Introduction: Roforofo Fight
Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, is often credited with the quote: “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” In a similar vein, radical Nigerian anti-establishment Afro-beat iconoclast, the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, coined the phrase “Roforofo Fight” in a 1972 song criticising the human intolerance of not being able to resolve a dispute amicably, resulting in physically fighting an opponent in the mud. Like wrestling a pig, the two contestants get completely soiled so that both become indistinguishable. This is a perfect depiction of South Africa’s challenge in engaging the United States (US) administration of Donald Trump during its presidency of the G20 (Group of 20) between November 2024 and November 2025, after which it will ironically hand over the chair to Washington.
This article assesses the first eleven months of South Africa’s chair of the G20, and looks forward to the grouping’s first Africa summit in the Johannesburg suburb of Nasrec in November 2025. I will briefly sketch the difficult geo-political environment in which Pretoria has had to pursue its presidency, before outlining some of the successes and shortcomings of its chair two months before the Nasrec summit. The G20 accounts for 85 percent of the global economy, 75 percent of international trade, and two-thirds of the world’s population. Founded in September 1999 to promote global financial stability through cooperation among the world’s most important economies following the 1997/1998 Asian financial crisis, the grouping consists of the original BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) members; Western powers like the US, Germany, Britain, France, and the European Union (EU); and regional powers like Japan, Indonesia, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The African Union (AU) joined the bloc in September 2023. Upgraded to summit level as a result of the global financial crisis of 2008/2009, the G20 has sought to stabilise the world economy
Ahead of the G20 summit, the Trump administration has already taken a wrecking ball to the multilateral global order, having withdrawn from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the 2015 United Nations (UN) Paris Climate Agreement. The Lancet medical journal estimated, in July 2025, that president Trump’s gutting of America’s bilateral aid programmes by effectively closing down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), could lead to 14 million preventable deaths by 2030. Other donors have also massively slashed development aid and humanitarian assistance. This retreat from global cooperation was acutely felt during G20 convenings, with Washington failing to send its foreign and finance ministers to meetings in South Africa. It also expelled Pretoria’s Ambassador to Washington, Ebrahim Rasool, in May 2025 for describing the American president as leading a white supremacist movement, further poisoning bilateral relations. Trump crowned all this by cutting off aid to South Africa, having falsely accused Pretoria of promoting “white genocide” amidst tendentious allegations of expropriating previously stolen black land. White Afrikaner farmers were then offered political asylum in the US.
A White House visit by South African president, Cyril Ramaphosa, in May 2025 to reset bilateral relations turned out to be disastrous, effectively culminating in Trump’s ambush of Ramaphosa in an attempted high-tech lynching in which a video was played alleging false evidence of “genocide” against white South African farmers. Trump then rejected Pretoria’s offer of a trade deal largely based on exchanging South African minerals for American liquefied natural gas. Washington thereafter imposed tariffs of 30 percent on all South African goods entering the US in August 2025, as part of global tariffs on all of America’s trading partners.
The Evolving Global Geo-Politics: Pax Americana v Pax Sinica
The rapidly evolving global geo-politics has not led to greater multipolarity. Instead, it has increased bipolarity between China and the US which are engaged in a new Cold War centred not on ideology, but on technology and markets. Beijing’s rise to become “the workshop of the world” has seen it build the globe’s second largest economy with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $19.2 trillion in 2025, which is around the size of all 27 EU countries combined at $19.9 trillion. An estimated 150 countries have joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative which has built highways, railways, sea ports, airports, and pipelines around the world. Moreover, Beijing has become the largest trading partner of over 120 countries. But despite exaggerated claims about the decline of America as a global superpower, the US is still the world’s largest economy, with a GDP of $30.5 trillion in 2025, accounting for 26 percent of global output and half of the G7’s (Group of Seven) GDP.
Africa is actively engaging China, its largest trading partner at $295 billion in 2025 (four times the size of US trade with Africa), and builder of a third of its infrastructure. Beijing is also South Africa’s biggest trading partner. China further accounts for about half of the GDP of the BRICS+ countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates [UAE], Iran, and Indonesia), a bloc that accounts for 46 percent of the world’s population and 36 percent of global GDP. However, BRICS+ comprises largely status quo powers which seek to enhance their own positions in Western-dominated institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), rather than overturn the American-created post-war order. Though a quarter of the BRICS+ bloc’s declarations relate to climate issues, members are fragmented into different negotiating blocs at global environmental summits. Historical tensions between China and India over the Himalayas, Ethiopia and Egypt over the Nile, and Iran and the UAE over disputed Gulf islands, could further disrupt the bloc’s cohesion.
Leviathan on the Limpopo: South Africa’s G20 Presidency
South Africa’s G20 presidency is thus being pursued within this difficult geo-political climate. Its chair is themed “Solidarity, Equality, and Sustainability,” with its presidency set to culminate in a November 2025 summit. The G20 has, however, historically struggled to address effectively challenges of climate change, reform of global economic institutions, crippling debt burdens, food security, and global poverty and inequality. The current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have also caused divisions among its members, which have sometimes made consensus more difficult to reach.
South Africa has sought, during its presidency, to prioritise African and global South issues. Pretoria’s G20 presidency has consciously built on those of three southern powers which are now all BRICS+ members: Indonesia (2022), India (2023), and Brazil (2024). Indonesia touted “inclusive development” and “vaccine equity”; India pushed “the digital revolution” and “sustainable development”, while the Brazilian presidency sought to promote climate justice, “social inclusion”, and a global alliance against hunger. A key lesson that Pretoria took from Brasilia’s chair has been the need to engage grassroots and other civic movements with which Brazil convened the G20’s first ever Social Summit in November 2024. South Africa has thus planned a Social Summit in Nasrec just before the Leaders’ Summit on 22-23 November 2025. The idea is to ensure an agenda set by the priorities of ordinary citizens, and to coordinate multinational civil society networks effectively.
