South Africa barred from attending G20 preparatory meeting
Cape Town, South Africa (PANA) – South Africa has not been invited to the upcoming G20 sherpas meeting scheduled for 15 and 16 December in Washington, DC.
The exclusion was confirmed after the United States extended invitations to all other G20 member nations and singled out Pretoria. At the G20, Sherpas are country leaders who guide discussions and agreements ahead of the final summit with heads of State and Government.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday reiterated that South Africa would not be invited to next year's meeting. In his announcement on his social media site, Truth Social, he added that because South Africa had refused to hand over the G20 presidency to the acting US ambassador at the Johannesburg summit on 23 November, “South Africa will NOT be receiving an invitation to the 2026 G20, which will be hosted in the Great City of Miami, Florida”.
Last week, President Trump also questioned South Africa’s membership of the G20 group. He added that South Africa “has demonstrated to the World they are not a country worthy of membership anywhere, and we are going to stop all payments and subsidies to them, effective immediately”.
President Trump also complained that South Africa refused to hand off the G20 Presidency to a senior representative of the US Embassy, who attended the closing ceremony. President Trump was widely ridiculed for snubbing the mega summit.
South Africa's Department of International Relations & Cooperation spokesperson Chrispin Phiri said that as a founding member, “our commitment to the G20’s principles and collaborative framework remains steadfast”.
“We are confident that all members recognise that the strength and legitimacy of the forum derive from its established composition and shared adherence to its founding protocols. Any unilateral departure from this consensus would not only fragment our collective agenda but would inevitably set a precedent, introducing a new and destabilising variable into the calculus of membership for every nation present,” he said.
-0- PANA CU/MA 3Dec2025
