By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has reaffirmed that the upcoming Group of 20 (G20) Leaders’ Meeting will proceed as planned despite the boycott by the United States (US).
Ramaphosa was speaking during a cleaning campaign in Kliptown, Johannesburg, on Friday.
The United States, which holds the G20 presidency next year, is supposed to take over as chair at this summit.
The G20 Leaders’ Summit is scheduled for Nov 22 and 23 in Johannesburg, South Africa’s largest city and economic hub.
Relations between the U.S. and its biggest trading partner in Africa are at their lowest since the end of apartheid in 1994.
For a country that has found itself straddling geopolitical fault lines between East and West and the Global North and Global South, while assuming a leading role in African affairs, hosting the G20 will be a key test of its long-term commitment to non-alignment and multilateralism.
The summit is a critical moment for the diplomatic corps of the world’s 19 major economies – including the US and China – plus the European Union and African Union – to meet face-to-face and stake out some common ground.
Long before the summit, there were already ominous signs that the new US administration was preparing to extend its wilfully disruptive influence to the event.
President Donald Trump will not attend in person. His secretary of state Marco Rubio boycotted a G20 foreign ministers meeting in Johannesburg in February – accusing South Africa on Twitter of peddling a G20 agenda defined by the administration’s pet hates: “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] and climate change.”
On 8 November, Trump said that it was a “total disgrace that the G20 will be held in South Africa” and confirmed that no US government officials will attend. He repeated discredited claims about mass killings of Afrikaners that he previously aired in an infamous Oval Office meeting with Ramaphosa.
In recent months, South Africa has attracted particular US ire, not least for initiating action at the International Court of Justice against US ally Israel for alleged genocide during its war in Gaza: the court ordered Israel to take all measures to prevent any acts contrary to the 1948 Genocide Convention. South Africa has been hit with tariffs of 30% by the US.
Ramaphosa said, South Africa will symbolically hand over the G20 presidency to an “empty chair” in the absence of US leadership at the summit next week, while stressing the need to repair trade ties with Washington.
“I have said in the past, I don’t want to hand over to an empty chair, but the empty chair will be there, (I will) probably symbolically hand over to that empty chair and then talk to Trump,” Ramaphosa said.
South Africa is increasingly exasperated with Trump’s claims that Afrikaners are victims of ethnic cleansing. It deny that anyone faces discrimination based on their race in the Black-majority country.
Ramaphosa said his priority was to maintain economic ties with one of its biggest trade partners.
“We export products to that country that in the end don’t end up in the White House. They end up in the hands of consumers in the United States, “he said.
“There could well be a view that we should not engage with the United States. (But) sometimes you have to talk to people who may not be very friendly … to advance the interests of your own people”.
While the summit is expected to be a severe test of South Africa’s diplomatic nous, experts say that the G20 also offers a rare chance for South Africa to put its interests – and those of the African continent and the Global South at large – at the centre of the international agenda, all while promoting the country as a major investment destination.