When China hosted the G20 summit in 2016, authorities refused to reveal how much it cost, but there was a rumour reported by The Economist that it approached $24-billion (around R410-billion).
The 2018 G20 summit in Argentina was much more modest, but still set the country back around $112-million (R1.8-billion).
Japan, 2019: $320-million (around R5.5-billion).
India, 2023: authorities were again cagey about spending, but it was believed to amount to in the region of 4.1 crore rupees (R8.4-billion).
Earlier this month, Dirco Minister Ronald Lamola said that South Africa was aiming to spend around R700-million when it hosts the G20 summit in November 2025.
That budget is so small that of all the countries which have hosted the G20 in the past 10 years, it only comes close to Indonesia – which spent just 674-billion Indonesian Rupiah, or around R766-million, hosting the summit in 2022.
The obvious point to be made here is that South Africa’s economy is dwarfed in size by the G20 member nations cited above. The only one within touching distance is Argentina, whose GDP in 2024 is still roughly twice that of South Africa.
And yet, there is an argument to be made that South Africa should still consider ploughing far, far more money into this event.
India offers a potential example
I travelled to India last year as part of a Modi government-funded media tour for G20 journalists. (Yes, it was a propaganda fest; let’s leave that aside for now.)
The country, as I wrote afterwards, was in the grip of G20 fever. What Indian authorities seemed to have succeeded in doing was something quite astonishing: galvanising the public into genuine enthusiasm for what many would consider a very dry international economics talkshop.
Everywhere we went, the word “G20” drew excitement, interest and comprehension from ordinary Indians.
This was the result of a vast public education campaign about the G20 and the benefits it could bring to India. G20 signage seemed to plaster the entire nation. One technique the organising body had employed to whip up interest: crowd-sourcing India’s G20 logo via a nationwide competition.
Every airport had a dedicated G20 desk to expedite the processing of G20 delegates. Everywhere, and I do mean everywhere you went as somebody even nominally associated with the G20, you were greeted by some form of cultural spectacle: dancing, singing, showing off traditional wares.
Most people probably associate the G20 solely with the leaders’ summit held right at the end, which draws together international heads of state in one hell of a security headache.
But there are other G20 meetings and events held in the host country throughout the hosting year. In the case of India, 190 G20 meetings had been held in 57 different cities by September 2023. Authorities deliberately chose to spread the events across the length and breadth of this vast country to disseminate the associated benefits as widely as possible.
Of course, set against the strongman premiership of Prime Minister Mahendra Modi, it was possible to perceive a more sinister dimension to all of this.
The G20 offered the perfect opportunity to present a palatable face of the regime to the international community: billboards everywhere proclaimed the country “the world’s largest democracy” when in reality decidedly undemocratic things were happening behind the scenes, including forced removals of the poor around Delhi to hide evidence of poverty.
But this is the whole point of the G20. It provides a chance to showcase a country to the world arguably more extensively than any other international events beyond the globe’s largest sporting tournaments.
What if we treated the G20 as South Africa’s Olympics?
Benefits may be long-term
There is surprisingly little research available on the economic impact of these summits, partly because of how more repressive governments try to shield their spending from public scrutiny, and partly because the differences between respective hosting contexts make it difficult to draw direct comparisons.
One study from the University of Toronto also notes that some of the benefits of hosting are difficult to quantify.
Here are some it suggests, though:
“1) The immediate, visible short-term stimulus of higher spending at hotels, restaurants and shops; creation of temporary jobs;
2) longer-term economic benefits such as increased tourist traffic and investment resulting from increased global name recognition thanks to media and advertising coverage;
3) new, permanent, public infrastructures and upgrades; and
4) the training for security forces and other first responders to prevent and respond to mass emergency events, such as terrorist attacks, infectious disease outbreaks, earthquakes and extreme weather events including hurricanes and tsunamis”.
The same study notes that the benefits seem to be much more powerfully felt by places “that lack the global visibility and infrastructure that the capital cities of the imperial powers of the past several centuries have”.
Good news: that’s us.
The G20 by definition attracts attention from investors and business people, with the opportunity to forge new partnerships here.
It draws politicians, activists, academics and policy-makers with money to spend (or generous per diems). As India did, we should be showing these people the best of our varied local cultures; creating – as India did – vast exhibitions to showcase South African talent and ingenuity.
The GNU feels like the perfect moment for this, with a renewed spirit of optimism and what feels like a genuine thirst for nation-building projects. There is also much international media interest in the concept of the GNU and Ramaphosa’s multiracial Cabinet, 30 years after the dawn of democracy. Why not capitalise on all of that?
As is the case with everything in South Africa, there will be understandable scepticism about whether allocating more funds to our G20 hosting will indeed result in more funds actually being spent on our G20 hosting.
Even if more money cannot be released from our wheezing fiscus, however, it is surely high time to at least start educating the public in earnest about what the G20 is, why it should be a point of national pride to host it, and how ordinary South Africans might capitalise on the opportunity.
There are precious few moments when the eyes of the world are trained on our ever-less-relevant country. Surely, surely, we should suck every drop of juice from this that we can? DM