The G20 will be diminished under the leadership of the United States (US) that will assume the Presidency of the bloc from South Africa later, this month. That’s the view of leading development economist Professor 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 US Government officials who’ve cast aspersions about South Africa’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 South Africa’s bilateral relationship with the United States has taken a severe knock since President’s Donald Trump’s return to White House in January, Washington’s lack of engagement at the highest levels of Pretoria G20 Presidency has also notable.

WATCH | U.S. President Donald Trump says South Africa should no longer be part of the Group of 20 major economies, and that he will not attend the G20 Leaders’ Summit in SA later this month. SABC News Specialist Correspondent Sophie Mokoena has the latest updates. pic.twitter.com/qCt8Gsm0Qk

— SABC News (@SABCNews) November 6, 2025

“South Africa shouldn’t even be in the G’s anymore because what’s happened there is bad. I told them I’m not going. I’m not going to represent our country there. It shouldn’t be there,” says Trump.

Secretary of State, Marco Rubio on X in February criticized South Africa for using the G20 to promote “solidarity, equality and sustainability” while the US Treasury Secretary 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,” says U.S. Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent.

“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,” says US Under Secretary Of State, Allison Hooker.

US positions we put to this economist 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 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,” adds Ghosh.

The US Presidency follows that of four countries from the Global South, Indonesia, India, Brazil and South Africa where development concepts aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals have been a central peg.

“What does this mean for the G20 next year… that we have to think of it as a as possibly, you know, one of those years that you have to blank out, that you have to go imagining that it didn’t happen. It does not mean that initiatives brought in this year, and also by the Brazilian and South African presidencies over the past couple of years, will disappear because you have other countries. Most of the other G20 countries and coalitions of other countries willing to take that agenda forward. So increasingly, the world has learned, if you like to swim around the big fish and I think that’s going to happen also with a lot of the initiatives that are seen as part of G20 but often go beyond G20 or just on a subset of some G20 countries,” says Ghosh.

Professor Ghosh warned of broader G20 irrelevance where the bloc to abandon issues relevant to most of humanity.

WATCH | U.S. President Donald Trump says that no U.S. government official would attend the G20 Leaders’ Summit in South Africa later this month, including the U.N. Climate Change Conference, COP30, in Brazil. SABC News Correspondent Sherwin Bryce-Pease has more. pic.twitter.com/sQdyl6lCEn

— SABC News (@SABCNews) November 10, 2025

“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 are free to do that. 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 world,” she says.

President Trump will host next year’s Leader’s Summit at this Doral Golf club, near Miami.

What is clear is that once the leadership mantle shifts to Washington there will be a new sheriff in town and a shift to what the US calls a return to basics, a re-centering of the G20 to what the United States views as its core economic mission and not to engage in what it describes as “out of touch social initiatives disconnected from growth and stability” a return to the G20’s founding mandate….which Professor Ghosh warns could lead to the bloc’s growing irrelevance.

RELATED VIDEO | Trump says South Africa should not be in G20 Group