PEDRO MZILENI | New Brics bloc will democratise world economy and Global South future

The addition of Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Argentina, Egypt, and Iran to the Brics block is the consolidation of a long struggle to ultimately end the domination of this planet by Washington.

The world in the past 80 years has been ruled according to the template set by the aftermath of World War 2 in the late 1940s. That era saw the establishment of the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as the three institutions that will govern and control the economies, governments and security matters of all nation states in the world.

All these three institutions are based in the US – a single nation state which has used systems of slavery, neoliberalism and wars to gain control of every other nation state in the world. This assumption of the global superpower status by the US was done alongside its West European allies – the UK, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and Italy in the main – who used systems of settler colonialism, land dispossession, apartheid and open genocides to capture people, oceans and landscapes in the Global South to maintain supreme control.

The creation of the IMF, the World Bank and the UN therefore was intended to formalise, institutionalise, maintain and indeed naturalise this order of the world in the psych of every human being living on this earth. This order is defined by the domination of the West over the resources, knowledges, economies, governments and cultures of the East, Africa and the Latin American islands.

Those who choose to resist this institutionalised terror of the West were subjected to enslavement, exploitation, dehumanisation and even assassination. Where this Western order felt extremely threatened by growing decolonial struggles, it would readjust itself and shift its arm of control to the invincible schemes of power – such as finance, trade, knowledge, being, governance and thought.

The IMF, World Bank and the UN are in place therefore to achieve this neocolonial purpose. The UN has a structure called the Security Council, which has been dominated by three colonial allies – the US, France and the UK – and the two anti-Western nation states in China and Russia. This structure has been determining the patterns of wars across the world in the past 80 years outside the mandate of the majority of the world.

The IMF has been granting loans to poor countries ravaged by colonialism and imperialism. These loans have been weaponised by the West to keep African countries trapped in poverty, deindustrialisation and mass unemployment – where they must give raw materials at cheap prices to the West to buy them back as expensive finished products. In addition, these loans have been set with austerity conditions where African countries are not allowed to use them to develop their people.

The World Bank on the other hand has been the biggest research centre in the world concerning development – producing decontextualised and neoliberal concepts and policy proposals for African governments that keep them in perpetual underdevelopment.

These structural systems of neocolonialism have birthed the Brics bloc which has crafted an alternative path of development – where trade, peace, security, human development and independence would be democratised and determined in the interest of all those who inhabit the earth.

The eleven countries who now consist of the new Brics bloc share a third of the world economy among each other and almost half of the world’s population. If the rest of the remaining 40 nation states interested to join the Brics bloc are allowed in by 2030, the bloc will represent the majority of the world’s population and the bigger pie of the world’s economy.

In other words, the economy and security of the world will be democratised and be entrenched, finally, in a multipolar system.

The New Development Bank therefore will be a crucial institution in the next decade. It needs to be resourced, supported and empowered massively so that it can replace the IMF and the World Bank – and begin to play a more productive role of allowing countries to own their resources independently, determine their own paths to peace and security, create policies and governments for their own people’s development and finally set their own rules of trade for maximum benefit.

In essence, the future of the ‘Brics Plus’ requires sustained vigilance, especially against his type of an enemy which has proven in the past that it refuses to die – even if it means using nuclear threats to maintain its position as a dying horse.

The future of the world is in the Global South.