South African professional golfer, Jean Hugo finished as runner-up in the Zambia Open in 2011 and he is placed 6th on the all-time winners list of the Sunshine Tour, with 19 tournament victories. His second cousin, André van Eck (37), a South African speaker, educator, and author has a BRICS dream.
He has hopes of being involved in the alliance’s cultural and people to people exchanges and its sectorial co-operations in education and innovation in the future. He dreams about this opportunity as the BRICS Alliance expanded further last month. Academics is something that runs in the family for Van Eck since he is also the cousin once removed of Prof. Victor Hugo (the father of Jean Hugo), former Acting Dean and Associate Dean, former Head of Department and Professor of Organic Chemistry at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, who was the second person ever to receive a Doctor of Technology degree in South Africa. Van Eck’s own degree was conferred upon him by Mr. Thabo Mbeki, Chancellor of the University of South Africa (UNISA) and former President of the Republic of South Africa, who also congratulated him with his achievement.
Van Eck has also translated and published his business and career book, Strategies to Advance Your Career in the languages of the BRICS nations with the use of AI algorithm technology. He did this to celebrate the event of the core BRICS nations’ expansion to add five new members at the beginning of last month and he announced this on social media. AI was also recently voted as the 2023 word of the year by the makers of the Collins Dictionary. As a speaker, he has also spoken at national level in South Africa for organisations such as the SABPP – the South African Board for People Practices, the professional body for human resources practitioners in South Africa. Van Eck was mentored by International CSP Speaker, Speaker Hall of Fame Inductee, and former President of the Professional Speakers Association of Southern Africa (PSASA), Dr Gustav Gous when he started his speaking career.
The English version of the book ranked 211th globally on Amazon’s Psychology Education and Training Kindle Store book ranking in April of 2023. The English version of the book is also meant to accommodate Ethiopia since English is the most widely spoken foreign language and it is the medium of instruction in secondary schools and all tertiary education; here federal laws are also published in British English including the 1995 constitution. His book is now also available on Amazon in ebook format in Hindi, Arabic and Traditional Chinese. Whereas it is now available in English, Portuguese and Spanish in both ebook and paperback format. Russian and Persian are currently not on the list of languages that are supported on Amazon’s Kindle Store. The Spanish version of the book was meant to accommodate Argentina’s Spanish speaking population. Argentina withdrew from joining the BRICS Alliance recently, after initial plans to join after the 15th BRICS Summit that was held in Johannesburg in August of last year.
BRICS seek to establish deeper ties between member nations and cooperate on economic expansion, including trade. Two of the three pillars of BRICS are – economic and financial and cultural and people to people exchanges. It has developed sectorial co-operations in different areas, such as energy, health, education, science and technology, innovation, and trade promotion.
Van Eck hopes that the BRICS Alliance and the new ties between these countries may play a part to make his dream become a reality of lecturing, teaching, coaching, or speaking within BRICS’ cultural and people to people exchanges and its sectorial co-operations programmes. He also hopes that there will be an increase in publishing opportunities for authors like himself as well from the BRICS countries within the other member nations.
