http://www.foreignpolicy.com/sponsored/southafricaat20/seeking_global_reform_to_build_a_better_south_africa#!/
The 69th session of the UN General Assembly has opened in New York. Maite
Nkoana-Mashabane, South Africa’s minister of international relations and
cooperation, will be there with mixed emotions. “I always cringe when I
hear that in September we must come back to the United Nations just to talk
about the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),” she said in an interview on
the sidelines of President Obama’s US-Africa Leaders Summit in August.
The minister did not mean she was uncomfortable with the targets UN members
set themselves in 2000 for ameliorating the developing world’s economic and
social ills by 2015. She simply wished the agenda could include progress on
a separate but in her view closely related issue. “2015, for us, the
developing countries, should be about how far we have gone in reforming
global institutions of governance,” starting with the UN Security Council,
a “dinosaur…in need of urgent democratization.”
Equally in need of reform, she said, were the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, institutions still dominated by the powers
that founded them at Bretton Woods in 1994. They hold their annual meetings
in Washington in October. Would the MDG’s be closer to being met were the
Bank and Fund were more truly representative of the world as it is now?
Quite likely yes, in the minister’s view. "We have seen fewer and fewer
good graduates of World Bank [programs] where you could say that these ones
were actually helped and that's why they are successful."
A month before the Washington summit, Ms. Nkoana-Mashabane was with
President Jacob Zuma in Fortaleza, Brazil, for the 6th annual summit of the
BRICS, the grouping of major emerging powers – Brazil, the Russian
Federation, India and China – to which South Africa was invited to add the
“S” as Africa’s de facto representative in 2010. In the minister’s words,
“we are proud members of an emerging group that represents 42.6 percent of
the world’s population and 18 percent of global trade, attracts 53 percent
of foreign capital, accounts for 20 percent of global gross domestic
product (GDP), generated 61 percent of economic growth in the world economy
and has an estimated $4 trillion foreign reserves base.”
The big news at the summit was the launch of the New Development Bank (NDB)
and the Contingency Reserve Agreement, with functions paralleling those of
the bodies created at Bretton Woods. As the minister explained in a speech
on her return, “the establishment of BRICS was anchored upon a shared
vision to pursue the restructuring of the global political, economic and
financial architecture into one that is more equitable, balanced and rests
on the important pillar of multilateralism.”
“2015, for us, the developing countries, should be about how far we have
gone in reforming global institutions of governance…” Maite
Nkoana-Mashabane, South African Minister of International Relations and
Cooperation
The five countries will start by capitalizing the NDB at $50 billion, each
paying in $10 billion. Within 20 years, by some estimates, the bank could
be helping leverage infrastructure investments in developing countries
totaling $68 billion annually. "This would be far bigger than World Bank
loans," Columbia University financial markets expert Stephanie
Griffith-Jones recently wrote in the Financial Times' “beyondbrics” blog.
In an Op-Ed published on the eve of the Fortaleza meeting, Ms.
Nkoana-Mashabane observed that the old South Africa had played “a not
insignificant role” in shaping the post-World War II global hierarchy, as
indeed it did under the leadership of Jan Smuts, a close confidant of
Winston Churchill and author of the UN Charter’s preamble. Given that
history, she wrote, “it is only fitting that on the twentieth anniversary
of our democracy (Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa’s first
post-apartheid president in May, 1994), we and our partners should today be
laying the foundations of a new, more truly representative international
order – one in which all nations, including the North, stand to benefit
from greater inclusion and shared prosperity.”
In the interview, the minister emphasized that while South Africa’s first
allegiance was to the nations of the South (“Historically, I am sure we
would have never have won our freedom if not for [their] support and
solidarity,” she said), “the formations that South Africa belongs to are
not anti other blocs but they are for developing countries…We don’t go
round provoking people, we do things that are good for humankind and the
world.”
In support of that assertion, the minister can (and does) point to a May
2013 Op-Ed on the BRICS bank by Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph
Stiglitz and former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern. The NDB,
they argued, “will not only be a driver for sustainable in the developing
and emerging world, but would also foster reform in the existing
multilateral financial institutions – changes from which all of us, in the
developed and developing world alike, will benefit.”
That includes South Africa, whose foreign policy, the minister said, “must
start at home – that is why we speak of a better South Africa in a better
Africa in a better world.” President Zuma put it even more simply when he
gave South Africa’s diplomats their marching orders at the annual
heads-of-mission conference on September 1. “The economy is the apex
priority over the next five years.”
Since the 2008 global financial crisis, South Africa’s growth rates have
been trailing those posted in much of the rest of the continent in part
because the economy is growing from a more developed and mature base, in
part because South Africa has outgrown its power supply and other
infrastructure, and in part because of what Mr. Zuma has described as “an
untenable labor relations environment.” In response, the government has
committed to a program of “radical economic transformation” Mr. Zuma hopes
will boost growth from under 2 percent currently to 5 percent by 2019.
To meet that target, the government is investing massively in
infrastructure. Outlays during Mr Zuma’s first five year term topped a
trillion rand ($92 billion). Another 847 billion rand ($78 billion) has
been budgeted for projects over the next three years.
That, said Ms Nkoana-Mashabane, is why “you’ll see if you come now we look
like a construction site.”
Received on Fri Sep 26 2014 - 05:37:13 EDT