Was the G20 worth the effort for team SA?

Did hosting the event end up doing more harm than good, or were there unforeseen benefits for South Africa?

The overall G20 impact remains unclear, but commentators this week at least agreed on one outcome: the diplomatic furore over Donald Trump’s G20 remarks turned the global talk-shop into a unifying event for South Africa and other ‘middle economies’, which find themselves increasingly aligned in opposition to Trump’s tirades.

This ‘solidarity of the insulted’-- in addition to a welcome injection of hotel bookings and other visitor expenses -- was possibly the most meaningful benefit of an otherwise ineffectual global summit that has lost its compass bearings, commentators opined: “In the context of the US government boycott, the strengthening of our relationship with Europe and other “middle economies” may turn out to be a significant turning point geopolitically,” said Andrew Donaldson, a former Deputy Director-General of the National Treasury and current research associate of the University of Cape Town’s  Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit. “The theatre can create space for improved multilateral collaboration, but the hard work has to be done in technical forums that have to deal with trade issues, tax cooperation, financial vulnerability, and the like.”

“I think the G20 has expanded too widely in its sectoral sub-streams and consultative processes – it's not clear that much value comes from these many engagements, which to some extent reproduce functions of the UN agencies or the OECD or the World Bank or other forums. A return to a narrower agenda of critical issues in fiscal and financial coordination might be helpful.”  

“But on balance South Africa has done well in putting the focus on Africa’s development and finance challenges, on global inequality and the high cost of debt to low-income countries,” Donaldson said.  

Prominent economist Dawie Roodt said Trump’s G20 boycott created a convenient moral high ground for those critical of the US leader’s antics: “What happened here is that Donald Trump did us an amazing favour by not coming,” Roodt said in response to Cape Chamber queries. “Trump saying all the things he said created a platform for everybody to criticise him, and created this impression of everybody singing from the same hymn sheet.”  

“It (the event) was not an example of good political leadership by South Africa, it was just a platform for everybody to nail Donald Trump – and he created that by not coming. South Africa came out looking very good, and sounding very good,” said Roodt, adding that President Cyril Ramaphosa inadvertently benefited from the Trump backlash. “Everybody was jumping up and down and giving compliments to him -- Trump gave him that on a platter.”

To the average South African, the G20 had far less impact on the national psyche than the latest exploits of the Springbok rugby team, concluded Roodt. “Of course, the hotels were full. But the G20 is primarily a political platform where world leaders get to have their say.”