Ahead of the official launch of SA’s Group of 20 (G20) presidency on December 1, the government has reached out to corporate SA for a large sum of money to help with the costs of a year-long mega-event that will be the largest and most complex the country has ever hosted.
The sum that is being sought is said to be as large as R1bn. That’s over and above the costs organised business will incur to host the B20 (Business 20), one of several “engagement” forums that feed into the G20 leaders’ summit. It’s also over and above the costs of the private venues the government will use, for free, to host meetings across the country. All the big banks have been asked for venues; Investec will host the first big meeting of finance ministry and central bank officials on December 11-12, for example.
The government has been quite open about asking the private sector for sponsorship and support, even if it has been less than transparent so far about the numbers. The begging bowl is embarrassing in one sense, and reassuring in another. SA’s new government of national unity (GNU) has once again turned to the private sector for help with a problem it clearly cannot manage, or fund on its own. To put on the rose-tinted glasses for a moment, that builds on a model of collaboration between business and government to fix the economy that is unique globally.
It is a kind of “grown-ups in the room” partnership model that is being shared in forums such as the B20. And then there is the GNU itself, however fractious, and the grown-up model it provides of co-operation between formerly reluctant partners, as well as of democracy prevailing. All of which goes to some of the bigger-picture issues of what value SA can add to the G20, and what value it might add to us — if we can pull it off. And that is a big if.
This is a year for SA to build bridges, metaphorically and in practice.
There are 260 ministerial and officials’ meetings, of which 130 will be in person, spread across the country. Added to that are multiple meetings of the various engagement groups through the year. It all culminates in the leaders’ summit in Sandton in November, when all the heads of government fly into Gauteng’s five airports and half the city gets shut down. The government also plans to copy Brazil with a social summit of civil society groups alongside the leaders’ summit. And all of this on the world’s TV screens.
Yet the logistics are arguably easier to pull off than the task of leading the G20 and its fractious members, at a time when the world could be facing a trade war — not to mention various other wars — and SA’s own foreign policy stance has been controversial.
SA is the last of the 19 countries to play host before the presidency returns to the US, which hosted the first heads of government summit in an effort to rescue the global economy in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008 (the leaders met twice in 2009 and 2010). SA is also the last of four consecutive emerging-market hosts that have sought to foreground developing country issues in the forum.
Over the years the G20’s agenda has become unmanageably broad and unfocused. But it remains a uniquely important global forum. It’s the only one in which the US, Russia and China sit together, apart from the increasingly dysfunctional UN. As president, SA now has the task of shaping the agenda and trying to get the members to find enough common ground to agree a communique at the end, even a bland one.
It has to try to keep it all together amid a bunch of geopolitical tensions, some of which have nothing to do with us directly — not only US trade tensions with China and potentially everyone else in the era of Donald Trump, but also tensions in the South China Sea over China’s territorial ambitions. Or tensions between South Korea and Russia over North Korean aggression, not to mention Russia-Ukraine or the Middle East.
In one way SA’s foreign policy stance in recent years has not made it the best candidate to hold this together. Take the theme the government has chosen for our G20 presidency: “Solidarity, Equality & Sustainability”. It sounds forgettable, even vacuous. Yet some Western diplomats read it as pure Brics rhetoric. Others read “solidarity” as “Palestine” — potentially a red flag for relations with the Trump administration — even if President Cyril Ramaphosa was careful to mention Palestine, Ukraine and Sudan, plus the need for solidarity with countries enduring pandemics.
Yet the fact that SA is a middle power, with Ramaphosa seen as having the ear of China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin even as he swans charmingly around Western capitals, is precisely its advantage. It can act as a bridge between the G20 countries. Such bridges will be particularly important in 2025, with Trump moving into the White House and the potential for trade and territorial conflicts to intensify globally.
So too might bilateral chats between leaders behind the closed doors of the various G20 meetings. SA remains a trusted democracy in which those can take place.
But it will have to step up — to drop some of the global grandstanding and show some statecraft. If it can pull off the logistics and the statecraft, the benefit could be significant. For one thing, Trump is not known for his interest in Africa, or indeed SA, but SA will be hard to ignore in 2025. And we have golf courses.
That’s no guarantee SA will avoid tariffs or stay in the African Growth & Opportunity Act (Agoa), but it can’t harm. And the potential benefits of showcasing SA to the world are broader. The G20 will provide a year-long boost to tourism on an even larger scale than the 2010 Fifa World Cup — a boost that hopefully will last well beyond 2025.
It will ideally also provide a catalyst that will get municipalities to clean their streets, fix roads and upgrade infrastructure. We probably didn’t do nearly enough of that in 2010. The government and business also hope it will help attract investment to SA from at least some of the G20 member countries, which account for 85% of the global economy.
All of which might be why business is willing to go along with the begging bowl stuff, to an extent. But for the G20 to yield a broad economic return on the huge investment of time, money and focus that will go into it over the coming year, SA will have to make a coherent investment case for itself. The business-government partnership has become an important plank in that investment case, along with the achievements of Operation Vulindlela in making economic reforms happen.
As long as those don’t take too much of a back seat in a year in which the G20 could preoccupy the players. This is a year for SA to build bridges, metaphorically and in practice.
• Joffe is editor-at-large.
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