Last Friday, the United Nations General Assembly voted, by 164 countries to one, to encourage the world to start using a different map.

The map most of us grew up with was drawn in the sixteenth century for sailors. It is accurate in shape but wrong in size, stretching what lies near the poles and shrinking what lies near the equator. On it, Greenland looks about as big as Africa. But Africa is fourteen times larger than Greenland, big enough to hold the United States, China, India and most of Europe inside it.

The resolution is not binding. Redrawing a map does not redraw the world, but correcting a false picture is still worth doing.

Hold that thought, because this weekend the BRICS leaders meet in New Delhi, and the question hanging over that summit is a version of the same one. Is what is being corrected the picture, or the thing itself?

BRICS was not founded by governments. It was invented by a bank. In 2001, an economist at Goldman Sachs argued that Brazil, Russia, India and China would grow fast enough to reshape the world economy, and gave them an acronym so investors could buy them as a group. Banks do this often. The Magnificent Seven, the label attached to the largest American technology shares, does the same job.

The governments liked it enough to adopt it, meeting as heads of state from 2009 and inviting South Africa in 2010, which is where the S came from. Membership has since doubled to ten, with Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates joining in 2024 and Indonesia in 2025. Saudi Arabia was invited and has not answered.

The loudest claim made for all of this is that BRICS will end the dominance of the United States dollar, usually through a shared currency.

It is worth knowing who is not making it. Brazil’s president said in February there is no proposal for such a currency and no debate about creating one. India’s trade minister said last month that his country does not support the idea, and India chairs this summit. South Africa’s BRICS ambassador said years ago it had never been on the agenda. Our Reserve Bank governor has explained why. A shared currency needs a banking union, a fiscal union, and converged economies.

The dollar-killer story is told mostly by people outside the room. Recent history shows why.

The euro was built to do exactly this job. Twenty-one countries, one central bank, one rulebook, money moving freely across borders, deep markets in which to hold it. Twenty-seven years on, it holds about 20 percent of the world’s official currency reserves. The dollar holds about 57 percent, down from 72 percent in 2001, and sits on one side of nine of every ten currency trades. China is the world’s largest trading nation, and its currency is under 2 percent.

That gap is the answer. A reserve currency is not a prize for being big. It is what happens when the world trusts that money put in can be taken out again, and that trust takes decades rather than a summit.

The euro also had three advantages this grouping does not.

The first is proximity. The eurozone is a neighbourhood, sharing borders, roads, railways and a labour market. BRICS spans four continents and nearly every time zone. Brazil and China share no border, no common language and no history.

The second is similarity. Germany, France and the Netherlands have comparable incomes, inflation and institutions. BRICS puts the country with the highest measured inequality in the world, with more than a third of its workforce out of work, in the same room as China. Those are not economies that need the same interest rate.

The third is a rule for joining. To use the euro, you must be in Europe and meet published tests on inflation, public debt and currency stability. Bulgaria met them and joined in January. BRICS has no such test. At last year’s summit in Rio, members paused admissions and appointed a working group to decide the criteria, because they could not agree. And a shared currency means a shared interest rate, putting the rate on a South African bond repayment in the hands of a committee weighing ten economies at once. Britain examined that trade and declined it.

None of which means nothing is happening. The practical work is in payments, letting two countries settle directly instead of converting through dollars twice.

Then there is the bank. In June, the New Development Bank, founded by the BRICS countries in 2015, approved up to US$1 billion for infrastructure across eight South African metros, covering water, sanitation, electricity and refuse. Last week, Treasury signed a further US$ 405 million and said the bank had helped cover our foreign borrowing needs for the year. Its five founders hold equal shares, so our vote counts the same as China’s.

Something slower is also on the agenda. Reform of how votes are allocated at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Those votes decide who attaches conditions to lending, and the conditions shape what a country pays to borrow. Africa’s share is small against its population. That is the financial version of the map, worth far more than a new banknote.

There is an honest limit. The bank set itself a target of lending 30 percent in members’ own currencies and has not reached it. Its base currency is the dollar. The economist who coined the acronym now says it produces symbolism rather than results.

A more accurate map does not move a metre of coastline. Africa has always been that size. What changes is what people believe when they look, and whether that belief reaches what gets built. So the question this weekend is not whether the dollar is finished. It is whether we are watching the loud part and missing the part that pays.

Yusuf Bodiat is a chartered accountant, certified director and former chief financial officer. He is the founder of Pragmatic Thinking, an independent strategic advisory firm, and serves as a non-executive director on several boards. He is the author of The Bottom Line: A CFO’s Blueprint for South Africa’s Turnaround, published in February 2026.