The Moroccan government has firmly and furiously denied the South African government’s announcement that Morocco had applied for membership of the BRICS bloc, which will discuss expanding its membership at its summit in Sandton this week.

The Moroccan government says it has neither applied for membership nor will it accept the invitation it received to attend the BRICS-Africa outreach meeting at the summit.

“Morocco will not take part in the BRICS-Africa outreach meeting at any level whatsoever,” an official of Morocco’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Daily Maverick.

He said the invitation to the summit was not a BRICS or African Union initiative, but an invitation from South Africa in its national capacity. And so Morocco had rejected the invitation on the basis of its “strained relations” with South Africa, said the official, who asked to remain anonymous.

He explained, “South Africa has always shown a primary hostility towards the Kingdom [of Morocco] and has systematically taken negative and dogmatic positions on the question of the Moroccan Sahara.”

What Rabat calls the “Moroccan Sahara,” is more generally referred to as the Western Sahara, the territory south of Morocco which Morocco claims, but which many of its own people insist is a separate independent country called the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). South Africa and several other African states as well as the African Union recognise the SADR, and that has strained relations with Rabat.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Morocco and South Africa renew war of words over Western Sahara

The official accused Pretoria of increasing its “notoriously malicious actions against Morocco’s higher interests”, both nationally and within the African Union. 

Last week, International Relations and Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor gave journalists a list of 23 countries which she said had formally applied to join BRICS. Morocco was on the list.

Pandor said that 67 leaders of Africa and the Global South had been invited to the summit to meet the five BRICS leaders in “outreach” components of the event. She did not name all of these leaders as she said they were still responding to the invitations.

The Moroccan official said South Africa’s invitation to the BRICS meeting was a “deliberate and provocative” breach of protocol. He added that many countries and entities “appear to have been invited arbitrarily by the host country, without any real basis or prior consultation with the other member countries of the BRICS group.

“It had thus become clear that South Africa was going to hijack this event from its nature and purpose, to serve a hidden agenda,” he said.

The official said that Morocco did maintain “substantial and promising” bilateral relations with the other four members of the BRICS bloc and even had strategic partnership agreements with three of them. But he was adamant that Morocco had never formally applied for membership of BRICS.

“Once again, South African diplomacy has arrogated to itself the right to talk about Morocco and its relationship with the BRICS without prior consultation.”

 “There is as yet no framework or precise procedures governing the expansion of this grouping,” the official said.

Read more in Daily Maverick: ​​The BRICS Summit in Johannesburg — what’s it all about?

Another official told Daily Maverick that Morocco had inquired about the criteria and procedures for joining BRICS. It appears this might have been interpreted by Pretoria as an application to join.

Morocco seems particularly concerned about the possibility that Iran and Venezuela might join BRICS. They were both on the list of 23 which Pandor announced. She also said that Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had been invited to participate in the outreach session and was likely to attend.

Daily Maverick approached Pandor’s spokesperson for comment on Morocco’s reaction, but had not received a reply at the time of publication. DM