Ramaphosa sets new agenda amid US snub
Publish date: 24 November 2025
Issue Number: 1153
Diary: IBA Legalbrief Africa
Category: G20 Leaders Summit
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa set a new tone for the G20 yesterday, ending the first meeting of the global summit to be held on African soil with a push for a stronger voice for Africa and a challenge of assumptions that global leadership belongs to the west, writes Legalbrief. Significantly, the historic meeting, which ended on Sunday with the adoption of the Johannesburg declaration, earned Ramaphosa widespread acclaim for his handling of the summit in the face of US bullying. The US – among the most powerful members of the G20 – was largely sidelined, with the meeting resoundly supported by key global players and its declarations adopted despite US objections.
‘I now say that this gavel of this G20 Summit, formerly closes this summit and now moves on to the next president of the G20, which is the United States, where we shall see each other again next year,’ Ramaphosa said at the closing event. He added that ‘we’ve met in the face of significant challenges and demonstrated our ability to come together, even in times of great difficulty, to pursue a better world’. Ramaphosa navigated a diplomatic storm by refusing to hand over the presidency at the G20 Summit to the US’ Chargé d’Affaires, Marc D Dillard, who is considered a junior official. News24 reports that Washington made a last-ditch request to have Dillard and his delegation accredited for the summit to accept the G20 presidency on Sunday. However, International Relations & Co-operation Minister Ronald Lamola confirmed that the G20 presidency would officially be handed over to a US representative at his department’s Pretoria offices this week. ‘No one will steal that spotlight. The African continent has made it,’ Lamola said.
Al Jazeera notes that the final document of the G20 summit says the organisation will work towards the settlement of armed conflicts and lighten the burden of the developing nations in the world. The summit convened on Saturday for the first of two days with an ambitious agenda to make progress on solving some of the longstanding problems that have afflicted the world’s poorest nations despite the boycott by the US. The adopted summit declaration said the organisation will work for a comprehensive and lasting peace in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the occupied Palestinian territory and Ukraine. The declaration placed pointed emphasis on the seriousness of climate change, in a snub to US President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly cast aspersions and doubts on the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by human activities. It stressed that increasing large-scale disasters disproportionately affect people in vulnerable situations in ways that exacerbate poverty and inequality, adding that a high level of debt is one of the obstacles to inclusive growth in many developing economies. ‘Critical minerals should become a catalyst for value-addition and broad-based development, rather than just raw material exports,’ it added.
Ramaphosa said in his opening remarks that South Africa sought to preserve the integrity and stature of the G20 top economies, but is also committed to ensuring that the development priorities of the Global South and Africa find expression in the group’s agenda. The US, which is boycotting the summit, had demanded that no declaration be made. Ramaphosa flatly rejected that. Many of South Africa’s priorities for the group, including a focus on climate change and its impact on developing countries, have met resistance from the US, notes Al Jazeera. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said before the summit: ‘But I think South Africa has done its part in putting those things clearly upon the table.’ Guterres cautioned that rich nations have often failed to make the concessions required to strike effective climate or global financial reform agreements. Trump ordered his country to boycott the summit over his baseless claims that South Africa is pursuing racist anti-white policies and persecuting its Afrikaner white minority. The Trump administration has also made clear its opposition to South Africa’s G20 agenda from the start of the year, when it began hosting G20 meetings. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio skipped a G20 Foreign Ministers’ meeting in February, slamming the agenda as being all about diversity, equity and inclusion and climate change. Rubio dismissively said he would not waste American taxpayers’ money on that. The G20 is a group of 21 members that includes 19 nations, the European Union and the African Union. It works on consensus rather than any binding resolutions, and that is often hard to come by with the different interests of members like the US, Russia, China, India, Japan, the Western European nations France, Germany and the UK and others like Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
See also Analysis
White House spokesperson Anna Kelly accused Ramaphosa of ‘refusing to facilitate a smooth transition of the G20 presidency’, The Guardian reports. ‘This, coupled with SA’s push to issue a G20 Leaders’ Declaration, despite consistent and robust US objections, underscores the fact that they have weaponised their G20 presidency to undermine the G20’s founding principles’. The Sunday Times understands that the US made an attempt to lobby the UK – which will chair the G20 Summit in 2027 – to accept the declaration on its behalf, after the Trump administration’s attempts to send a junior official to the ceremonial handover at the Nasrec Expo Centre were widely rejected. The UK has been a major supporter of SA’s G20 presidency and some local officials had felt that a handover of the declaration to Starmer would have been smoother, as the UK is more aligned with the country’s agenda.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said Washington’s explanation for missing the summit ‘is in my view unacceptable and unfounded’. Støre was a guest of Ramaphosa at the summit, and Norway participated in the entire G20 process, attending all of the meetings of Ministers and officials throughout the year in the lead-up to the summit. ‘I would like to really salute President Ramaphosa for having carried through this G20 presidency in a year of major pressure on the international framework — commercial, financial, political, diplomatic,’ Støre told the Daily Maverick. He noted that every country has to decide for itself whether it belongs around this table: ‘The strange thing is that the US is about to take over the presidency of the G20 and has plans for its presidency, as every presidency is entitled to have.’
