By Ambassador Bheki Gila
June 2 is upon us and the BRICS’ foreign ministers are meeting in Cape Town to craft the setting of the August summit.
The historic nature of the meeting, as taciturn and unsensational as it seems, is underplayed in the media in general, to great folly.
As diplomatic meetings go, this is the convocation that delivers the penmanship of the summit’s communique.
For all intents and purposes, this is the summit that determines the summit.
They may even decide who joins BRICS eventually. But if Russian President Vladimir Putin is not in it, then it matters little for the sensationalism that feeds war fuel into the regime change fires.
For South Africa, however, this meeting occurs against so much pressure on its national currency, the impugning of the unity of purpose of the ruling party and the dangerous rumours of war in the heightened tension of the Taiwan Strait. To boot, the accusations at South Africa for allegedly selling ordnance of war to Russia have reached deafening decibels of cacophony.
In the meantime, the de-dollarisation stallion has proverbially bolted out of the stable. In its last Asean Summit, the attending heads declared that henceforth, they would be trading among themselves in their own currencies.
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Malaysia and China have announced the promotion of the Asia Development Bank, which shall be promoting local currencies against gold and other commodities. Saudi Arabia and China will be settling crude oil transactions in Yuan. India is settling oil bills with Russia in rupees. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization members have similarly adopted the resolution to trade among each other in their own national currencies. If the BRICS main motivator is to trade in own currencies, perhaps it is time for the Americans to join the BRICS fraternity.
Putting the BRICS de-dollarisation initiative into context, in spite of the insouciant hollowness of the moniker, the discussion among the BRICS’ member countries, part of which culminated from comprehensive plans of a lesser known IBSA, which stands for India, Brazil and South Africa – an ideal, which was carefully crafted in 2011 in Fortaleza, Brazil.
The intent and detail of the Fortaleza Agreement is imperative in understanding the mechanism of BRICS member countries trading with their own national currencies.
The biggest threat of the greenback’s hegemony may arguably derive from South America, its professed Monroe backyard. It is the announcement by Brazilian President Lula da Silva that South America shall be establishing a single currency with which it will be using to trade among itself and, by extension, use to trade with the rest of the world.
Such currency may even cushion those countries that find themselves under the asphyxiating unilateral sanctions imposed on them by some country or a combination of like-minded countries.
Often, the question arises about what will replace the dollar. With the ferocity of the enquiry and its frequency, whether the motives of the questions are altruistic and academic, their political propriety however, sounds farcical and irrelevant.
When two or more countries gather and conceive of the idea of using own national currencies and agree on a formula, they are not thinking of an alternative to replace the dollar. They have only awoken to the reality that they are indeed themselves the alternative. It is only a binary vision borne of a unipolar dystopia that sees things in either or, us or them and with us or against us.
The idea of putting enormous political and economic pressure on South Africa, is like so many of its ilk, poorly thought out. But then again, in a regime change agenda, nothing needs to be well thought out. A wide sweeping accusatory allegation is enough.
In spite of Washington’s plenipotentiary in Pretoria swearing on his blood on national television that the South African government had delivered arms and ammunition to a sanctioned Russiam, neither he nor the DA have produced a verisimilitude of evidentiary proof, belying the aphorism that he who alleges must prove.
It is tempting to speculate on the DA’s attraction to a regime change agenda, with its utterances and secret visits to Ukraine placing it squarely at the front line of the hegemon’s storm troopers. So much so that if the DA were the ruling party, a lot of South African blood and treasure would probably have been volunteered to the meat-grinding front lines of the Maidan-Nato misadventure.
Having failed to dislodge the ANC from power, it has resolved to consort and, possibly, enlist the graces of the most benevolent regime changer. If the DA is not fully practised in alleging without the need to provide proof, the hegemon is a fully graduated master. And one million dead Iraqis can testify to that.
The ultimate goal of all the pressure, is to collapse the rand, drive a wedge in the irreconcilable faultlines of South Africa, especially racial faultlines, and, as a consequence, foster a socio-political disaffection among the populace.
The ruling party and South Africans overall, may have to contend with a possible military coup, comprehensive economic sanctions, no fly-zones, a civil war and the announcement of the breaking away of the Western Cape province from the polity of the Republic of South Africa.
Whatever it is, the collapse or splintering of South Africa may not be enough to prevent the burgeoning of a new politico-economic paradigm de-dollarizing at an incredibly fast and unstoppable pace.
Ambassador Bheki Gila is a Barrister-at-Law.
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