PAPAL SUPPORT: South Africa’s G20 Presidency received the blessings of Pope Leo XiV. Photo: The Vatican Media
Johannesburg is bracing for the most consequential week in its democratic history.
Motorcades and road closures will soon stretch across the city as the world’s largest economies converge for the G20 leaders’ summit next week. It will be the first time the forum is held under an African presidency and South Africa’s opportunity to shape a new conversation about global governance.
The symbolism is unmistakable. Twenty-six years after the G20 was created to stabilise financial markets, it meets on the continent most affected by the inequalities it was meant to repair. For South Africa, the event is about more than logistics. It is about legitimacy.
President Cyril Ramaphosa has cast the summit as a test of whether multilateral cooperation still matters. The chosen theme, Solidarity, Equality and Sustainability, seeks to redefine what stability means in an unequal world where access to health, technology and peace is shaped by wealth.
In his weekly newsletter on Monday, Ramaphosa wrote that Johannesburg should be the place where “the conversation on a fairer financial system begins”. Fairness, he said, can no longer be treated as sentiment. It must be measurable and enforceable.
Two days earlier, in Vatican City, he met Pope Leo XIV to seek moral backing for that message. The meeting, arranged by South Africa’s special envoy Mcebisi Jonas, was as strategic as it was symbolic.
The Pope described South Africa’s leadership of the G20 as “a moment of conscience for the world”. Ramaphosa called debt “a quiet violence” against developing economies and warned that it had become easier to fund wars than to invest in peace.
The encounter followed months of outreach between Pretoria and the Vatican to secure papal endorsement of South Africa’s G20 priorities on debt and inequality. It placed Ramaphosa within a lineage of leaders who have used faith diplomacy to reinforce moral arguments for economic justice.
When SA assumed the presidency, its diplomats, economists and development partners put inequality at the centre. Ramaphosa’s position has been clear from the outset: economic cooperation cannot claim legitimacy if it deepens division.
“The richest ten percent hold three-quarters of global wealth while one in four people face hunger,” he said. “Inequality is bad for everyone. It makes the world less stable, fuels conflict and undermines democracy.”
To ground that moral argument in policy, the government appointed a high-level expert panel chaired by Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz to examine inequality as a systemic risk. The panel’s report proposes the creation of an International Panel on Inequality, modelled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to measure disparities and hold governments accountable.
The Stiglitz panel reflects SA’s effort to turn ethics into economics, moving the language of fairness into the realm of measurable policy and financial reform.
UNAids executive director Winnie Byanyima, a leading advocate for linking inequality to public health, echoed the same argument. “The more unequal a society is, the deadlier and longer a pandemic becomes,” she said. Her words underline South Africa’s central claim that inequality is not a symptom of crisis but its source.
If adopted, the Stiglitz panel’s proposal could turn fairness from moral appeal into an enforceable standard. Credit agencies and global markets would begin to weigh inequality in the same way they assess debt or carbon.
For Pretoria, the argument is practical: justice must be built into the structure of the global economy rather than added as charity.
Ramaphosa’s message to the G20 is that moral imperatives have measurable consequences. Societies that entrench inequality ultimately undermine growth, erode trust and breed instability.
At the heart of South Africa’s presidency is a demand for debt reform. Ramaphosa argues that the global financial order punishes the very countries it claims to assist. In his newsletter, he wrote that sovereign debt had become “a noose around the neck of development”.
Africa’s average debt-to-GDP ratio is close to seventy percent and, in some states, interest payments already exceed budgets for health and education. Data from the International Monetary Fund shows that African governments now spend more on servicing debt than on reducing poverty.
For Pretoria, this is not a failure of governance but of structure. A system designed to protect creditors leaves reformers strangled by austerity. The president sees debt as the hinge connecting every other issue on the table. Without reform, there can be no genuine progress on climate adaptation, technology transfer or social protection. Debt relief is the precondition for development.
SA wants the G20 to agree on a lending framework that allows countries to invest in people and resilience before the next crisis strikes. Whether the bloc’s wealthier members will back that agenda remains uncertain.
The G20 includes nineteen countries together with the European Union and, for the first time, the African Union as a permanent member. Combined, they represent eighty-five percent of global GDP, three-quarters of trade and about two-thirds of the world’s population.
This year’s summit, from 21 to 23 November, unfolds in a fractured political landscape. The US has withdrawn its official participation after President Donald Trump announced a boycott and called SA’s presidency “a total disgrace”.
His decision follows renewed false claims about the killing of white Afrikaners and continued attacks on South Africa’s presidency.
SA dismissed Trump’s remarks as regrettable, unfounded. The department of international relations and cooperation reiterated that SA’s focus remained on its “positive global contributions.”
“Drawing on our own journey from racial and ethnic division to democracy, our nation is uniquely positioned to champion within the G20 a future of genuine solidarity, where shared prosperity bridges deep inequalities. We look forward to hosting a successful G20 Leaders’ Summit.”
SA will hand the G20 to the US next year, ending a run of Global South presidencies that began with Indonesia, continued through India and Brazil, and now reaches Johannesburg. It remains unclear how that handover will unfold. What was meant to be a routine procedural transition has become a test of whether the G20 can rise above political grievance.
Argentina’s President Javier Milei will also not attend, despite earlier expectations that he would travel to Johannesburg. He will instead be represented by Foreign Minister Pablo Quirno and Federico Pinedo.
Even without Washington and Buenos Aires, more than sixty heads of state are expected in Johannesburg, including India’s Narendra Modi, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, China’s Xi Jinping, France’s Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Their attendance signals confidence in SA’s ability to anchor a conversation that speaks to the priorities of the Global South, from debt relief and fair trade to digital inclusion and climate finance. It also acknowledges that Johannesburg has become a stage where the divide between North and South can no longer be ignored.
The G20 has long faced criticism for producing lofty statements without enforcement power. What distinguishes this summit is that its host knows what unfulfilled promises look like. SA’s struggles with inequality, unemployment and energy insecurity mirror those of much of the developing world it represents.
The Stiglitz panel warns that rising inequality has become as destabilising to the global order as inflation or debt contagion. Left unchecked, it amplifies every other crisis, from pandemics to migration and political extremism.
By placing equality alongside sustainability and solidarity, SA is asking the G20 to treat social justice not as philanthropy but as prevention. A world that fails to share opportunity will keep paying for instability through displacement, conflict and ecological loss.In his audience with the Pope, Ramaphosa spoke of a global spirit of Ubuntu and the belief that strength lies in lifting one another up. The Pontiff agreed that markets alone cannot deliver peace.
The exchange underlined the moral core of South Africa’s presidency: economics without ethics cannot last.
As final preparations intensify at Nasrec, the conference venue south of the city, the question is whether the world’s divided powers can still find common ground. For all the ceremony, the true test will be whether Johannesburg can turn symbolism into structure.
The challenge for South Africa’s presidency is whether it can convert moral capital into policy traction. For SA, this moment remains an act of faith. The presidency has given it a chance to redefine what global stability means and who gets to shape it.
As Ramaphosa wrote this week, “True strength lies not in dominance, but in lifting one another up.”
If Johannesburg can turn that sentiment into policy, it will achieve what most summits only promise, shifting the world from words to real change.