With all the controversy and staged theatre of the main G20 event in Joburg in November, it was easy to overlook many other elements.
In the year since assuming the G20 presidency last December, South Africa hosted 133 official meetings across the nine provinces. During those engagements, academics, career diplomats, civil society leaders and private sector stakeholders discussed policy interventions on the themes of solidarity, equality and sustainability.
It culminated in the leaders’ summit at Nasrec, where, despite a capricious US boycott, the G20 (whose countries account for 75% of international trade) adopted a 122-point declaration in which Africa was mentioned 52 times.
Long before President Cyril Ramaphosa brought down the gavel on Africa’s first G20, there was deep uncertainty about whether the forum would — or, in fact, could — deliver meaningful returns for ordinary people. This is because the G20 is a voluntary association whose resolutions are nonbinding and, critics argue, the people the forum endeavours to empower live their lives far removed from luxury hotels and conference centres.
“[The G20 invites] civil society organisations, the broader public, journalists, academics and other political contributors to attend … often as spectators, not as true participants,” says 350Africa’s Khaliel Moses. “What the G20 ends up becoming is a space where heads of state gather and sit in negotiations and often don’t come to any resolution that can be actionable. They speak among themselves behind closed doors.”
Moses works as a public finance campaigner for 350Africa — “350” referring to the goal of reducing the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere from 400 to 350 parts per million. He contends that climate action must be considered along with myriad entangled issues, and that G20 leaders are not positioned to tackle these in a way that benefits the Global South.
Moses spoke to the FM from the Women’s Jail at Constitution Hill, where an estimated 5,000 people from 30 countries gathered for the second People’s Summit, an alternative to the G20 that debuted at last year’s forum in Rio de Janeiro. Moses described the gathering as a grassroots platform for discussing issues such as those on the G20 agenda, but tabled more bluntly.
“How do we ensure that the wealthy are taxed? That the 1% are taxed? How do we rebuild and remake multilateralism? If we allow the G20 to be business as usual, to allow it to happen in the ways the heads of state want it to happen, then nothing will change.”
Daniel Bradlow, a professor of international development law and African economic relations at the University of Pretoria, agrees that the voices of ordinary people aren’t being heard at the G20. Still, he believes forums such as the G20 enjoin progress, glacial as it may be.
Wits University economist Gilad Isaacs — who also serves as executive director of the Institute for Economic Justice — is an expert on the G20 process and multilateralism writ large. He spoke to the FM at Nasrec on day two of the leaders’ summit. He believes the deliberations will “absolutely” affect everyday South Africans — but not dramatically and certainly not all at once.
For context, Isaacs says G20 declarations ought to be considered differently to legislation.
“Take something that sounds quite arcane, like multilateral development bank leverage ratios,” he says of capital reserves that institutions such as the African Development Bank must maintain. “If you change those ratios, those banks would then be allowed to lend more to local industries. Those industries could grow and employ more people. If you think about climate financing, whether that flows as loans or grants, that’s going to impact people’s lives.”
How do we ensure that the wealthy are taxed? … How do we rebuild and remake multilateralism?
— Khaliel Moses
Due to a convergence of domestic and international pressures, Isaacs finds that the G20 declaration “holds the line. In this multilateral and geopolitical environment, it is quite an achievement. But it doesn’t meaningfully take us forward.”
He attributes this to a “relatively low level of ambition from South Africa’s National Treasury and Reserve Bank, which inhibited a more progressive agenda on this year’s finance track. They just were not interested in ambitious, Global South-centric reforms to the financial architecture. They were much more concerned with what the US presidency would or wouldn’t think for the following year.”
The “finance track” Isaacs refers to and the more socially engaged “sherpa track” constitute the bifurcated G20 policymaking framework.
The “sherpas” (a term derived from the people of Nepal who guide climbers up Mount Everest) are aides and representatives of the G20 leaders, responsible for co-ordinating negotiations on the agenda and substantive issues. The finance track is handled by finance ministers and central bank governors and their aides.
“The finance track people are far less hostile to the US, because the US’s language of free markets and its market-centric growth agenda are less alien and far less out of sync with officials in the finance track,” Isaacs explains. “So I would expect that South Africa’s finance track officials see the US G20 as just another year to continue the same type of work they have been doing.”
The US boycott of the G20 did bring pressure to bear on the summit. “The fact that the US is not a signatory to the various outcomes does weaken those outcomes,” says Isaacs. His impression is that foreign ministries are preparing a “grin and bear it” approach to the US presidency in 2026, treating the UK’s turn in 2027 as an opportunity for a “reboot of the G20”.
“There’s a lot of genuine positivity towards South Africa’s diplomatic corps,” he says. “There is a sense that we managed the negotiations … and the G20 processes in difficult circumstances with a level of grace. And we stood up to the bullying tactics of the US, but not in a way that alienated other countries.”
The weekend also saw significant bilateral engagements beyond G20 member states. “Countries need to diversify their economic and political relations,” Bradlow says of the geopolitical environment. “The G20 president for the year gets to invite a group of countries as guests. And South Africa invited several African countries, but also countries like Vietnam.”
Deputy President Paul Mashatile’s address on day one of the summit to the South Africa-Vietnam business forum indicated that Pretoria is primed to escalate South-South co-operation.
“We have the opportunity and indeed the responsibility to diversify and deepen our economic engagement, to move beyond the exchange of raw commodities and promote value-added trade and industrial partnerships,” Mashatile told the delegation, headed by Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh.
Between 2023 and 2024, South Africa carried a 30% trade deficit with Vietnam. Mashatile highlighted the potential lures for increased bilateral trade, such as the African Continental Free Trade Area and South Africa’s special economic zones. Legislation enacted in 2016 established 11 custom-controlled industrial areas designed to promote internationally competitive trade infrastructure through building and employment incentives, a reduced corporate tax rate (15%, rather than 28%) and VAT relief.
And this is only one example of South Africa’s bilateral ventures with other emerging economies given impetus by the G20 process.
Before his arrival in Joburg, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva invited Ramaphosa for a state visit early next year; there will also be a business summit.
Asked by the FM what mechanisms exist, or ought to exist, to ensure returns from the G20 for ordinary South Africans, UN secretary-general António Guterres said: “The system as it works today is unfair and ineffective. It’s time to have a really global international financial system, whose main preoccupation should be to address the challenges that developing countries face.
“Will the G20 be able to move in that direction? We’ll see, but I think South Africa has done its part in putting those things clearly on the table.”
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