Tariff Plan Hits BRICS Cars, Shields the West, Exposing Policy Incoherence

That South Africa is considering raising tariffs on Chinese and Indian vehicles to 50% exposes a deep incoherence in terms of both its foreign and domestic policy making. On the surface the tariff threat might have been presented as a technical trade adjustment. But in practice it exposes a sharp ideological contradiction between what Pretoria says about the global order and how it actually structures economic policy at home.

For more than a decade, and increasingly so under President Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa has framed its foreign policy as a rejection of Western hegemony. Official doctrine and presidential rhetoric emphasise multipolarity, strategic autonomy, and solidarity with the Global South. BRICS is elevated as a political project, not just an economic forum, meant to dilute American and European dominance and accelerate the emergence of a new world order led by emerging powers. This posture has been repeated consistently in summit declarations, international speeches, and diplomatic positioning.

Pretoria has been willing to generate friction with Western governments to sustain this stance. It has resisted pressure to align with American and European positions on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, insisting on a purported non-aligned posture that nonetheless maintains warm diplomatic signals toward Moscow. It has deepened symbolic cooperation with Iran, China, and Russia through forums and military diplomacy, despite Western criticism. It has also pursued confrontational legal and diplomatic strategies against close Western allies, intentionally reinforcing the sense that South Africa is consciously distancing itself from the West.

Against that backdrop, the tariff proposal is ideologically jarring. The International Trade Administration Commission has proposed raising tariffs on vehicles from China and India from 25% to 50% in order to shield chiefly Western auto makers from competition and lost market share.

This contradiction goes to the heart of policy coherence. If BRICS is meant to represent an alternative economic future, then domestic policy should be geared to advantage BRICS partners, or at least to avoid penalising BRICS producers in order to protect Western incumbents. Instead, South Africa is proposing to make Chinese and Indian vehicles more expensive, even as it continues to speak about breaking free from Western economic dominance.

The message abroad says one thing. The incentives at home say another.

The structure of South Africa’s automotive sector explains some of the contradiction, but does not resolve it. The local, and heavily subsidised, vehicle assembly industry is dominated by multinational firms headquartered in Europe and other advanced economies. While the extent of the subsidies makes the industry somewhat artificial, and while its contribution to employment is minimal (less than 1% of the national workforce), it is seen by the state an important status symbol to counter the idea that South Africa’s manufacturing base has been decimated by counter-productive domestic policy.

The costs of maintaining what is essentially a vanity project is vast, and ordinary South Africans pay the price.

More than 60% of South Africa’s light motor vehicles are imported, with 57% of those imports coming from India and 17% from China, according to NAAMSA, an industry body. Chinese and Indian vehicles have become the most affordable options in a market where car prices are already high. Raising tariffs will push prices higher, forcing ordinary households to subsidise the vanity.

The policy contradictions deepen further when the political maths of in practice forcing households to subsidise Western auto makers is taken into consideration. Support for South Africa’s once dominant African National Congress party is down precisely because living standards in the country have stagnated and unemployment levels remain stuck at a multiple of the global average. The ability to afford a vehicle, especially given South Africa’s apartheid-era urban geography and lack of public transport systems, is an essential ingredient to entrepreneurship. But this is in practice denied by state industrial policy.

Far from advancing a coherent alternative to Western dominance, the tariff proposal exposes the gap between South Africa’s foreign policy slogans and its economic instincts. It reveals a state that talks about a new world order, but still builds its trade defences around the old one, leaving consumers to pay the price for an unresolved ideological contradiction.