Picture this. Night clubs thronged with multi-racial yuppies, dead ringers for that elusive tribe who tout beer and life insurance on Johannesburg billboards. Military convoys dispensing anti-retroviral drugs to people who have never seen a telephone. In the squatter camps of a prosperous coastal city, slum dwellers gaining formal title to their shacks, their feet on the ladder of a new property-owning democracy.
Wishful propaganda from the Nepad Secretariat? The idle daydream of a jaded World Bank official? Far from it. In downtown Sao Paolo, the outer reaches of the Amazon and the shanty towns of Rio de Janeiro, all this is happening - now - in Brazil.
Almost a decade ago, Cape Town economist Jos Gerson published an economic forecast entitled 'SA, the Brazil of Africa'. A daunting prospect at the time, Gerson predicted the performance-enhancing, job-shedding shocks dolled out to local industry would transform 21st-century South Africa into a rainbow nation of strong corporations cheek-by-jowl with spiralling poverty. Infused with the confidence of the Mandela era, Gerson was cautiously optimistic. He saw the benefits of democracy surviving the effects of South Africa's self-imposed economic reforms.
Today, being the Brazil of Africa looks like a reasonable summary of President Thabo Mbeki's ambitions for South Africa. Meanwhile on the far side of the Atlantic, much about Brazil in 2004 recalls the giddy optimism of the post-apartheid era. After a two-week tour as a jobbing journalist, I was left with a strong sense that Brazil has turned the tide on what Mbeki has derided in South Africa as "a psychosis of failure". Like their African peers, Brazilians have confronted the rhetoric of a looming apocalypse. Unlike them, common problems which still weigh heavily on Africa have been diffused.
A year after Workers' Party leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva came to power, most Brazilians are still enthralled by the romance of a former shoe-shine boy becoming president. His governing Partido dos Trabalhadores is a restive alliance of capitalists, pragmatists, populists and the destitute. Uniting them looks impossible, but there is broad consensus even among the government's opponents that it needs to be tried.
The challenges of doing so are enormous. At 170 million, Brazil's population rivals Nigeria's, South Africa's and Zimbabwe's combined. Aside from the vexed question of the actual proportions of Africa's Aids epidemic, Brazil's problems look much worse than South Africa's - if only for their sheer scale. The distribution of resources resembles Nigerian proportions, with at least 55 million Brazilians living in poverty. The largest private estate is the size of Connecticut, while the landless peoples' movement, Movimento Sem Terra, is the world's largest political pressure group. Popular politics is infused by an often nostalgic yearning for land, which any Zimbabwean would recognise.
South African cabinet ministers make much of their mutual interests with Brazil. With China and India, South Africa has forged a robust alliance of developing countries to campaign for a fairer system of world trade. Brazil is the boldest of the pack. In the corridors of multilateral agencies and the boardrooms of big pharmaceutical companies, South America's biggest country is hailed as a vanguard for the developing world. Its stance in dealing with Aids, multinational companies and mass movements is a useful reference for Africa.
BIG, BUT PERFECTLY FORMED
Size alone does not account for Brazil's influence, nor the sometimes grudging respect it commands abroad. As Mbeki often tells his African peers, size is no substitute for coordination. A better explanation lies in Brazil's social cohesion, developed over half a millennium since the arrival of the first Portugese settlers. Immigrants from every corner of the globe - India, Italy, Japan, China, France, Spain, Russia and Arab states have cross-bred through generations. Watch a Paulistano (Sao Paolo resident) who looks Korean, dancing the Samba - and you grasp how much ethnic roots have dissolved.
Brazilians boast that miscegenation is the country's greatest asset. Better even than the distinct colours of a 'Rainbow Nation', Brazil's racial profile has the blurred hues of an impressionist painting. Brazilians aren't much bothered by variations in culture or colour or ethnicity. Portugese, the colonial language, is an authentic "mother tongue". Despite huge economic disparities, political loyalties are largely non-racial. When there are no natives, no settlers and no lineage claiming to be purer than the next, transparently racial alliances have little resonance.
Knowing who you are is good for a nation's confidence. Alas, it does little to resolve historic wrongs. After three centuries of slavery, racism remains alive in Brazil. You see it in the concentration of Afro-Brazilians in the outlying slums of industrial towns, and the maldistribution of resources which condemns the mainly black North to poverty. Yet racism in Brazil is substantially different from much of the racially-charged feuding in Europe or America.
Watching a rally of destitute Brazilians gather under the banner of the MST is a lesson in virtual history: a glimpse of what might have been in South Africa. Brazil's underclass reminded me of those sepia photographs of pan- racial crowds on the Witwatersrand gold reef, protesting against cuts in miners' wages almost a century ago. Nobody pretends these evils are in any way redressed by changing the colour of people's faces on television. On the tenth anniversary of South African democracy, becoming the "Brazil of Africa" might seem an attractive prospect to many.
