KUALA LUMPUR: South African President Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa said South Africa will use its chairmanship of the Group of 20 (G20) to push for global action on equality, solidarity and sustainability.
Speaking to reporters here, Ramaphosa said he was honoured to have been invited as a guest of Asean chair Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim to address the 47th Asean Summit alongside Brazil.
“We were the guests of the chairperson, Premier Anwar.
“Together with Brazil, we were given an opportunity to address the Asean Summit, which we welcomed.
“We were able to speak about our forthcoming G20 leaders’ meeting in Johannesburg in November,” he said.
Ramaphosa said South Africa had chosen equality, solidarity and sustainability as the main themes for the G20 under its presidency, reflecting the country’s own struggles against inequality and its pursuit of inclusive growth.
“As you may well know, we have dubbed the theme of the G20 in South Africa as addressing challenging issues in the world that have to do with equality, solidarity and sustainability.
“We chose these themes because we had a sense that the world, in terms of the challenges being faced, is slipping away from promoting equality between nations and within nations,” he said.
He said Nobel laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz had been commissioned to lead a global study on inequality, which will be presented at the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg.
Ramaphosa said the other major themes – solidarity and sustainability – were equally significant to the world’s development agenda.
“The powerful must support the weak, the rich must support the poor, the healthy must support the unhealthy. And we need to act in solidarity,” he said, adding that this principle was rooted in South Africa’s own history and reflected in its support for Gaza.
On sustainability, he said the world needed to “move towards sustaining everything that we do”, including economic growth and climate action.
He outlined four key priorities that South Africa would bring to the G20 table, namely, climate recovery, financing climate change, debt justice, and governance of critical minerals.
“We felt that it’s important for the world to address the issue of financing recovery and come up with innovative solutions, be it insurance, soft funding or concessional funding, that can be put on the table by development finance institutions or multilateral organisations to help poor countries recover from climate change damage,” he said.
He also called for climate financing commitments to be honoured and scaled up, particularly to support developing nations transitioning to clean energy without leaving vulnerable communities behind.
Ramaphosa said that financial sustainability, particularly for heavily indebted countries, must also be addressed, stressing the need to tackle both the scale and cost of debt.
“Many countries in the Global South are paying far more than countries in the Global North for their debt.
“Debt for countries in the North is much cheaper than the cost of debt for those in the Global South.
“We think this is a huge injustice because many countries spend much more of their financial resources servicing debt rather than paying for education, health, infrastructure and development,” he said.
On critical minerals, Ramaphosa said developing countries must benefit from the natural resources within their borders.
“Many developed countries set up processes just to extract those minerals, rocks and soil, and take them to their locales.
“We now say that we want those minerals to be processed in the countries of origin so that the communities from where those minerals come should benefit,” he said.
© New Straits Times Press (M) Bhd
