WILL the Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) Summit in Durban next week offer any concrete outcomes, or is it just another meaningless diplomatic jamboree? This question is moot as the Brics leaders gather to close the first cycle of the summits since the group was given life as a diplomatic platform in Russia in 2009. The declaration that will emerge from the summit will show some signs of progress in the work of the Brics. While Brics countries agree on some common interests, they also diverge sharply on some crucial values.

Apart from general pronouncements about the reform of the international financial institutions, Brics leaders will agree to put in place a number of institutional processes that express commitment to shared interests. The first institution is the development bank. This could start off as a pool of funds from emerging markets and developing countries with seed capital of $50bn aimed at infrastructure and sustainable development.

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The Brics development bank will be launched on paper as it will be some time before a fully fledged institution is wrought. Challenges related to governance rules, vote-weighting, corporate culture, investment strategy, location and control of the bank will emerge as serious areas of contention on the way to institutionalisation. Other tensions are likely to revolve around the prioritisation of investment projects. India, for example, is more interested in mobilising funds for its huge domestic infrastructure programmes.

Russia sees the bank as an instrument to drive infrastructure development in its neighbourhood as part of burnishing its diplomatic credentials, while South Africa is obsessed with channelling Brics resources towards Africa’s infrastructure development but has no commercial diplomacy in place to ensure it derives maximum benefit.

There is also unhappiness among development finance institutions in South Africa and Brazil about their potential crowding out by the Brics bank in critical infrastructure projects in their regions. The Brics bank could signal an existential crisis for local development finance institutions. Their lifeblood is major infrastructure projects.

The second area of common interest is the Brics Energy Co-operation Mechanism, aimed at addressing energy issues at local, regional and global level. There are benefits in such co-operation, especially because these countries are some of the major emitters of greenhouse gas. It is thus an important step that they are committing themselves to a joint effort to promote a low-carbon trajectory.

Given the ascendancy of these countries in the global hierarchy of power, they will be looked upon to provide leadership and innovative approaches to overcoming the developmental, environmental, and energy challenges of the 21st century.

Then there’s the Brics Business Council, which will be formally launched with a view to facilitating an increase in exports of value-added products and to encourage investment flows between the Brics members.

The growing emphasis among some of the Brics countries on elevating state-owned enterprises (SOEs) will mean that such a council will be made up of a cocktail of SOEs and the private sector.

However, benefits in the form of investment flows will depend a lot on each country removing obstacles to doing business, addressing competitiveness challenges and working closely with business leaders to address constraints to growth and injecting confidence in the economy.

The faith placed in SOEs by some Brics countries is misplaced. Their record in South Africa and Russia is nothing short of disastrous. They tend to have an unhealthy obsession with handing opportunities to cronies, are seedbeds of corruption, drain the fiscus, and are plagued by managerial incompetence.

Finally, the Brics finance ministers and reserve bank governors were given a responsibility in June last year to propose the best way to establish a financial safety net via a joint pool of foreign exchange reserves to be utilised by Brics countries in the event of capital flight.

This will help cushion these countries against the volatility of financial flows and exchange rates gyrations.

For an entity that has been around for less than five years, Brics has made some strides. What is lacking, though, are common values around the reform of the United Nations Security Council, democratic governance and human rights. China and Russia have a long way to go to allow free expression of civil liberties. These countries are also not keen to endorse developing country democracies such as South Africa, India and Brazil as permanent members of the council.

Without a doubt, membership of Brics has elevated South Africa’s stature in the eyes of rising powers. But the country needs to do more. South Africa should evolve a broader emerging-economy strategy within which its Brics endeavours are realised rather than being obsessed with just the Brics.

There are other growth markets in Africa as well as in emerging economies such as Turkey, Indonesia and Vietnam, for which South Africa has no coherent strategy.

• Qobo is a member of the Midrand Group and is affiliated to the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation.