South Africa will host this year’s BRICS Summit from 22-24 August at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg after the country took up the one-year rotating chairmanship of the BRICS bloc in January. 

The theme of the 2023 summit is: “BRICS and Africa: Partnership for Mutually Accelerated Growth, Sustainable Development and Inclusive Multilateralism.” As it did when it hosted the BRICS Summit in 2018 and 2013, South Africa will include an outreach programme which will be attended by many African leaders. 

Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined the BRIC acronym in 2001 to describe the economic potential and investment attractiveness of Brazil, Russia, India and China. The BRIC powers had their first summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia in 2009. South Africa joined in 2010, making it BRICS. 

The BRICS bloc accounts for more than 42% of the world’s population, 30% of its territory, 23% of global GDP, and 18% of global trade. However, only about 6% of the total trade of the five BRICS countries is with each other. 

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South Africa is the smallest in the alliance in terms of population and economic weight. 

This will be the first in-person BRICS summit since 2019. (Meetings took place virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic.)

Who’s attending?

Brazilian President Lula da Silva, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will attend the summit in Sandton. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin will not attend in person, as he is under a warrant of arrest from the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Being a member of the ICC, South Africa would have been obliged to arrest Putin had he set foot in the country. If South Africa didn’t arrest him, it would breach its international obligations to the ICC and also break South Africa’s own ICC Implementation Act.

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Putin will participate remotely, and Russia will be represented in Johannesburg by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. 

Sixty-seven leaders from the Global South have also been invited to attend and meet the BRICS leaders in outreach sessions, according to South Africa’s Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Naledi Pandor. Among the invitees is Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi — Russia’s close military ally — who is expected to attend, Daily Maverick reported. But Pandor has insisted that Raisi’s likely attendance at the BRICS Summit does not mean the block is becoming pro-Russian or anti-Western. 

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron, who had indicated that he would like to attend, did not crack the nod and has not been issued with an invitation. 

Ramaphosa has also invited the leaders of 20 international organisations, including UN Secretary-General António Guterres and African Union Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat. 

What is up for discussion?

The expansion of BRICS is expected to be high on the agenda when leaders meet next week. South Africa proposed expanding the membership of BRICS in 2018, but other members — notably Russia and China — were reluctant at the time. The leaders decided instead to consolidate and shelve discussions about expansion. A major decision of the 2022 BRICS Summit was to begin the process of expanding the membership of the bloc. 

However, the expansion of BRICS has emerged as a prickly issue among the five leaders, who are not in agreement about the merits of expanding membership, let alone the criteria for accepting applicants. 

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Official sources have told Daily Maverick that China and Russia — BRICS’s two autocratic members — are pushing to expand membership, while democratic Brazil and India are wary, and South Africa is on the fence. Russia’s strong impetus for expansion is believed to be driven largely by its isolation from the West because of its invasion of Ukraine, while China is seeking to boost its geopolitical clout amid increasing US-China tensions over Taiwan. 

BRICS officials and foreign ministers have been working on the criteria for membership, according to Pandor, and will draft recommendations to be considered by the BRICS leaders at next week’s summit. 

Interest in joining BRICS has soared in recent years, with 23 nations having formally applied to be part of the bloc. Several other countries including Comoros, Gabon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have informally shown an interest in doing so. 

South Africa’s BRICS “sherpa” — the official in charge of this year’s summit — Anil Sooklal believes big-power contestation is driving interest by countries in the Global South in joining the BRICS group, Daily Maverick reported. And Pandor has said the increased interest from countries in joining BRICS indicated recognition of the bloc as a leader of the Global South, and the benefits of membership. 

Ahead of the summit, at the bloc’s foreign ministers’ meeting, the topics of discussion included the need for BRICS countries to conduct trade and financial transactions in their own currencies, rather than the US dollar. The BRICS leaders are expected to discuss deepening the use of local currencies in trade between member countries at next week’s summit, Bloomberg reported. DM