Sa Not Ready To Abandon Us Dollar For 'brics Currency' - Mashatile

South Africa is not able to move away from the US dollar to a potential BRICS common currency in international trade at this stage, Deputy President Paul Mashatile has said.

BRICS, the acronym for the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa formation that now includes several other countries, has been discussing using their local currencies in international trade and financial transactions between themselves and their trading partners.

This has often been confused as an attempt to create a common BRICS currency, something the South African government denied late last year.

Speaking at the NEDLAC Organised Labour School in Pretoria on Tuesday 21 January, Mashatile cautioned that South Africas debt is largely dollar denominated.

The South African economy is largely indebted on the dollar, so we have to be careful when we discuss this question. If you look at trade between South Africa and the West, those are the countries that we have very big trade with and we pay by the dollar, he said.

We are part of BRICS. We will discuss it, but we will need to be careful, as the leadership of the country, how we manage trade, particularly in the West.

The issue of whether we can immediately move away from the dollar and introduce a new currency is something that we may not be able to do at this stage. But we are discussing it we dont want to collapse our economy. We would like to see countries, even in our own continent, strengthening their own currencies.

In December last year, Donald Trump, now US President, threatened to impose 100 tariffs on BRICS countries if they moved away from the dollar or created a new currency.

There is no chance that the BRICS will replace the US dollar in international trade, and any country that tries should wave goodbye to America, he said.

However, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation DIRCO said the narrative that BRICS is discussing a new currency is incorrect.