The handover of the G20 presidency to the United States will occur on Tuesday at the Department of International Relations offices. (GCIS)
The handover of the G20 presidency to the United States will occur on Tuesday at the Department of International Relations offices between officials of the same rank, director general Zane Dangor said on Monday.
“We’ll have one of our officials [to] hand over to the US charge. We could not do so under the normal process of the summit,” Dangor told journalists, a day after South Africa hosted the two-day G20 leaders summit boycotted by Washington. He noted that the US had only attended five of the 130 task team meetings held during the year, in the run-up to the summit.
International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola said at the weekend that South Africa would have preferred to hand over the presidency to US leader Donald Trump or a senior member of his administration, but decided to assign an official at the charge d’affaires level after the summit boycott.
In a significant mark of success for South Africa’s presidency, the G20 leaders that were present reached consensus on adopting a declaration on Saturday, defying Washington’s demand that none be issued in its absence.
On Monday, Dangor said the US “withdrew from the bulk of the early part of our presidency” and “there was a formal moratorium on participation” up until two weeks before the leaders’ summit.
After the US withdrawal, there were not many “consensus-based ministerial meetings” which informed how the declaration should be handled at the end of the year summit, he added.
“We decided on the consensus of those in the room. If you are in the room and we disagree, there is no reason we cannot consider your view,” he said.
“If you are not in the room, you cannot insist that your issues prevail. If you are in the room and negotiate in good faith, then we will consider your view, which is the spirit of multilateralism.
Dangor said the US hoped its non-participation would lead to a veto, “but there is no veto in the G20”.
He said the US had argued that, based on principle, “if one member is absent, then we can’t have a consensus”. Several member states agreed with this proposal, but it was voted against, Dangor said without naming the countries.
“This was unprecedented. There has never been a situation where a member has absented themselves in this way,” he said, adding that countries wanted to avoid setting a precedent which would weaken the G20 and lead to unilateral actions.
When asked whether he expected South Africa to be banned from the US G20 meeting next year, Dangor said this would mobilise the other member states and the US would have to prove “on what basis the non-invitation [was made] and what does that mean to the rest of the G20 members”.
He said it would be “a hard argument to sell that South African politicians pushing against the human rights violation in Palestine” should not participate at the summit, referring to one of the issues of contention between Pretoria and Washington.
Asked whether another reason for the frosty relationship — the discredited US claim of Afrikaner genocide in South Africa — had been discussed at the G20 over the weekend, Dangor told journalists: “It did not come up whatsoever. There was a general sense in the room that this was misinformation.”