South Africa says it will step back from next year’s G20 meetings after the U.S. indicated it won’t extend an invitation, citing concerns over alleged discrimination against the white Afrikaner minority. In this episode, Innocent Semosa speaks to Political Analyst Patrick Bond to unpack the politics behind the fallout, and later connects with DIRCO spokesperson Chrispin Phiri for the government’s official response. Stay tuned for a clear look at what this means for diplomacy, South Africa’s global standing, and the road ahead.

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Transcript 

Innocent Semosa: We are now joined by a political economist, Professor Patrick Bond. But before we go to Professor Bond, let’s hear, get official weigh-in from the South Africa Department of International Relations and Cooperation. We talk now to the spokesperson, Chrispin Phiri. Chrispin, a very good evening to you and welcome to Channel Africa. 

Chrispin Phiri: Thank you for having me and good evening to our listeners in the SABC. 

Innocent: Yeah, indeed. I mean, Chrispin, we understand that South Africa takes a break from the G20 activities for the year 2026. Can you tell us what does this break exactly mean? 

Chrispin: Yeah, you would have noted that was a statement put out by the presidency spokesperson. But then to say that, it’s not possible for a G20 country to be unilaterally removed from the G20. And that’s a statement that Minister Lamola today has made quite clear in an open letter to Secretary Rubio, the Secretary of State, the foreign affairs minister of the United States of America. And what we’ve also said consistently, is that if we have a situation where the US are allowed to just unilaterally determine what the membership of the G20 is, then it really does affect the integrity of such an organisation. But Lamola’s statement in the main spoke to the idea of us not necessarily going out of our way to get other countries to express a particular view. It’s entirely up to the G20 how it advances to address this matter. And we remain in the hands of the G20 on this issue. 

Innocent: Yeah, Chrispin, one would say, hang on, about being criticised by President Donald Trump. Would you say that he has won, in pushing South Africa out of this G20, in your view?

Chrispin: Well, I think it’s premature. We want to see how the G20 itself will handle this issue and and we trust that the G20 members will be able to defend the integrity of the organisation. You can imagine the world is quite a big place. A number of countries would have differing bilateral positions on a number of things, and they may then cohere in a particular organisational forum. It doesn’t mean that that organisation or forum should fall apart because country B doesn’t have the same perspective on a particular issue with country X, which happens to also be in that forum. And that’s the principle that we are advancing. And that’s what we believe other G20 member countries will be able to navigate with the United States as well. 

Innocent: Yeah, Chrispin, just before I let you go, what happens then to the priorities that were set during the presidency of South Africa during the US cycle, and how do you ensure that they are you know pursued? 

Chrispin: It’s entirely up to the G20 host at one point in time, to define what its presidency priorities are. But we do find that there’s some high level alignment with what our presidency has achieved and what the US has pronounced on. So for example, one of the things that we have produced is a report – that’s G20 at 20 – which looks at reviewing how the G20 has performed over a couple of years and how effective it has been and what can be done to improve and streamline its processes so that each presidency has more continuity. That is something that cannot be ignored, and we’ve heard the US also saying that perhaps some of the working groups that were in place over the years need to be reviewed. That’s in line with our report. So there are a number of initiatives that have been developed by our presidency which will probably be implemented very directly by the US. 

Innocent: All right, that’s South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation spokesperson Chrispin Phiri. Thank you so very much for indeed making the time. All right. Now we move to political economist Professor Patrick Bond to basically look at economic implications of South Africa being left out of this G20. Prof. A very good evening to you and welcome to Channel Africa. 

Patrick Bond: Oh, it’s great to be back with you, thanks Innocent. 

Innocent: What does South Africa’s temporary withdrawal from the G20 signal about the you know crisis of global governance, Prof, and I’m asking because there are issues around diplomatic missteps, or a principled stand, or in simple evidence, would you say that Washington is expanding its unilateralism as opposed to pushing multilateralism?

Patrick: Oh yes. Now that’s exactly the right perspective, the big picture, which is that the Trump regime has walked out of the climate summit. He’s walked out of the World Health Organisation, therefore pandemics may be much harder to prevent in the coming years. He’s walked out of UNESCO and the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine. And he’s participated with Israel in what South Africa accurately has described as a genocide at the International Court of Justice. Trump has put sanctions on the ICJ and the International Criminal Court. He’s disrupted world trade. He’s engaged in bellicose threats such as to Panama, to Greenland, even to neighboring Canada. He’s bombed Iran. And the expulsion of South Africa is just the latest. I suspect in the coming days he’ll do something even more destructive, that is, to have an invasion of Venezuela because there’s a lot of oil, in fact more oil underground in Venezuela than anywhere. So we’re talking of a big picture, aren’t we, of a man, Donald Trump and his sidekick Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, who really have no business hosting the G20. And it’s a terrible shame that knowing that from January 20, even well before that – when Trump had been elected, making these threats – that South Africa didn’t do more to prepare for this logical eventuality, especially given the brutally inaccurate way ‘genocide’ or ‘attacks on Afrikaners’ are the basic logic behind what Trump is saying he’s doing to exclude South Africa. It’s appalling. 

