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The 17th Sustainable Development Goal seeks to promote partnerships at various levels. To this end, COVID-19 vaccines development partnerships in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are inevitable in facilitating ethical access to affordable and safe vaccines the world over. With South Africa being part of the BRICS, its presence can assist in leveraging the partnership to ensure that COVID-19 vaccines developed by the BRICS are efficiently deployed in Africa. Through the tracking of announcements, documents and critical discourse analysis, and Geographical Information Systems, this paper investigates COVID-19 vaccines development collaboration in the BRICS and its implication for Africa. It emerges that there is an inherent discord in the BRICS, with bilateral arrangements both within and outside the forum being evident. This has resulted in advance breakthrough COVID-19 vaccines from China and Russia not widely tried across the BRICS. The paper notes that these developments weaken the global south and affect its potential to develop COVID 19 vaccines. The work recommends a reconsideration in terms of COVID-19 vaccines development and future proofing of collaboration within the BRICS and finding a way of having South Africa continue to lobby for affordable and accessible vaccines for Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to provide a perspective on the development of knowledge and the teaching of Political Science on Africa from a South African view point. The article sketches the historical context of the study of the politics of the continent in relation to various institutions. It also discusses the development of teachers and scholars who were involved in the emerging field of study as well as some of the controversy around the transformation of the higher education sector in the country. Publications on the politics of Africa suggest an initial focus on the core issues in the politics of South Africa, and only later on the continent itself. Some of the professional associations are also referred to. The conclusion is reached that the study of the politics of Africa in South Africa is more than an idea and is becoming more centrally located in the discipline as well as in allied multi-disciplinary approaches, and is poised for further growth as the countries of the continent become more integrated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

South Africa's role in Africa since its democratic transition has been mired in controversy and characterised by differing interpretations. While it has wrestled ambivalently about constructing an African identity in the Mandela years, President Mbeki has firmly located South Africa's interests in Africa. The normative foundations of its Africa engagement with regard to providing public goods and leadership in peace diplomacy, resolving conflicts, and helping to develop the continent's institutions collides with the more instrumental aspects relating to investment, its commercial interests and the material sources of its hegemony. These dynamics have been profoundly shaped and determined by South Africa's domestic transitional order and its own development imperatives, as well as international role expectations. This article examines these issues and concludes that South Africa's future relations with Africa will depend on how it addresses the multiple ambiguities and contradictions of its engagement and pursues a hegemony that is more firmly grounded in meeting the continent's development and growth challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa, viewed here as the world's 'swing continent', has in the past decade started to interact with emerging market economies in more intense fashion. This represents an advancing of the continent's integration into the global economy on terms more beneficial to the continent's development. However, this phenomenon also represents one of Africa's central strategic challenges; one located within what is widely considered a new 'scramble for Africa'. In emphasising South-South cooperation and linkages of interdependence between Africa, Asia and the Americas, who is managing whom? Is Africa effectively guiding these new partnering relationships? Or is the continent, in its fragmented disunity, being strategically manipulated by emerging powers, which have well thought-through national interest agendas as they build on their unique comparative advantages in facilitating access to Africa's resources? In answering these questions, emphasis is placed more on challenges than opportunities since the manner in which Africa comes to grips with the challenges will, in many respects, determine and define the opportunities. The problem of Africa arriving at a disciplined and consistent 'common position' strategy is not simply one of colonially inherited fragmentation. It is also a problem of how the strategic space of other continents interacts with that fragmentation in a manner that intrudes on Africa's geopolitical and strategic integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the complex relationship between capitalism and democracy in contemporary democratic regimes in Africa from the perspective of current trends in economic globalisation. It does so by underscoring the complexity of the prospects for democracy as is illustrated by some controversial trends in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya. These trends include the 'fractured' executives, as well as the dominant incumbent parties the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, the People's Democratic Party (PDP) in Nigeria, and the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) in Kenya, that have all been embroiled in scandals recently. Using political economy theoretical themes and frameworks to illustrate the contentious effects that global regimes of capital are having on contemporary national democratic politics, the article shows how a democratic crisis in each country is associated with an economic crisis. It presents South Africa's French Connection Scandal, Nigeria's Globacom Affair, and Kenya's Anglo-Leasing Finance Scandal as iconic archetypes illustrating the thorny relationship between development and democracy in contemporary Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]