INTRODUCTION

Two meetings took place back-to-back in November 2016: both revealed the limitations of a favourite rhetorical technique deployed by South Africa's neo-liberalnationalist politicians. Immediately after the first substantial challenge to President Jacob Zuma's power within the African National Congress (ANC), over his financing of the rural palace Nkandla from state funds and the number of corruption charges facing him, Zuma's connections to the infamous Gupta brothers (from India) were under the spotlight. His desired nuclear energy programme costing over R1 trillion would benefit the Guptas’ Oakbay uranium company through an insider contract with the state electricity utility Eskom. Internet documents signed by Russia's stateowned Rosatom included a contract for construction and operation of the nuclear plants which Zuma had negotiated with Vladimir Putin two years earlier. Eskom's outgoing chief executive Brian Molefe had just arranged a $5 billion line of credit (from the China Development Bank) to pay for the first instalment on the nuclear project. As another relevant piece of context, six months earlier, there had been a right-wing putsch against Zuma's Brazilian ally Dilma Rousseff (who served from 2012 to 2016, having won re-election in 2015). This constitutional coup, numerous commentators believed, was arranged by Western powers to weaken the Brazil- Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) network.

So it was that in November 2016, Zuma explained BRICS to ANC activists in the provincial city of Pietermaritzburg as: ‘It is a small group but very powerful. [The West] did not like BRICS. China is going to be number one economy leader […Western countries] want to dismantle this BRICS. We have had seven votes of no confidence in South Africa. In Brazil, the president was removed’ (Politicsweb 2016). In the second meeting in parliament the following week, during the president's Question Time, an opposition legislator asked Zuma: ‘Which Western countries were you referring to? How did they plan on dismantling BRICS? And what will the effect of their actions be on our economic diplomacy with these Western countries over the next decade?’ Zuma replied, according to the Hansard (2016), ‘I've forgotten the names of these countries. [Laughter.] How can he think I'm going to remember here? He-he-he-he.’