TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Jokowi to attend BRICS summit in South Africa
The meeting, which brings together major emerging economies countries led by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, will be held for three days starting Tuesday.
Change Size
P
resident Joko “Jokowi” Widodo departed for South Africa on Sunday to attend the BRICS summit in Johannesburg amid speculation that the country could join the group as its latest member.
The meeting, which brings together major emerging economies countries led by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, will be held for three days starting Tuesday.
"Indonesia has been invited to the BRICS summit and of course in between the BRICS summit there will be meetings with other world leaders," Jokowi told reporters ahead of his departure.
The trip is Jokowi 's first to Africa as leader of South East Asia's biggest economy.
He said earlier in the week that his government had not decided whether or not Indonesia would join BRICS.
The group, formally launched in 2009, seeks to tame Western economic domination in global affairs.
It represents 23 percent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP) and 42 percent of the world's population.
Aside from attending the BRICS summit, Jokowi said he would also visit Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique to strengthen cooperation.
Tanzania and Kenya opened embassies in Jakarta last year, while Mozambique is the first African country to sign a Preferential Trade Agreement with Indonesia.
Representing billions of people across three continents, with economies undergoing varying levels of growth, the BRICS share one thing in common – disdain for a world order they see as serving the interests of rich Western powers.
"The traditional global governing system has become dysfunctional, deficient and missing in action," Chen Xiaodong, the Chinese ambassador to Pretoria said at a briefing on Friday, adding the BRICS are "increasingly becoming a staunch force in defending international justice".
There is growing interest in the bloc – at least 40 countries have expressed interest in joining, and 23 of those have formally submitted applications to become BRICS members.
Anil Sooklal, South Africa's ambassador-at-large for Asia and the BRICS, told AFP on Friday that one of the reasons countries are lining up to join is "the very polarized world we live in, that has been further polarized by the Russia-Ukraine crisis, and where countries are being forced to take sides".
"Countries in the South don't want to be told who to support, how to behave and how to conduct their sovereign affairs. They are strong enough now to assert their respective positions," added Sooklal.
The BRICS have raised hope for countries looking to restructure the global "architecture", he said.
"The major markets are now in the Global South... but we are still on the margins in terms of global decision-making."
Lebogang Legodi, international politics lecturer at the University of Limpopo, agrees that many states keen on joining the group "are seeing BRICS as an alternative to the current hegemony" in world affairs.
Around 50 other leaders will attend a "friends of BRICS" program during the summit, which will be held at a convention centre in the heart of Johannesburg's Sandton, historically referred to as the richest square-mile on the continent.
This year's gathering is themed "BRICS and Africa: Partnership for mutually accelerated growth, sustainable development and inclusive multilateralism".
It comes at "a critical inflection point," said Steven Gruzd of the Africa-Russia Africa project at the South African Institute of International Affairs.
"The current multilateral system is under strain," he said.
A decision on expanding the BRICS membership is expected at the end of the summit, according to Sooklal.
An upbeat Ramaphosa told a meeting of the ruling ANC party in Johannesburg on Saturday that "we are going to have a fantastic BRICS summit".
He said the presence of so many heads of state "goes to show the influence and the impact that South Africa" has in the world.
But experts closely watching the BRICS are not very optimistic about the meeting's outcomes.
"I don't think this summit will yield those dramatic results because the power is still with Western countries. China is rising, but is not the dominant power yet," said SAIIA's Gruzd.
