According to a wire report, the president of the South Africa Chamber of Commerce called for a permanent BRICS secretariat to drive implementation.
A secretariat is the administrative body that organises meetings, records decisions and follows up on actions. In the BRICS grouping, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the secretariat currently moves each year to the country that holds the rotating chair. A permanent secretariat would stay in one location and provide continuous support for the bloc’s projects.
The president’s suggestion reflects a desire for more predictable coordination of the BRICS agenda. For South African small and medium enterprises, a stable secretariat could mean clearer information on trade rules, easier access to joint investment programmes and a single point of contact for cross-border business queries.
At present the idea remains a proposal. The BRICS members have not announced any plan to create a standing administrative unit, and any decision would require consensus among the five countries.
Whether the bloc will adopt a permanent secretariat is uncertain, but the call highlights South Africa’s ambition to cement its role in the group and to make the benefits of BRICS cooperation more tangible for local businesses.
How other trade blocs have handled the same question
A rotating chair without a permanent secretariat is a common early-stage arrangement for an intergovernmental grouping, and BRICS is not unusual in having outgrown the informality of its early years. The European Union built the European Commission specifically to provide continuity and institutional memory that a rotating presidency could not. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a smaller and more comparable grouping in some respects, operates a standing secretariat based in Jakarta precisely so that projects agreed under one chair do not lose momentum when responsibility rotates to the next.
The tradeoff a bloc faces in making this move is real rather than purely administrative: a permanent secretariat requires a host country, a funding formula and a decision about how much independent authority the secretariat itself gets, none of which are trivial questions among five large economies with different governance systems and different levels of enthusiasm for ceding coordination to a standing bureaucracy. For related coverage of the same forum’s business agenda, see this site’s report on the BRICS Business Forum.
What South African SMEs actually get from BRICS today
Ahead of any institutional reform, the practical BRICS channels already available to a South African business are the New Development Bank’s project financing, bilateral trade missions organised around the annual summit, and preferential arrangements individual member states negotiate outside the formal BRICS structure entirely. A permanent secretariat would not create new funding or new market access on its own. What it would do is give a smaller business a single, predictable point of contact to find out what already exists, rather than having to track five separate national bureaucracies to work out which programme applies.
That practical, coordination-focused case is a more modest argument than the geopolitical framing BRICS institutional debates sometimes attract, and it is worth separating the two: whether the bloc becomes a more prominent counterweight to existing global institutions is a question for foreign ministries, while whether a South African exporter can find out in one place what financing or market access already exists is a much narrower, more immediately answerable one that a permanent secretariat would resolve regardless of how the larger geopolitical debate plays out. Business chambers in other member states have made similar calls in the past for exactly that reason, which suggests the appetite for a standing coordination point is broader than any one country’s chamber pressing its own case.