Innocent: Yeah, Prof. One wonders because America has three consulates in the country and you wonder if they can’t tell President Trump what exactly is happening in the country, that is very much problematic. But in part prof, we know that the G20 is a recommendation body so countries can be forced to basically adopt the declarations. But what happens then to the priorities that were set during South Africa’s presidency? How do you ensure, how can member states, ensure that they are essentially pursued? And this is the question I asked Chrispin earlier. 

Patrick: Yes, Mr. Phiri, though extremely eloquent, extremely persuasive, I think flubbed that one. Because he could have been honest with you and said, actually, ‘Everything that South Africa did this year is now in the waste bin.’ And that’s the African debt initiative that Trevor Manuel’s commission looked at; the inequality commission that famous professor Joseph Stiglitz – former World Bank chief economist and Nobel laureate – ran; it’s the entire set of climate and environmental strategies including food security. Everything into the waste bin. And that’s something that Marco Rubio is delighted at. He’s been saying, along with Scott Bessant, the finance minister, that they want to have a slimmed down G20. 

Innocent: Now, what would that mean? 

Patrick: You know, there only two times I can tell you I think in my experience having looked at the G20 since 1999 when in Berlin – where I happen to be at the moment – it was founded in 2000. It went to Montreal. That was the finance ministers. In 2008, it went to Washington and then it was the heads of state – for the simple reason that there was a financial crisis and the middle-income countries – China and Saudi Arabia and South Korea – that had large reserves that were desperately needed by the G7 to bolster the western economies. The same happened in 2020. The G20 was crucial for coordinating the quantitative easing, spending more money, having lower interest rates, more state spending and printing of money and also giving Africa debt relief: there was a delay on the debt repayment. Now, those are the sorts of things where you can sort of feel the rumbling in global capitalism, the potential for an AI meltdown, the stock markets being so overvalued, or AI getting out of control, another crucial feature that South Africa has been worried about, or climate catastrophe worsening, or poverty and extreme inequality worsening. Trump doesn’t care about any of those. The proposal from President Lula in Brazil last year, hosting the G20, that the super rich be taxed in a coordinated way. Well, of course, Donald Trump has done the opposite. He’s given major tax cuts to his friends like Elon Musk and since you did also cover Bill Gates saying that the child mortality will be up, that’s on Elon Musk, raised in Pretoria and Johannesburg and Durban. Now, these are the sorts of things that to me warrant a G20 minus Donald Trump: voting Trump off the island right away. Doing so before this first Sherpa meeting on December 15 and 16, and maybe appointing I’m just guessing here, somebody appropriate like Claudia Sheinbaum, the president of Mexico to host a G19, that is the 19 members minus the US plus the EU plus the AU. And I really think it is time, especially if we have a war breaking out in coming days with this aggression by the US just simply to grab Venezuela’s oil. It’s really time to say ‘Boycott Divestment Sanctions’ and a G19. And really, let’s put pressure on the US. Even the climate sanctions that are being put on South Africa by Europe starting on January 1, a carbon border adjustment mechanism, should be applied to the US for having dropped out of the climate summit in Brazil just a couple of weeks ago. These are the sorts of things that we’d have hoped instead of the accommodating and assimilating and frankly, you know, quite obsequious attitude that South Africa’s had to the US, a little bit more strength would have been welcomed. 

Innocent: ‘G19.’ Prof, that’s pretty interesting. But many argue that the G20 has long been structurally biased towards Global North interests. Equally so some would say that this moment exposes the inherent weaknesses of the G20 as a platform for genuine multipolarity. Do you think that that statement does hold water? Is it binding in your view? 

