As far back as December 2005, Bloomberg Business Week wrote: “The biggest, fastest growing economies of the Third World are Brazil, Russia, India and China.

“But while the Big Four, also known as BRICs, have attracted the most investor attention in recent years, there are also opportunities in less prominent but more promising emerging markets”.

South Africa is included in the article’s list of promising emerging markets, and it went on to state: “South Africa has also surprised on the upside, largely because of the spending restraint exercised by its government.

“While the country has long been viewed as a one-trick pony for precious-metals stocks, a strong currency has dimmed prospects for commodity and other export plays. Instead, the smart money is looking for opportunities in domestic-oriented sectors such as retailers and consumer banks.”

Of late, this optimism expressed by Bloomberg at the time is justified by what is happening in the international marketplace.

Toward the middle of May this year, the website World Focus News, under the headline “South Africa, the Next Emerging Market Powerhouse?” – reporting on the recent summit of the emerging market grouping known as BRIC – wrote: “Interestingly, the BRIC summit was actually a BRICS summit, as it included South Africa. The inclusion of another country here in the same breath as the original BRIC nations is significant because it’s transformed the group into a truly global entity.

“South Africa is largely seen as a gateway for BRIC trade and investments into the resource-rich nations of Africa.”

In this edition of Blue Chip Journal, we put focus on sub-Saharan Africa as an attractive investment destination and on the opportunities implicit in South Africa adding an additional letter to the initials of the most influential organisation of emerging economies.

It is noted that although external investment in Africa has been increasing in recent years, it still lags far behind the flows to other developing regions. The key to the opportunities locked up in South Africa’s membership in BRICS is that the country should be instrumental in turning around this situation.

As we report, this situation exists in part because of the generally negative image of the continent still portrayed in the international media. On that score, South Africa has a responsibility to not only help establish and maintain socio-political stability in its own region and beyond on the continent, but also ensure it manages its own domestic household as a model for the rest of the African continent.

If South Africa is to realise all the potential of its unfolding role in the emerging world, it would largely depend on its ability to take the democracy, which came into being in 1994, to a next level of maturity.

Piet Coetzer