When SA hosted the world’s leading finance ministers and central bank governors at the Group of 20 (G20) meeting near Hermanus in late 2007, one of those finance ministers turned out to be a Christian Scientist who insisted on a Christian Science ambulance being on standby and refused to get the required yellow fever vaccination. The minor diplomatic tensions were soon resolved.
The meeting was a success, even though the cracks in the global financial system were starting to show. Hermanus proved to be the last G20 in its original form. It had come together in the wake of the 1998 emerging markets crisis as a forum for the finance ministers and central bank governors of the world’s most systemically important economies. It was reshaped in the midst of the 2008 global financial crisis as a forum led by G20 heads of government, who came together to stabilise the world economy and its financial system.
It’s a forum that was a creature of economic crisis and has been at its most successful in crisis times. SA played host the last time on the cusp of a global crisis. It is due to play host again in 2025, taking over the year-long G20 presidency from Brazil in December. It’s hard to tell whether the world might again be headed into crisis in 2025.
One thing is for sure: diplomatic spats over vaccinations pale into insignificance compared to the challenges SA will face this time. The past two leaders’ summits, in Indonesia and India, have been overshadowed by tensions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and have struggled to reach consensus on a communique. And that was before the renewed tensions in the Middle East, which will surely fracture the leaders at the summit in Brazil later in 2024 and into 2025.
Those are just a subset of the broader geopolitical tensions looming large over the forum. China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin declined to attend the leaders’ summit in New Delhi in 2023. It’s not clear who will be there this year. And after this year’s spate of elections we don’t even know who the leaders of key G20 countries, particularly the US, will be in 2025.
By contrast to some of the craziness in global politics lately, SA’s election outcome has it looking like a bastion of sanity and democracy, one in which the grown-ups in the room prevailed.
Whether the US presidency goes to Kamala Harris or to the protectionist, anti-globalist, anti-China Donald Trump/JD Vance twosome, has significant implications for the G20 itself, as for other multilateral institutions and forums, not to mention for the world economic and geopolitical outlook. Europe’s electoral outcomes matter too.
By contrast to some of the craziness in global politics lately, SA’s election outcome has it looking like a bastion of sanity and democracy, one in which the grown-ups in the room prevailed. In that context the G20 presents a real opportunity for SA to step up on the world stage as the mature, non-aligned grown up — one able to host the largest global gathering held on African soil. But the risks for SA are at least as great as the opportunities. And with the election having delayed our prep, it’s far from clear at this stage whether we will be ready to roll by December.
First, the logistics. The G20 is an enormous enterprise, larger and longer than a Brics summit or an Agoa forum — or a World Cup. It lasts all year. It involves hosting well over 100 meetings and preparatory and sideline meetings, at all levels from the technical to the ministerial to the presidential.
G20 finance ministers and central bank governors are meeting this week in Rio de Janeiro. That’s effectively the original forum, which is now the “Finance Track” of the G20 and still focuses on issues such as global financial stability, financial regulation, taxation and economic growth. Then there’s the broader “Sherpa Track” of the G20, which is everything else, from climate change to inequality to development to pandemic preparedness.
Each of the tracks has leaders and sherpas and working groups and task forces, all of which have to meet. Added to this is a variety of “engagement forums”. There is a B20 (business), a T20 (think-tanks), Y20 (youth) and many other 20s beside.
There is a foreign ministers’ summit and a finance summit and eventually it all culminates in the leaders’ summit. More than 20 global leaders landing at the same time, with entourages, require multiple airports and a huge amount of hotel space and security.
The leaders’ summit is likely to be in November in Sandton, which will essentially be shut down for the occasion. It’s all an enormous logistical exercise even without the political tensions. And it plays out on the world’s TV screens over days and months. Getting it right would do much for SA’s reputation: it will be hard to recover if anything goes wrong.
If the logistics are complex, the agenda is even more so. As host, SA must shape the 2025 agenda, adding its own particular twist to the G20. That effectively means adding at the margins to the long list of items already on the G20’s agenda. Brazil has focused on global food security and inequality, including Lula’s proposal for a global tax on billionaires, which has been supported by SA’s finance minister.
Next year’s forum marks the first time the G20 has been held on African soil in its current form, so SA will surely want to highlight issues such as debt relief and debt costs for low-income countries, as well as the “just” part of the energy transition. All of these issues are complicated by geopolitical tensions.
The new GNU cabinet is likely to be reviewing plans and budgets for SA’s 2025 presidency in August. SA’s technocrats are already in the thick of it as part of the G20 “troika” of past, current and future hosts, which this year is India, Brazil and SA. Next year the troika will be Brazil, SA and the US — which initiated the first leaders’ summit in Pittsburgh in 2008 and is due to take the presidency again in 2026.
With the US’s leadership — and its relations with the rest of the world — in an uncertain place, SA gets a walk-on part in a scary but riveting movie. We have only a few short months to shape the reviews.
• Joffe is editor-at-large.
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