position within (the continent) and if we do that, whatever short- term hiccups we may face in these six months in particular, we are in a good space and we need to consolidate and build on that.”


Davies sees an advantage in South Africa getting into BRICS on the ground floor. President Jacob Zuma and his entourage attended the first five-member summit meeting of BRICS in China in 2011 and their second in India at the end of March 2012. All eyes will be on South Africa when it hosts the next meeting in 2013. “We can shape a process


14 Management Today | May 2012


of developing co-operation with the major emerging economies of the world. We have a possibility, through being members of BRICS, to shape the pattern of intra-BRICS co- operation in ways which are beneficial to us as well as the other members.


“We also joined BRICS at a very important and quite auspicious moment because the BRICS have not yet, before we joined, worked through a programme on how we promote co- operation within the BRICS themselves. What does intra-BRICS co-operation mean? For example, how do we promote trade between ourselves without resorting to convertible currencies of the developed world?


“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 differently to the conventional way where we emphasise complementarities,


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