US absence at SA’s G20 Summit threatens to upend Ramaphosa’s agenda

With barely a week to go, some important leaders have dropped out of South Africa’s G20 summit, and it’s uncertain whether it will be able to issue a Leaders’ Declaration.

Rightwing Argentine President Javier Milei has joined US President Donald Trump’s boycott of the summit in Johannesburg on 22 and 23 November, his spokesperson confirmed this week. Official sources also confirmed that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo would not be attending the summit.

There are also unconfirmed reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping will not attend for unknown reasons. The Chinese embassy in Pretoria referred questions about this to South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco), which said it would answer on Monday.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will also not attend the summit. He was expected to represent President Vladimir Putin, who could not attend because of a warrant of arrest for him issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The Kremlin this week said the deputy chief of staff of the presidential executive office, Maxim Oreshkin, would head Russia’s delegation.

With the US absent, 65 delegations will attend the summit, including the other 18 countries and the European Union and African Union, which comprise the G20, plus 15 guest countries, the heads of African regional economic communities and many international organisations.

With their support staff included, more than 1,000 accredited delegates are expected to fill the summit venue, the Johannesburg Expo Centre at Nasrec, south of Johannesburg.

Consensus fundamental

Many of the G20 members are supporting South Africa especially strongly to compensate for the US’s hostility. However, the absence of the US could still be a spoiler.

Trump had earlier announced that Vice-President JD Vance would represent him at the summit. But this week, Trump posted on his Truth Social site that “No US Government Official will attend” because “Afrikaners … are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated.”

This false claim has obsessed him for months.

Trump could still change his mind. But if no US officials attend the summit, it is uncertain whether the leaders will be able to adopt the G20 Johannesburg Leaders’ Declaration — which South Africa hopes to issue at the end of the summit — as declarations are supposed to be agreed upon by consensus.

On Wednesday, President Cyril Ramaphosa told journalists outside Parliament that the US’s “absence is their loss” and that the boycott would not prevent the meeting from going ahead and making “fundamental decisions”.

However, other G20 members cautioned that consensus was fundamental to the G20 and that the US was the incoming host. They said some members might be concerned that defying the US could harm their relations with Washington.

US officials have attended some of the 130-plus ministerial and official G20 meetings that have taken place this year, agreeing on some declarations and blocking others. At some of the meetings they missed, declarations were agreed on in their absence.

This was the case with the declaration of agricultural ministers on food security and hunger in September and the development ministers’ declaration on illicit financial flows and social protection in July.

The US protested at these declarations, insisting they were null and void because the US’s absence meant they were not agreed upon by consensus.

Argentina has also disagreed on several positions, particularly on G20 support for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as it did at last year’s G20 summit in Brazil. But it did not block the declaration there. It will be represented in Johannesburg by its foreign minister, Pablo Quirno, say sources.

Saudi Arabia also objected to several positions in SA’s agenda that support renewable energy. Diplomats from other G20 countries believe Argentina and Saudi Arabia were emboldened by Trump.

Read more: Ramaphosa secures papal blessing for G20 values, while Trump (yet again) dumps on SA

‘No precedent’

The unsatisfactory alternative to a leaders’ declaration is a chairperson’s statement, which describes who has agreed or disagreed on what.

The “sherpas” who manage the G20 process are due to meet on Sunday to finalise all these issues, including the implications of the US’s absence and the final text of the declaration.

Elizabeth Sidiropoulos, the national director of the SA Institute of International Affairs and chair of the Think 20 engagement group, said there was no precedent for a G20 member being absent from the leaders’ summit.

She said one way of addressing the problem would be to issue a declaration by consensus of those countries present at the meeting, which is the way it had been done with some of the ministerial working group declarations.

She said how this was handled would depend on the other members.

“They want to see this as a success. They don’t want to see the South African G20 presidency fail or not be able to issue a declaration.”

The US, which takes over the presidency of the G20 from SA after the summit, would then set its own priorities and wouldn’t consider itself bound by the Johannesburg declaration.

Some G20 members have suggested that Trump probably intended to radically prune the ambitious agenda, removing the development items and focusing on managing the global economy.

Ambitious agenda

In its latest draft form, the roughly 50-page declaration covers the many topics of South Africa’s ambitious agenda under the theme of solidarity, equality and sustainability.

As a fundamentally development-oriented document, it includes many statements or initiatives to counter climate change, gender and other inequalities, and to promote the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and free trade, which are likely to be anathema to the Trump administration, Argentina and to a lesser degree, Saudi Arabia.

Originally, South Africa expected the main cleavages would be geopolitical issues, like Russia’s war against Ukraine and Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, which have divided past G20 summits.

Zane Dangor, the Dirco director-general, said South Africa managed to finesse these geopolitical issues and found the really difficult issues were climate change, the SDGs, gender and free trade — the latter because of Trump’s tariff wars.

After taking over the G20 presidency from Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last year, Ramaphosa announced his four priorities would be:

• Strengthening disaster resilience and response;
• Taking action to ensure debt sustainability for low-income countries;
• Mobilising finance for a just energy transition; and
• Harnessing critical minerals for inclusive growth and sustainable development.

The draft declaration proposes actions on all of these and others.

It agrees to mobilise finance to “accelerate just, affordable and inclusive energy transitions … in line with SDG 7…”

The draft declaration affirms support for the G20 Critical Minerals Framework developed under SA’s G20 presidency, which emphasises that critical minerals should be a “catalyst for prosperity, value chain security, greater beneficiation and value-addition in developing countries, and sustainable development worldwide”.

The draft declaration stresses the need for the global community to provide financing to developing countries to help them avoid, especially, climate-related disasters and to recover from them.

On debt sustainability, it proposes to strengthen the G20/OECD Common Framework for Debt Treatments, which includes debt forgiveness.

This was adopted by the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in October, with the US present.

The same month, the US attended the meeting of the G20 ministers of environment and climate and agreed to the Cape Town ministerial declaration on crimes that affect the environment — which adopted measures to fight the illegal trafficking of wildlife — and the ministerial declaration on air quality, which adopted measures to improve air quality.

These declarations might not stand if the US is absent from the summit. DM

This article was updated on 14 November 2025 to reflect that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo will not be attending the G20 Summit.