South Africa and BRICS+ — Steven Gruzd on Pretoria's calculation

Steven Gruzd, head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in Johannesburg, has been the most consistent Pretoria-based analyst of South Africa's positioning within the BRICS grouping. His 2023-2024 work, including SAIIA policy briefs and *Daily Maverick* commentary, captures the tensions the 2023 enlargement created for South African diplomacy.

South Africa joined BRIC (Brazil-Russia-India-China) in 2010 at Beijing's invitation, becoming BRICS. The membership was always asymmetric — South Africa's $400 billion GDP versus the others' $1.5-18 trillion ranges — and was understood as an African anchor rather than a peer-power addition. Pretoria's political return was a seat at the table of an emerging non-Western governance forum, useful both for African continental leadership posture and for navigation between Washington and Beijing.

The August 2023 Johannesburg summit, hosted by South Africa under Cyril Ramaphosa's chairmanship, agreed to invite Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Egypt, and Ethiopia as new members effective January 1, 2024 (with Argentina invited and subsequently declining under Javier Milei). The expanded grouping — sometimes called BRICS+ — pushed South Africa's share of total membership GDP below 2 percent.

Gruzd's analytical reading distinguishes three Pretoria interests now in tension. First, the African-anchor role the original membership delivered is structurally diluted by Egypt's and Ethiopia's entry, since Egypt has its own claim to African leadership and Ethiopia represents an East African alternative. Second, the navigational utility between Washington and Beijing remains, but it gets more politically expensive as the expanded BRICS+ takes more visibly anti-Western positions on Ukraine, Gaza, and dollar-system reform. Third, the practical economic returns to BRICS+ membership — including New Development Bank financing — remain modest relative to South Africa's other multilateral engagements.

Pretoria's 2024 hedging response is visible. South Africa supported the BRICS+ enlargement and the dollar-alternatives discussion but declined to back the more aggressive Russian framing on Ukraine, hosted the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice on its own initiative rather than as a BRICS+ position, and maintained the African Growth and Opportunity Act benefits with Washington. Gruzd's reading is that the doctrine remains coherent but the political and reputational management costs of maintaining it are rising, and the 2025-2027 government-of-national-unity coalition will face harder choices than the previous ANC majority had to.

­Steven Gruzd, head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg, has produced the most consistent South-African-side analytical reading of Pretoria's BRICS engagement since the country's 2010 accession to the grouping. His work, including SAIIA policy papers and contributions to the South African Journal of International Affairs, frames Pretoria's BRICS calculation as a balancing exercise between three competing strategic interests: African-continental positioning, Global South solidarity rhetoric, and the bilateral economic relationships with traditional Western partners that remain central to South African external accounts.

The 2023 Johannesburg Summit, hosted by President Cyril Ramaphosa's administration, was the South African moment in BRICS+ history. The summit's principal output — the membership expansion to include Iran, the UAE, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia (with Argentina backing out post-election) — was negotiated under South African chair-ship and reflected the post-expansion grouping that took effect on 1 January 2024. Pretoria's role in shaping the expansion criteria, in mediating between Russian and Chinese ambitions for the bloc's strategic posture, and in preserving the bloc's developmental-finance focus, was the most active phase of South African BRICS diplomacy in the membership's history.

The Pretoria-Beijing economic relationship is the most important bilateral within the BRICS framework from the South African perspective. China is South Africa's largest single trading partner, accounting for approximately 15% of South African exports and imports across the post-2010 decade. Chinese investment in South African mining, manufacturing, and infrastructure has been substantial, though the volumes have moderated post-2018 as Chinese outbound FDI globally has slowed. The South African position on currency-settlement diversification within BRICS has been measured: Pretoria supports the development of local-currency settlement infrastructure but has not advanced the more ambitious de-dollarization framing that Russian and Iranian counterparts have promoted.

The Pretoria-Moscow bilateral has been the most diplomatically complicated dimension of the BRICS engagement since the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. South Africa's abstention from successive UN General Assembly votes condemning the invasion, the controversies around the 2023 Lady R cargo-ship incident, and the political-rhetorical tilt toward the Russian framing of the conflict in some official statements have produced friction with the Western trading partners (the EU, the US, the UK) whose bilateral trade-and-investment relationships remain central to South African external accounts. The 2023 ICC arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, which constrained the Russian president's ability to attend the Johannesburg Summit, was the most visible test of how the diplomatic conflict between BRICS membership obligations and ICC-related legal obligations is managed in practice.

The Pretoria-Brasília bilateral is the South-South dimension of the BRICS relationship that has received less attention in Western commentary but has institutional significance. South Africa and Brazil are the two BRICS democracies of the Global South, and the bilateral coordination on issues ranging from G20 development agenda items to IMF quota reform to the World Trade Organization dispute reform has been substantial across multiple electoral cycles in both countries. The Lula-Ramaphosa political alignment, more natural than the Lula-Putin or Lula-Xi alignments, has been an institutional asset for the bloc's developmental-finance agenda.

The forward question that Gruzd's framework most clearly answers is whether South African BRICS engagement is durable across the political transitions Pretoria has experienced. The 2024 South African general election produced a coalition Government of National Unity that includes the African National Congress, the Democratic Alliance, and several smaller parties. The bilateral and multilateral commitments that the previous ANC-majority governments built up are inherited by the coalition, with the Foreign Minister position (held since June 2024 by Ronald Lamola) responsible for managing the continuity. The doctrinal commitment to non-aligned-style hedging between the major powers, the Global South-solidarity framing of multilateral engagement, and the preservation of Western commercial relationships are all expected to remain in place across the coalition's term. The BRICS engagement specifically is one of the few foreign-policy areas where the ANC, the DA, and the broader coalition partners share substantially aligned positions; the doctrinal continuity is therefore politically stable.

The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.

The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.