Enoch Godongwana is in the US capital for the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings running April 13 to 18, the kind of high-level forum where the world’s finance ministers and central bankers map out responses to global economic pressures.
The G20 finance chiefs meeting runs alongside it, as it traditionally does. South Africa will not be part of it.
The decision makes South Africa, Africa’s only full G20 member and one of the group’s founding nations, a spectator at a forum it helped build.
“We are members of the G20,” Godongwana said. “However, the US has not accredited us, which means that South Africa will not be part of the G20 for the whole of this year.”
His framing was deliberate. This, he insisted, is not an expulsion. It is a lock-out, and there is a difference.
A G20 host nation controls access to its meetings through the accreditation process. It is an administrative tool, not a legal one. South Africa’s membership has not been revoked. Its seat simply has a padlock on it for as long as the US holds the presidency.
“We’ve taken a view that for us it is a holiday from the G20 this year,” he said. “We’re beginning in November with the UK presidency.”
Trump has repeatedly alleged that white Afrikaner farmers are being systematically killed and their land seized in South Africa, accusations South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has described as disinformation.
The US sent no delegation to the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg in November 2025. When it came time to hand over the G20 gavel, Washington signalled at the last minute that a junior embassy official would attend the handover ceremony.
Pretoria refused, calling it an insult. In the end, no US delegation was accredited at all.
A month later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio formalised the break in a statement pointedly titled “America Welcomes a New G20.” He announced that Poland, praised as a post-Cold War economic success story, would join the forum in South Africa’s place.
Rubio accused the ANC government of sabotaging the G20 during its presidency, claiming Pretoria had ignored US objections, blocked negotiations, and even leaked the identities of American officials working on G20 talks. South Africa denied the characterisations.
Rubio said the US “supports the people of South Africa, but not its radical ANC-led government,” adding that Washington would forge ahead with what he called “a new G20.”
Precedent that worries the world
Beyond the bilateral noise, what unsettles other nations is the principle being set. South Africa is the only African country with full G20 membership, its exclusion means the continent’s largest economies, its crises, its debt burdens and its 1.4 billion people lose direct representation at the table where global financial decisions get made.
The African Union holds a permanent seat but it is not the same as a founding member’s chair.
At the first G20 sherpas meeting in December, Germany, China, the UK, France, Canada and Brazil were among the countries that pushed back against South Africa’s exclusion.
Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly backed Pretoria, noting the dangerous precedent of one host nation simply deciding another member cannot attend.
The message from several capitals was clear: if this can happen to South Africa today, it can happen to anyone tomorrow.
For now though, the African Union’s permanent membership means Africa will retain some voice in G20 proceedings, thin comfort for a country that spent 2025 chairing the forum and producing what many called one of the more substantive G20 outcomes in years.
Godongwana says South Africa will wait it out. He does not expect the UK, which takes over the G20 presidency in 2027, to adopt the same approach. The door, he believes, reopens in November.
