That’s the view of leading development economist, Prof Jayati Ghosh, who also serves as a member of the G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality. Ghosh, who is a development economist based at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, was responding to various statement by senior United States (US) Government officials, who’ve cast aspersions about SA’s theme of Solidarity, Equality and Sustainability, while promising to whittle the bloc back down to basics when Washington assumes the leadership mantle, ahead of hosting next year’s Leaders’ Summit in Miami, Florida.

While SA’s bilateral relationship with Washington has taken a severe knock since Trump’s return to White House in January, the US’ lack of engagement at the highest levels of Pretoria G20 Presidency has also notable. In light of this, Trump announced that he would be missing the gathering.

“SA shouldn’t even be in the G’s anymore. Because what’s happened there is bad. I’m going, I told them I’m not going. I’m not going to represent our country there. It shouldn’t be there,” he said.

US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, on X in February criticised SA for using the G20 to promote “solidarity, equality and sustainability” while the US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent gave a preview of America’s leadership of the group.

“The US is back on the international stage as a leader. We have whittled down the G20 back to basics. We are making it work for the American people better than ever. We have the G20 had become basically the G100 this past year. So it will be a concentrated group in Miami seeing the best America has to offer with American leadership. Thanks to President Trump,” he said.

Deputy US Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Allison Hooker shared Bessent’s sentiments when speaking at the SA-hosted G20 Foreign Ministers meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly this September.

“Instead of elevating urgent global economic matters through a consensus based approach, the G20 has become entangled in debates over every political wedge issue of the day, whether on gender responsive budgeting, nation building or pandemic surveillance. Let me be clear expanding the G20 scope in this way does not strengthen the forum. It dilutes it and undermines our ability to deliver on our most basic responsibilities,” Hooker

US positions were put to Development Economist, Professor Jayati Ghosh, who warned of the detrimental impacts of Washington’s position on the bloc.

“It will be diminished in the G20, but I think we have to remember the G20 is just one of many groupings, and G20 can be useful if it is a forum to project wider interests and to generate cooperation across countries. I think G20 is not useful if it does not do that. If it’s just an expression of power among some of the larger countries, G7 was basically that, which is why it stopped being useful a very long time ago. G20 the real use of it, the dramatic, shall we say, expression of its usefulness happened really after the global financial crisis when there was a coordinated effort. Since then, we haven’t seen that much. I think the presidencies of the developing countries really did seek to bring that agenda forward by adding many more things that are of importance to the global majority,” Ghosh said.

The US Presidency follows that of four countries from the Global South, Indonesia, India, Brazil and SA, where development concepts aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals have been a central peg. Ghosh warned of broader G20 irrelevance, where the bloc to abandon issues relevant to most of humanity.

“The more G20 seeks to, as you say, whittle down, pare down, focus, concentrate on the issues that are of interest to large capital based in the North, the more irrelevant it will become for both the global economy and for global geopolitics. So yes, they they are free to do that. And G20 presidents have significant power in determining the agenda and the outcomes of the process during that year. But doing that actually has consequences, and those consequences would be much less relevance in the in the world,” Ghosh said.

–SABC–