Our BRICS, our media

Although the official start date is the 22nd of August, the first sideline meeting in the current BRICS summit is off and running and this is on a business track. Media briefings at this time are ongoing.

The SA BRICS Business Council (SABBC) in collaboration with the Department of Trade Industry and Competition officially kicked off their BRICS Business program, at the Gallagher Convention Centre, with various sectoral-facing engagements, including a BRICS Energy Cooperation, to foster knowledge and best practice sharing. The exhibition serves as a platform for showcasing products and services from the BRICS countries as well as business-to-business interaction aimed at increasing intra-BRICS trade and investment.

An interesting development is in the media space. Russia’s Sputnik news agency proposes developing a shared platform for BRICS news agencies, Dmitry Gornostaev, deputy editor-in-chief of Sputnik’s parent company the Rossiya Segodnya international media group, said at a media forum in South Africa.   The first step has already been accomplished in cooperation with South Africa’s leading agency, ANA, and China’s global agency Xinhua. The agencies’ news is available in each other’s editorial terminals, he added.

It is very important to get verified and precise information from each other, “not tainted by narratives and fakes of the West”. The deputy editor-in-chief added that Russia should not get news from Africa from Western media reports. Likewise, African countries should learn about what Russia is up to from Russian journalists.  Sputnik has reached out and brought African journalists together to attend master classes and to prepare for this new media platform.

This is a worthy initiative and will block the Western fake news at the knees.

The Western fake news has been on top form, with Bloomberg announcing that BRICS is Broken and Should Be Scrapped and is an artificial transcontinental alliance is past its sell-by date.  Of course, the fact of countries lining up to join escapes the pea brains of the Western press.   Reuters is trying to make hay out of the announcement that Morocco has not applied to join BRICS.  But it is almost impossible now to hide the excitement on the eve of the Summit.  The BRICS bloc, after this summit, will be bigger than the economy of the G7 by possibly orders of magnitude. 4 out of 5 people live in developing nations. But where is the voice of those 6, 7 billion people?  “We need multilateral organizations that will truly represent the Global South. And that’s what BRICS can be,” says Indian geopolitical analyst S.L. Kanthan.

The Global South senses that it has a new international home, the ability to take part in shaping an economic order that is to its benefit, and a platform on which to develop true sovereignty, democracy in its true sense, and freedom in global trade and finance. 

The New Development Bank stated that they will make 30% of loans available in local currencies but there is a big ask on the table to them.  It is not enough!  More should be made available in local currencies.  Western dominance in local economic affairs should be changed urgently.  The Ugandian Finance Minister stated that what is needed is investment without the conditionalities such as those that have been witnessed in the latest altercation between Uganda and the USA.  (The World Bank withdraw support to Uganda because of their new anti-lgbt laws).  “International finance should be utilized to usher the world into a shared global prosperity and not for scoring political points over non-economic issues,” Dr. Ruzive concluded.

BRICS as a work in progress, cannot be ignored any longer.