YESTERDAY'S HOLOCAUST
Politics in Brazil is not burdened by the sense of dislocation which weighs so heavily on South Africa, muddling real problems with old phobias. This is most apparent at times of crisis, when nations face a stark choice between unity and recriminaton. No crisis has loomed larger on either side of the Atlantic than Aids.
In the early 1990s, estimates of the likely impact of Aids in Brazil were freighted with the same apocalyptic warnings which now torment Africa. A killer virus, barely understood, threatened a fledgling democracy. There were no special drugs, and not much useful advice from Europe or America. When AZT and other treatments emerged in the early 1990s, conventional wisdom among multilateral agencies held that such medicines were simply too complex, too expensive and too difficult to supply at scale in developing countries.
Ten years on, the government claims that 99 per cent of Brazilians who need anti-retroviral drugs get them -- free - a measure of official confidence that the Aids programme reaches all corners of the country. After long battles at the World Trade Organisation, state laboratories manufacture generic copies of 12 Aids medicines under licence from the patent holders. Arguments with the big pharmaceutical companies over intellectual property rights have been fierce, yet contrary to its reputation among some Aids activists, Brazil has never broken a patent.
Far from antagonising Big Pharma, the principle of pricing essential medicines according to a country's ability to pay has been accepted by drugs companies. "Being in the forefront of just about any developing country in terms of being able to provide care for all who need it," says Raymond Gilmartin, chief executive of US drugs giant Merck, "Brazil has been a very tough and hard bargainer." Differential pricing is now recognised as a sustainable business model - making possible last year's agreement on trade in generic drugs at the WTO. "Brazil is moving towards greater intellectual property protection," says Gilmartin. "They see that as important for investment in the future".
The most important consequence is that HIV is no longer perceived in Brazil as a death sentence. At the Sao Paolo State Hospital for Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Aids Training and Referral Centre, I met queues of apparently healthy patients collecting anti-retrovirals from the pharmacy. Grey-haired old men lined up beside young mothers with push chairs. All carried green magnetic swipe cards - which allow the national Department of Health in Brasilia to track their prescriptions - with no obvious embarressment.
A stubborn stigma has been eroded. Because Aids hits rich and poor alike, its effect on Brazil's stratified society has been unifying. Constitutional precedents have been upheld, after patients invoked their right to medicine to force the government to supply drugs. Even the wealthy who could afford private treatment have opted into the state system. "This is a democratic virus," says Dr. Geraldo Biazoto, an economist who devised Brazil's Aids policy in the early 1990s. "The option of not providing treatment did not exist."
Tellingly, Brazil's response to Aids has been much more effective than its handling of more treatable epidemics such as tuberculosis or malaria. These tend to hit only the poor, evincing less clamour from the middle class. For Aids, a new paradigm for managing drugs, clinical care and the laboratory testing of blood samples was devised from scratch. A purpose-built information technology system links central government to a network of dedicated Aids clinics and hospital laboratories. Government ships ferry essential medicines up and down the Amazon.
Brazil seems determined to see this success repeated in Africa. Instead of pledging debt relief to fellow former Portugese colonies, Lula has promised multi-million dollar laboratories to manufacture generic antiretroviral drugs in Mozambique and Namibia. This is bold - and the implications are unknown. Last year, with 100,000 people on treatment, Brazil's Aids programme cost US$750m, up from US$450m in 1999. The cost of treating an ageing, drug-dependent population is rising, even as the rate of new infections begins to subside.
Translate this experience to Africa, where the proliferation of drug- resistant strains of HIV will be proportionally higher, and the risks are almost impossible to predict. Even so, Brazil faced similar uncertainties. At Volkswagen's Sao Bernardo do Campo factory, South America's biggest car plant, the first Aids case was diagnosed in 1986, the first year of democracy after decades of military rule. By 2003, the coordination of company healthcare with government drugs worked well enough that there were no deaths from Aids at the Volkswagen factory. About 0.6 per cent of Brazil's population are estimated to be HIV-positive, and the rate of new infections is falling.
TOMORROW'S WORLD
Much as high tech medicine has prolonged the lives of its workforce, the San Bernadetto car plant stands at the crossroads of another technological revolution. One wing houses the old production line, where half-built combi vans dangle on slings from what appears to be a giant bicycle chain. This ancient model is assembled by hand and still sells well in Brazil, despite being hardly changed since the late 1960s. Opposite, a battery of laser-guided orange robots build the latest model Polos for export to Europe.
Like South Africa, Brazil's short experience of democracy has coincided with a massive programme of economic liberalisation. Exports are rising, trade barriers are falling, and - after a sharp devaluation - industrialists worry at the renewed strength of the Real. The largely agricultural economy is moving away from traditional farming methods, adopting the new disciplines of agri-business. New crop varieties, state-of-the-art irrigation and mechanised production have transformed the world's biggest coffee industry from a centuries-old peasant livelihood into a modern industry.
