His Excellency Ambassador Matjila,
South African BRICS Sherpa and Director-General of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation,
Prof Ahmed Bawa, Vice-Chancellor of Durban University of Technology,
Dr Olive Shisana, Chief Executive Officer of the Human Sciences Research Council,
Dr Sarah Mosoetsa, Deputy-Director of our special project to establish a National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences,
Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues from the five BRICS nations.
It gives me great pleasure to be able to meet with you, academics and researchers from leading developing economies. For those of you who have come from outside South Africa, I’d like to welcome you warmly and I trust that you are being made to feel welcome by your South African colleagues and by all the South Africans that you come into contact with.
Our countries, the BRICS, are about to hold a summit to discuss matters of mutual interest in a quest to find ways to improve the living standards of all our people, to educate them, to keep them healthy. The summit will also seek to develop ways for our countries to cooperate with one another so as to create a better, fairer, more peaceful world.
The BRICS grouping is not a power bloc.It is not aimed against any other country or group of countries. It seeks, rather, to enhance cooperation among some of the leading developing nations in order to promote global stability, security and prosperity.
All our countries face the crucial challenge of overcoming poverty, unemployment and inequality in our societies. For this, it is important that we develop policies and strategies to achieve sustained and sustainable economic growth as well as an equitable distribution of resources among our peoples.
These goals are, of course, not unique to the BRICS countries alone and are shared by other developing nations. They will follow the Summit’s deliberations closely and will be keenly interested in the decisions that we take, particular decisions involving the establishment of new development institutions such as the proposed BRICS Bank and the approach that we take to the reform of the institutions of global governance.
The last two decades have seen a fundamental redistribution of global economic power and, accompanying this, of actual political influence. However, the architecture of global governance still reflects the international balance of forces at the end of the Second World War.
The question of how we change the institutions of global governance not only to better reflect the current international balance of forces but also to ensure that the voices and interests of all the world’s people - including those who are currently weak and relatively voiceless - are taken into account.
The theme for the fifth BRICS Summit is: BRICS and AFRICA: Partnership for Development, Integration and Industrialisation. Africa is currently the poorest and least developed continent. But it is also a continent in the early stages of rebirth and growth. Of course this growth is not guaranteed; what looks promising can also go wrong. It is certainly in our interests as South Africans to ensure that they do not. But it is also in the interests of the other BRICS nations and indeed of the developed world.
Integration of the African economies is at an early stage. Although communications infrastructure is improving, it still has a long way to go. It is not possible to travel between many neighbouring countries by train and railway infrastructure is mainly geared to getting raw materials to the coast for export but not for moving goods and people around and within countries or within the continent.
Roads, especially major arterial roads, are in need of serious upgrading. Despite a large expansion of air travel routes in Africa, it is still often easier to fly from one African country to another via Europe rather than directly. Industry, in general, is still weak – especially outside of the raw material, extractive industries.
But, despite these challenges though, Africa’s fortunes are changing for the better. Economic growth rates are increasing in many of our countries, new infrastructure is being built, communication systems and electronic connectivity are expanding and manufacturing industry, though still weak is starting to expand. BRICS countries are partners in a number of development projects, particularly with regard to infrastructure development.
There is a direct interest in extending cooperation between all the BRICS countries and Africa to support the continent’s development agenda, especially as it relates to infrastructure development and industrialisation.
A supportive international environment is important for Africa. It’s not by accident that Africa’s emergence from the morass of stagnation associated with the period of imposed structural adjustment programmes from the mid-70s to the mid-90s has coincided with the emergence of the large BRICS countries as economic giants.
These countries have given African nations the ability to start to escape the clutches of neo-colonial dependence on foreign aid, and the policies and ‘advice’ of Western-controlled finance institutions. Trade and mutually beneficial foreign investment from countries without colonial mind-sets are starting to free Africans to shape their own national economies and polities.
SA freedom, gained in 1994, has ended this county’s isolation from the rest of Africa and has led to the strengthening of its ties with the rest of the continent. South African trade with and investment in the rest of Africa has expanded exponentially since 1994 when this country gained its freedom.
South Africa is the most developed country in Africa, but we are acutely aware that our future wellbeing is inextricably tied to that of our continent. Our own future is tied to the economic development of Africa as a whole and to the establishment of stability and peace throughout the continent. We believe that the other BRICS countries can play an important role in achieving these goals and that they (and the rest of the world), in turn, will benefit from the process.
One of the most important elements of BRICS cooperation should be in the sphere of knowledge production and academic cooperation. To achieve our goals – both in Africa and the world – we need constantly to strengthen our scientific and technical knowledge in all spheres, to deepen our understanding of our societies and those of the rest of the world and to refine and improve our development strategies.
To these ends, we must strengthen the cooperation between ourselves, develop joint research projects, academic exchange projects and deepen the dialogue between our academics. Particularly important, I think, is the need to cooperate in the area of expanding cooperation with regard to post-graduate studies.
All our countries include excellent universities and colleges as well as institutions that face many challenges to meet the expectations of our peoples. Academic cooperation can help us all to strengthen all of these institutions, help to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Most of our universities have traditionally had much stronger ties with Western academic institutions than with those in other developing countries.
Of course, those ties with Western universities are beneficial and must continue, but it is anomalous that our ties with countries that face similar challenges of development are relatively weak. Economists and economic historians in South African universities, for example, tend to know more about the British or American paths and strategies of economic development than about those of contemporary developing countries in Asia or Latin America whose challenges are more similar to our own.
And I dare say that it is likely that the similar knowledge gaps about Africa also exist in other developing countries, including the BRICS. In South African we are about to establish a National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Its main purpose will be to strengthen the study of these disciplines in this country. But an important part of its mandate will be to build ties with scholars across the African continent and the global South.
The Deputy-Director of the interim structure that is establishing the institute, Dr Sarah Mosoetsa, is here at this Academic Forum, and I hope that many of our visitors will take this opportunity to open contacts with her. And of course, please take the opportunity to build your relations with our long-established Human Sciences Research Council and with the natural and social scientists from many of our universities and research institutes. South African delegates should take full advantage of this opportunity to build contacts and partnerships.
To all the delegates, I extend my best wishes for a successful Academic Forum. I hope that it will make an important considering to understanding the BRICS group of countries and the challenges that face them in a globalising world. I look forward to seeing the report of your deliberations especially as they relate to understanding the capacity for collaboration amongst the BRICS nations in high-level educational enterprises, including science, technology and post-graduate education.
Partnerships in natural and human sciences, technology, and post-graduate education should logically form the basis for further intra-BRICS development and integration. Your debates and conclusions should also contribute to the understanding of our political leadership as it deliberates at this Summit and beyond. I wish you all well for the remainder of this Forum.
I thank you!
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