As South Africans we tend to be overly negative about what we have to offer the world, either depicting ourselves as the small “s” in BRICS, or as the lesser of the five great emerging economies. What I took away from the BRICS Summit this week was that South Africa actually has huge potential, and we just have to believe in ourselves.
One anecdote stood out for me in particular, and that is an example that Minister of Trade and Industry Rob Davies shared with the media at the start of the BRICS Summit. Davies talked about the fact that the Hisense, which is the large Chinese manufacturer of TVs and household appliances, has its second best-performing branch in South Africa.
The Chinese manager of Hisense based in Cape Town revealed to Davies that their top performing branch was in the US, then comes South Africa, which is then followed by countries from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). To hear that shocked me as all we tend to hear is complaints about how South African labour is too costly, investors are put off by the lack of physical security in the country, our bureaucratic red tape is onerous, and our workers don’t have the same work ethic as those in Asia.
But the fact that the South African branch of Hisense is hailed as one of the best-performing branches in the world says a lot about our capabilities as a workforce, and also about the investment environment that South Africa offers. What I also discovered to be remarkable this week is that it is the first time in many years since a new car manufacturing plant has been opened in South Africa.
This is why the opening of the Beijing Automotive Group plant in Port Elizabeth on Tuesday was celebrated with such fanfare, with President Cyril Ramaphosa and President Xi Jinping inaugurating the launch via video conference from the CSIR. Davies hailed this as the biggest single investment in our country’s auto sector.
Not only will the plant create at least 800 direct jobs in the Nelson Mandela Bay area, but it aims to produce 50 000 vehicles a year by 2022.
The speed at which this project moved from conceptualisation to fruition is also incredible. The project to establish the plant was agreed to and signed at the state visit of the Chinese president before the Forum on China-Africa Co-operation in December 2015, and it took only two and a half years to get to the launch where we saw the new vehicles rolling off the assembly line this week. What this indicates is that Chinese promises of investment and commitment to manufacturing projects are reliable, and delivered in a timely manner, outdoing expectations.
This should set the stage for South Africa to become a manufacturing hub for the African continent, particularly of vehicles, auto parts, and even railway carriages. This is the vision of our policy makers, and there is no reason why the objective can’t be realised. The extensive new infrastructure that is being rolled out across the continent will greatly facilitate such intra-African trade, and assist us to build economies of scale.
Africa still desperately needs infrastructure beyond the major urban centres, without which it will struggle to raise the living standards of its people. This is why the successful track record of the BRICS New Development Bank should be hailed as it will enable South Africa and eventually other African states to access much-needed funding for infrastructure development. As Dr Iqbal Surve, the chairman of the BRICS Business Council, noted this week, the NDB over the next few years will have provided more loans to the BRICS countries than the World Bank provided over 75 years. The question remains why infrastructure development in Africa is not a priority of the World Bank.
So for those who talked down the significance of the BRICS Summit, they need to remember what lies behind the ceremonial talk - it is a very real commitment to enhance the development prospects of the emerging economies.
It sees the collective pooling of intellectual capital, skills and resources as a way to overcome poverty and underdevelopment.
Yes, it is true that there are BRICS members with less than acceptable human rights records, and more attention needs to be paid to this area, but it doesn’t take away from the importance of what BRICS is trying to do for the developing south. What lies as a difficult challenge for South Africa and our Department of International Relations is how to carry forward a human rights foreign policy, while at the same time partnering with leaders who preside over human rights abuses with seeming impunity.
* Ebrahim is group foreign editor for Independent Media