The architect of these reforms, former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, might loosely be dubbed a Brazilian Thabo Mbeki. Both are intellectuals with historic ties to the political left, who endured long periods of exile. Both championed the economic orthodoxies of the 1990s, often at some political risk. To many foreign investors, they are two of a kind: savvy, sharp-suited diplomats who engineered an economic recovery only to watch their own popularity wane.
As elections loom in South Africa, Brazil's recent presidential contest may be an interesting portent. Party loyalties are different, but there are common underlying trends. "The way in which Lula won the elections was not a process of reascension of the mass movements, where the people demanded change," observes Joao Pedro Stedile, the cerebral, bearded leader of the landless people's movement MST. "The people only voted against neoliberalism. So we are faced with a government that is not yet defined and doesn't have a clear project."
South Africa confronts similar dilemmas of jobless growth and the possibly intractable hurdle of harnessing aggressive capitalism to a more populist programme which can deliver wider benefits. Despite claiming substantial progress in the past decade, Mbeki's policy chief Joel Netshitenzhe has acknowledged that for South Africa to continue on its current trajectory heralds "disaster". In one version or another, this tension has defined South African politics for the past decade.
Leaders of the African National Congress governing party seem determined to reconcile their traditional goals as a mass movement with Mbeki's strict economic creed. The fault line in this awkward unity is usually said to be the ANC's zealously guarded pact with the trade unions. In Brazil, equivalent tensions surface around the PT's historic commitment to agrarian reform, the basis of its close ties to the MST.
The political relationship, at least, is clearer in Brazil. "Lula's government is our friend," says Stedile, "but we are totally independent. Our role is to mobilise the people so that there are popular struggles, mass struggles... If there is no pressure in the streets, the government won't have enough strength to adopt measures of change."
These are sentiments any SA trade unionist will share. Cosatu, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, strives for an equivalent role, campaigning for jobs, access to antiretrovirals, and in recent years aspiring to represent the interests of the jobless alongside the employed. These ambitions surface in some of the well publicised points of conflict between Cosatu and the government, yet their competing claims to champion a popular agenda also have an unintended consequence. They discourage precisely the wider, more open debate which might ease these tensions.
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Trade is a compelling example. Cosatu supports South Africa's stance at the WTO, endorsing the moral case for reform of agricultural trade - albeit with a general wariness of other forms of trade liberalisation. In Brazil, the opposite applies. MST opposes the transformation of farmland into the export-oriented agri-business which is a centrepiece of Lula's economic plan. They decry free trade in food, arguing that exporting foodstuffs does not ease poverty among rural populations at home. MST even defends government subsidies for farmers (in Europe, as much as Latin America), provided they are not the specific kind of export subsidies which hurt Brazil's orange farmers or Africa's sugar refineries.
The principles at stake here are complex, and made more impenetrable by the welter of international trade rules. South African government ministers might argue there is much more consensus in all these arguments than my account implies. Perhaps. The relevance for South Africa, however, is that the scope for disagreement is more fully explored in Brazil, precisely because the bond between distinct political movements is not institutionalised in a formal alliance.
Even so, the ties nurtured through years of opposition remain intimate. When the MST launched a mass protest late last year to demand publication of a national plan for land restitution, the president of Lula's governing PT was a guest at the ceremony. His presence was cheered by about 2000 MST supporters as they set off on a 200km march against the government. The solidarity is genuine, but so is the conflict of interest between a government and a mass movement. Partnership and autonomy coexist.
This may be relevant to Africa because, rather than weakening government, this duality spares Brazil the energy-sapping task of protecting an alliance under stress. On the contrary, the tensions which surface in the MST's policy towards Lula clearly reassure Stedile. He defines Brazil's government as being in "permanent dispute". The rival positions are the neo-liberals of the Cardoso era, party stalwarts who would "re- hash neo-liberalism", and advocates of "a popular project".
A close ally of Africa's mass movements, with whom MST leaders have regular contact, Stedile is cautious when I try to draw lessons from Brazil for another continent. For him, the acid test of any democracy is that its politics should be in a perpetual state of flux. "Perhaps this was the first mistake there was in some African countries," he says. "The trade unions in South Africa, the rural movements in Zimbabwe...became dependent on the party and on the government."
As new world alliances gather momentum, Brazil's influence on Africa is growing. South African trade minister Alec Erwin flew to Brasilia en route to last September's abortive WTO round in Cancun, observing that Brazil has been Africa's best ally in trade talks. South Africa's finance minister Trevor Manuel wonders aloud why his budget speech commands fewer column inches in The Economist than its Brazilian equivalent. My own visit coincided with a delegation from South Africa's Free State, trawling the corridors of the Sao Paolo State Hospital for STD Aids Training and Referral Centre on a fact-finding mission.
Mark Ashurst reports on Africa for the BBC.