By November 2025, South Africa had convened about 132 planned meetings. The four key priorities of its G20 presidency are: strengthening disaster resilience and response; ensuring debt sustainability; mobilising funding for a just energy transition; and using critical minerals to promote sustainable development and inclusive growth. Pretoria is crafting a Critical Minerals Framework Document for adoption by G20 leaders in November 2025, which seeks to ensure that the real benefits of mineral wealth accrue to local communities and resource-rich countries. Its G20 meetings have also sought to collect ideas from technical working groups, foreign and finance ministers, central bank governors, mandarins (senior civil servants), and sherpas (leading negotiators), as well as 13 engagement groups involving business, civil society, think tanks, women, youths, and labour.
South Africa has tried to push an approach in which the 23 G20 Working Groups stick to technical issues and leave political issues to the sherpas, foreign ministers, and heads of state in order to avoid political issues overwhelming progress on prioritising the G20’s global economic coordination goals. In addition, three task forces have also focused on inclusive economic growth, industrialisation, employment and reduced inequality; food security; and artificial intelligence, data governance, and innovation for sustainable development. Pretoria further consistently championed, within the G20, the reform of global governance institutions such as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
At the foreign ministers meeting in Johannesburg in February 2025, South African host, Ronald Lamola, set out Pretoria’s plans. He pushed strongly for the acceleration of the implementation of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seeking to reduce global poverty by 2030, while reiterating that just 12 percent of the SDG targets had been met by 2023. He bemoaned supply chain disruptions, trade restrictions, unilateral sanctions, and economic coercion, while noting the political divisions that have created a climate of distrust. Lamola then called for action on lowering Southern debt burdens; resolving global conflicts; prioritising conflict prevention and post-conflict peacebuilding; battling climate change; combating pandemics; curbing nuclear proliferation; financing development; and strengthening the multilateral trading system and multilateral development banks. South Africa further committed to submitting a comprehensive report, by November 2025, of an evaluation of the first full cycle of all 20 G20 presidencies. Five days after the foreign ministers’ meeting, G20 finance ministers and central bank governors met in Cape Town, and promoted similar issues: achieving the SDGs, tackling disrupted global supply chains, addressing prohibitive debt servicing costs, rising protectionism, and the need to increase quality infrastructure. Two subsequent finance and central bank ministerial meetings were convened in April and July 2025, while a second foreign ministers meeting was held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on 25 September 2025.
G20 Friends and Foes
The Trump administration often played a “spoiler” role in the G20 by effectively boycotting foreign and finance minister meetings in South Africa. Washington also opposed clean energy proposals in the G20, with Trump dismissing climate change as the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” at the UN General Assembly in New York in September 2025, before urging oil companies to “drill baby, drill!” He thus once again demonstrated his disdain for the just energy transition. Rather than supporting Pretoria’s solidarity, equality, and sustainability agenda, Washington has instead embraced unilateralism, inequality, and nationalism. The US has sometimes been joined in its obstructionism by right-wing governments in Italy and Argentina, with all three countries opposing issues of gender rights, clean energy, and the Sustainable Development Goals. These challenges made it impossible to issue the traditional diplomatic final communiqués for the G20 foreign ministers meetings. Instead, the South African chair issued non-binding short summaries seeking to capture key outcomes of these meetings. Final communiqués were issued only for two finance ministers’ meetings in July (Durban) and October (Washington D.C.) 2025. Pretoria also faced dissent from other G20 members. Large oil-producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia opposed proposals to reduce fossil fuels. Furthermore, G7 and EU states were not fully in support of some of the proposals on debt suspension and reforming credit ratings frameworks. The global South – and particularly G20 troika member Brazil – however, provided strong support to Pretoria’s presidency.
Conclusion: The Road to Nasrec
As the Social and Leaders’ summits in Nasrec approach in November 2025, the Working Ministerial Outcomes across the Sherpa and Finance tracks are being closely watched, with the critical negotiating phase of the Leaders’ Declaration getting underway. Pretoria is determined to produce an “ambitious, bold, and concise” Outcome Document, focused around its three key themes of solidarity, equality, and sustainability.
Civil society engagement with the G20 was marked by significant challenges within the formal Civil 20 (C20) process. Yet, productive collaboration occurred among government-supported organisations such as NEDLAC (the National Economic Development and Labour Council), Show Me Yor Number, and the South African National Civic Organisation (SANAC), while others like AFRODAD (African Forum and Network on Debt and Development) and EJN (the Economic Justice Network) withdrew from the process. The Business 20’s (B20) work has been much smoother, with South Africa’s business leaders participating actively in eight task forces to produce 30 “transformative” recommendations – focused particularly on business-friendly policies, infrastructure, and green finance issues - before a business summit in Sandton in November 2025.
In September 2025, the president of the incoming G20 chair, Donald Trump, announced that he would not personally attend the summit in Nasrec, instead sending his vice-president, JD Vance. Two months later, president Trump abruptly announced that neither Vance nor any US official would attend the G20 summit in Nasrec, falsely accusing the black-led government again of perpetuating what he falsely described as the “abuse” of white Afrikaner farmers and the confiscation of their land and farms. In the same month, the US president also suggested that South Africa be expelled from the G20.
Washington has signalled an evolving focus for its G20 presidency on economic prosperity, deregulation, and affordable energy (including the continued use of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear energy), thus threatening to reverse much of the progress that South Africa’s presidency achieved. Pretoria has thus been advised by civil society activists to pursue “leapfrog strategies” that anchor key Africa-related priorities in important non-G20 fora such as the AU and the UN.