The 15th BRICS BRICS Summit has come and gone. We cleaned up Sandton for the visitors, and when they left we packed it all away and allowed the chaos to return.
It reminded me of the South African story where mothers keep the best crockery and cutlery for the once-a-year visitors while the family suffer the daily indignity of using badly damaged cutlery and crockery.
The ongoing and morally compromised dichotomy between the state, its friends, and its citizens is no longer a thing we should accept as normal.
If the state cannot provide for its citizens what it provides for its friends, then it should be called out. This also happened during the 2010 World Cup.
Most of the supporting resources and infrastructure were dismantled after the World Cup and citizens had to make do once again with bad public transport and unsafe walking routes.
We all saw hundreds of photographs of BRICS leaders, who all lead countries of vast inequalities, lavishing in the luxury that most of their citizens would never attain in their lifetime.
Again, if the new BRICS community wishes to show the world new ways of global engagement, then the disconnect between wealth reserved for its visitors and poverty reserved for its citizens should not be acceptable at any level.
These old-world protocols need to be done away with. The risk is that BRICS would become just another pole and not a new and alternative pole to the others. Alexandra borders Sandton as poverty borders wealth and as injustice borders justice. We cannot pretend it doesn’t exist.
Now more than ever we should object to entering spaces where it’s only one version and one layer of our daily multi-version, multi-layered realities. While the BRICS summit was under way, India landed its Chandrayaan’s Vikram lander on the moon’s south pole.
Russia was allegedly involved in the plane crash that likely killed Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin on the same day. We should all hope that BRICS will set a new tone for global engagement that demonstrates that its leaders are no longer strongmen whose geopolitics are only rooted in ‘progress or payback’ as its own two extreme poles.
With the US caught up in the Ukraine-Russia war and its 2024 election battles, it will naturally be distracted from its larger global role. This will give time for the new BRICS to cement its role on the global stage.
It will be enormously sad if all that BRICS seeks to do is duplicate other global bodies and replace them as the new home for the political and economic elites instead of building a truly equitable and just global system.
The challenge that most leaders have is that they don’t understand how to undo injustice and poverty systems, even those who lead very poor nations.
It all begins with historical belief systems and personal convictions. If you still believe that the words clean, safe and smart are to be reserved only for your special guests and not for your own citizens, then you will continue to perform like that on the global stage.
If the current state of national and global inequality and injustice does not make you reach for the vomit bowl, then you are not the leaders we need. If you still propagate and entertain narratives that contain words and intentions that are offensive to people’s culture, race, lifestyles or religion, then you are not the leaders we need.
With BRICS expanding its membership, it is valid for observers to be sceptical that it will soon become just another romanticised old-world cartel entrenched in failed attempts to restate old, outdated ideas.
We can no longer tolerate the luxury of our leaders while they ignore our poverty. We can no longer secure their living while they ignore our dying. We can no longer tolerate cleaning up our Sandtons for them while they ignore our Alexandras.
* Lorenzo A. Davids.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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