ABSTRACT
On December 23, 2010 the then Minister of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, Yang Jiechi, announced that South Africa had been officially invited to join the BRIC bloc as its fifth member. This came as a successful end to the tireless efforts that South Africa had made to lobby for its admittance to this group of emerging countries. For South African President Jacob Zuma, the country’s inclusion was important as the BRICs represented a set of states that, like his own, had the ambitions of restructuring global financial and political institutions to make them fairer and more equitable. Emphasizing the importance of African representation, an essential part of the South African lobby, Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Maite NkoanaMashabane, stated in response to the invitation: “We will be a good gateway for the BRIC countries. While we may have a small population, we don’t just speak for South Africa, we speak for Africa as a whole” (Pheko 2011, 1). Thus, on April 13, 2011, on the occasion of the third BRIC conference in the Chinese city of Sanya, South Africa was officially welcomed as a member to the bloc. This transformed the BRIC to what is now known as the BRICS (see Chapter 5).
