Patrick Bond

Over the last fortnight, Brazil’s two million street protesters in 80 cities supporting the Free Fare Movement have declared how fed up they are with making multiple sacrifices to Brazilian neoliberalism as revitalized by one Sepp Blatter, the Swiss emperor of the Fédération Internationale de Foo

Barack Obama’s weekend trip to South Africa may have the desired effect of slowing the geopolitical realignment of Pretoria to the Brazil-India-Russia-China-SA (BRICS) axis.

Thanks are due to the brutally-frank Zambian vice president Guy Scott who last week pronounced, ‘I dislike South Africa for the same reason that Latin Americans dislike the United States’, and to our own president Jacob Zuma for forcing a long-overdue debate, just as the World Economic Forum Afri

Amongst Pretoria’s main objectives at the Brics summit in Durban, according to deputy foreign minister Marius Fransman, is to serve as ‘a gateway for investment on the continent, and over the next 10 years the African continent will need $480 billion for infrastructure development.’

As they met in Durban on March 26-27, leaders of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – must own up: they have been emitting prolific levels of greenhouse gases, far higher than the US or the EU in absolute terms and as a ratio of GDP (though less per person).

In a recent review ‘Will SA’S new friends turn out so different from the West?’ ) about a public debate on 28 February over the coming Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) heads-of-state summit, South Africa’s leading f

In Durban, South Africa, five heads of state meet on March 26-27 to assure the rest of Africa that their countries’ corporations are better investors in infrastructure, mining, oil and agriculture than the traditional European and US multinationals.

‘We reaffirm the character of the ANC as a disciplined force of the left, a multi-class mass movement and an internationalist movement with an anti-imperialist outlook.’ So said Jacob Zuma, orating to his masses at the year’s largest African National Congress celebration, in Durban on January 12.

SAPS Brigadier Zephania Mkhwanazi – who heads ‘public order policing’ and hence control of demonstrations – was asked this by commission chair Ian Farlam last week, and judging by his four answers, the SAPS have not begun to grasp the reality of the crime they committed on August 16:

Either: