Africa’s first G20 meeting opens with call for ‘cooperation’

JOHANNESBURG: South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa opened on Thursday a Group of 20 foreign ministers meeting with a call for “cooperation” amid geopolitical tensions and “rising intolerance.”

Top diplomats from the world’s largest economies gathered in Johannesburg for the two-day talks held for the first time in Africa, overshadowed by the absence of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“It is critical that the principles of the UN Charter, multilateralism and international law should remain at the center of all our endeavours. It should be the glue that keeps us together,” Ramaphosa said.

“Geopolitical tensions, rising intolerance, conflict and war, climate change, pandemics and energy and food insecurity threaten an already fragile global coexistence,” Ramaphosa said.

The G20, a grouping of 19 countries as well as the European Union and the African Union, is deeply divided on key issues from Russia’s war in Ukraine to climate change.

World leaders have also been split on how to respond to the dramatic policy shifts from Washington since the return of US President Donald Trump.

“As the G20 we must continue to advocate for diplomatic solutions to conflicts,” Ramaphosa said.

“I think it is important that we should remember that cooperation is our greatest strength,” he added. “Let us seek to find common ground through constructive engagement.”

A curtain-raiser to the G20 summit in November, the meeting was attended by top diplomats including Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, his Chinese and Indian counterparts as well as European envoys like France’s Jean-Noel Barrot and Britain’s David Lammy.

But the group’s richest member, the United States, was only represented by Dana Brown, the deputy chief of mission at the American embassy in Pretoria, after Rubio skipped the meeting amid disputes with the host nation over several policy issues.

Pretoria has in particular come under fire from Washington for leading a case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of “genocidal” acts in its Gaza offensive, which Israel has denied.

US Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent announced on Thursday that he would also not attend the G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors in Cape Town next week.

The first G20 presidency by an African nation was an opportunity for the continent to be “heard on critical global issues, like sustainable development, the digital economy and the shift toward green energy,” Ramaphosa said.

South Africa’s priorities for its presidency of the powerful grouping included finding ways to scale up resilience to climate disasters and improving “debt sustainability” for developing countries.

It also wanted to mobilize finance for a “just energy transition” in which countries most responsible for climate change support those least responsible, he said.

“G20 leaders should secure agreement on increasing the quality and quantity of climate finance flows to developing economy countries.”

South Africa would also champion the harnessing of critical minerals for “green industrialization.”

However, in a sign of the tensions in the grouping, the planned group photograph was canceled as “several countries did not wish to appear next to Lavrov,” members of a delegation told AFP.

South Africa’s agenda for its presidency might be “derailed” by heightened geopolitical tensions, senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, Priyal Singh, told AFP ahead of the meeting.

“The elephant in the room is the geopolitical context in which this meeting is taking place,” Singh said.

Rubio’s absence will “distract the focus of the meeting,” warned William Gumede, professor of public management at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

“It sends a symbolic message to Africans: the US is not taking Africa seriously,” he said.