Patrick: That’s absolutely right, because when I was making those optimistic statements about how the G20 took on all of these issues, I mean food security, but they wouldn’t talk about land reform. Or debt relief, but they wouldn’t acknowledge Odious Debt, corrupt debt. That was Trevor Manuel’s commission. Or on climate finance, it’s all private-sector blended, so it’s too expensive and it’s not a climate debt payment. So in all of these ways I think you’re right that we should question whether the G20 – which has had the traditional G7 that is the western powers the US, Europe, Japan, Canada – plus the BRICS being brought in – that is Brazil Russia India China South Africa – and a few others: Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Australia, Argentina, Turkiye, Mexico. So you’ve got an interesting mix in the G20 but it hasn’t reached out – even though tokenistically, the African Union was added in the 2023 G20, hosted by India, it was added, but you could see at the Johannesburg summit, with no inputs from the African Union of any merit, it was tokenistic. And so, as a result, I think that’s exactly the right question. Aren’t the G20 traditionally, and especially with someone as aggressive, bullying, imperialistic as Donald Trump, assimilating the subimperial, the middle powers against all the rest of us? And you know, we also saw that in Belem, Brazil at the COP 30. It was the rich countries and the middle countries that really ganged up on everyone else. I fear we can’t really talk, therefore, about a Global North, a Global South. It’s really now an imperial and a subimperial bloc against the rest. And unfortunately, South Africa lands itself in the subimperial category too often. 

Innocent: Yeah. And Prof, going back to your work, you have written and you spoke extensively about how Global South elites often fold under US pressure. Now the question is how would you define what you call Trump appeasement syndrome and his leadership in this current geopolitical moment? How do you categorise that? 

Patrick: Well, let me borrow, Innocent, from the ambassador who was just kicked out in March from Washington, Ebrahim Rasool. He’s an extraordinary fellow who really had a good inside view and really tried to make things work. And as he described it, ‘We’ve tried appeasement, it didn’t work.’ In other words, again and again, appeasement of Trump. It was going to the May 22nd Oval Office meeting with racist golfers. I mean one of them Ernie Els, said ‘thank you, to the US, for helping us – us meaning white South Africans – in the war in Angola.’ Right, helping apartheid against a neighboring country, to basically go in, and about a million people were killed in that process. It was that degree of appeasement that failed. And don’t, again, don’t just take it from me or from Ebrahim Rasool. The New York Times last month had a very interesting, long article about the sabotage of the G20 by Trump and his various people who came to various meetings; you know, underlings, only one or two ministers ever showed up, once, the central bank chair. But basically Trump was already setting out – and he made it very clear right from the outset – that South Africa would be a specific target and that was based on this awful myth of of white genocide. It is so ironic, isn’t it, Innocent that when you look at the tariffs, especially on grapes and wine – the two agricultural products that are that are really sticking. They originally also said citrus and nuts, but those have been taken off. But that all hit, more than anyone else, Afrikaner farmers. So the whole thing looks absolutely ludicrous, doesn’t it? And at that level, you have to just think, well, who is he signaling to? Who is he trying to beat up? South Africa. Just like he did Somalia this week in a cabinet meeting, as well as Nigeria a couple of weeks ago? Well, I think he’s trying to speak in all of these ways to a racist white American base. I happen to have gone to university there and know pretty well what that MAGA make America great again philosophy is all about. And to have tried appeasement, as Ebrahim Rasool admits, was never going to work. And it’s really time to be tough and not to be rolling over, as unfortunately the message that came from Vincent Magwenya, the president’s spokesperson, saying we’ll just take a year off, take a commercial break. Now that was very unfortunate it’s time not to just lie down and appease. It’s time to fight back.

Innocent: Yeah, Prof, just before I let you go, I’m keen to hear your view on this one. How has South Africa’s economic dependence on the western capital markets and trade flows shaped its cautious posture towards Washington and even while it’s rhetorically aligned with BRICS, which I guess it’s one of the, you know, the big one of the force for lack of a better term. 

Patrick: Yes, Innocent, that is actually crucial because the underlying problem is the overproduction of goods, especially steel and aluminium and automobiles. We could look at the overproduction, the overcapacity, and find that largely coming from the east coast of China. But Trump’s response to that – a tariff war – is something that South Africa’s suffered in the first half of this year: an 82% decline year-on-year, in auto sales to the US. The only things that are selling are some of the East London Mercedes C-Class. So, it’s an extraordinary period where the entire world is in turbulence and the global value chains are being shaken up. And what China has done as a result of losing a lot of its US market because of high tariffs, is to dump in South Africa. And the South African response – with the International Trade Administration Commission, that is, our Department of Trade and Industry’s committee that looks at the unfair trade, and they say, ‘Look you’re dumping, you’re selling here below cost, you’re selling washing machines and steel and nuts and bolts and tyres. So we’re going to put tariffs on you, China.’ And this is the extent to which I think we’re in a really serious problem. A problem that’s very deep. And that what Trump and China and South Africans are doing is pretty much on the surface. We have to get right to the roots of it. 

Innocent: All right, that’s where we’re going to leave it. Political economist, Professor Patrick Bond, thank you so much for indeed making the time. That conversation with you. Thanks. That conversation brings us to exactly 21:25 Central African time. This is Africa World Hour on Channel Africa, the African perspective.

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