In his closing remarks, Ramaphosa expressed deep gratitude to his fellow leaders for their steadfast support throughout SA’s G20 presidency: ‘Your commitment has been vital in reaffirming the G20 as the premier forum for international economic co-operation and ensuring that it continues to drive progress on our most important challenges.’ News24 reports that he said the global community of nations used the meeting to call for an end to the conflicts and wars around the globe, and for a just, comprehensive, and lasting peace. ‘This summit has taken place at a crucial moment, as calls around the world grow louder for progress on the imperatives of our time: to end poverty in all its forms, to reduce inequality within and among countries, and to take urgent action to combat climate change,’ stated Ramaphosa. Brazilian President Lula da Silva, who handed over the G20 presidency to SA on 1 December 2024, was the first leader to embrace Ramaphosa and congratulate him for successfully hosting the summit. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hugged Ramaphosa and congratulated him. She was joined by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and India’s Narendra Modi. IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva said: ‘I am very proud of you … it was not easy’.
The G20 on Saturday issued a declaration emphasising the need to tackle climate change and achieve gender equality’. Trump’s administration withdrew from the Paris climate agreement on the first day of his second term in office and has reversed many policies designed to tackle sexism, racism and homophobia. Lamola emphasised that the summit was SA’s G20, highlighting that it was an opportunity to shine a spotlight on the African continent. The Sunday Tribune reports that he pointed to the framework on critical minerals, noting that 30% of the global minerals required to power artificial intelligence and green economies are found in Africa. ‘SA has enabled the issue of beneficiation at source within this G20 framework,’ Lamola added. On the subject of artificial intelligence in Africa, Lamola acknowledged that few African content creators have access to resources, but stressed that the G20 Summit aimed to change that dynamic.
Moneyweb reports that French President Emmanuel Macron noted that meeting for the first time on the African continent marks an important milestone in the life of the bloc, ‘but we must also recognise that the G20 may be reaching the end of a cycle’. Underscoring the drift, the French leader cited the absence of the US at the table, the difficulty of protecting humanitarian law and the sovereignty of some countries like Ukraine as evidence that requires an urgent collective re-engagement. ‘We are struggling to have a common standard on geopolitical crisis,’ Macron said.
On 18 occasions since SA took the chair of the G20 group, Trump aimed his barbs. The mission: clearly to destabilise SA under the influence of a powerful group of right-wing political actors in the country and in the US. A Daily Maverick analysis notes that the target was the G20 meeting, which Trump continued to try to upend until days before, when his administration issued a diplomatic note warning the group against making its standard political declaration. ‘On Sunday, a nineteenth attack came from White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly, who told Fox News that Ramaphosa’s refusal to facilitate a "smooth transition" of the G20 presidency to the US, coupled with its issuance of a Leaders’ Declaration, amounted to a weaponisation of the G20 to undermine the forum’s founding principles. ‘In that context, the G20 SA, now declared closed by Ramaphosa, had to fend off unprecedented attacks by a superpower to maintain a progressive path in a hostile world. A political declaration was passed and agreed. How that happened is the story of a changing world: 16 member states and 25 other leaders, many middle powers, defied America’s pique to attend. This was both a mark of solidarity with Africa and with SA and, also, of self-interest. Africa’s young population represents a great opportunity, as does the continent’s store of critical minerals.’
In a News24 analysis, Adriaan Basson said the adoption of the declaration was a significant victory for Ramaphosa’s presidency of the G20. ‘His smile couldn’t be broader when he asked the plenary to vote in favour of the adoption of the declaration. ‘Do I have the support?’ Officially, this wasn’t supposed to be televised after his opening address. Lamola whispered in Ramaphosa’s ear that he was still live on television when he called for adoption, but he didn’t seem to care. He quoted the Roman writer Gaius Plinius Secundus who is credited with the Latin phrase: ‘ex Africa semper aliquid novi’. ‘Out of Africa, there is always something new,’ Ramaphosa said confidently. This marked the end of a tumultuous year during which Madiba’s country had to withstand the bullying of a global powerhouse. At the end of it, America stood alone. And victory tasted sweet.’
On Friday night, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer threw his weight behind calls for the reform of global capital markets and how the cost of debt is formulated for African and other emerging economies. ‘We’ve got to work together to pioneer a new approach to development. It means countries like mine are resetting our relationship with the Global South, a relationship based on partnership but not paternalism, a shift from donor to investor. It means supporting countries in the Global South to raise more finance domestically. It means tackling unsustainable debt. TimesLIVE reports that Starmer was speaking at the eighth Global Fund replenishment session in Johannesburg ahead of the summit this weekend.
Throughout its presidency, SA championed four key themes: ensuring debt sustainability; strengthening disaster resilience and response; mobilising finance for a just energy transition; and leveraging critical minerals for inclusive growth. Gilad Isaacs, executive director of the Institute for Economic Justice, a policy think-tank in Johannesburg, cited two reports that have become flagship achievements. The Daily Maverick reports that they are a major global inequality report produced by a committee under the leadership of Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize for Economics laureate, and a high-level African debt report from an expert panel headed by former Finance Minister Trevor Manuel. Neither panel was part of official G20 structures or working groups, Isaacs noted, but Pretoria used the platform to elevate them, giving them global visibility and political momentum. In both cases, the government realised – though ‘a bit late in the day’ – that it could use the ‘G20 megaphone’ to draw global attention to issues of particular importance to Africa and the developing world, he added.
Manuel noted that Africa is losing nearly $89bn every year to external debt service and the global financial system designed to support vulnerable economies is instead accelerating their distress. City Press reports that he chaired the SA G20 Africa Expert Panel which comprised 26 distinguished economists and policy experts who released their landmark report on ‘Growth, Debt and Development: Opportunities for a New African Partnership’ ahead of the summit. The report was received by Ramaphosa. The findings are stark, revealing that more than half of Africa’s 1.3bn people now live in countries where interest payments exceed spending on health, education or infrastructure.
