South Africa's membership to BRICS will benefit Africa

South Africa will use its membership to the BRICS to further strengthen trade and investment, and integrate Africa with the world's fastest growing and most dynamic economies, a government official said on Sunday. South Africa's Minister of Trade and Industry Rob Davies said this at a post BRICS seminar held in Johannesburg. BRICS is an acronym for the grouping of the world's most powerful emerging market economies, namely Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. "We came into BRICS to promote South Africa and Africa's integration. We are a developing economy in our own right, but we are also part of the African continent," Minister Davies told delegates at the one-day seminar. He said Africa must move towards industrialization so that the continent's over 1.1 billion people fully benefit from the continent's economy worth 2 trillion U.S. dollars. "South Africa will prioritize infrastructure development in its future plan for the economic development," the government official added. Azar Jammine, an economist at the seminar, urged South Africa to pay more attention to building its human capital, saying "this will help the country achieve its dream of Africa industrialization." "South Africa at the moment cannot produce enough skills to make inroads into other BRICS countries and grab opportunities there," Jammine said.