SA rated worst G20 country in meeting key commitments - New report

Mounted police patrol on 13 November 2022, before the G20 Bali Summit in Nusa Dua, Indonesia. The G20 leaders’ meeting will take place this week. (Photo: Agung Parameswara / Getty Images)

By Peter Fabricius

14 Nov 2022

South Africa scored just 50% on average in a list of 21 main commitments by all the G20 members last year, according to a new report.

South Africa has come last in an assessment of the compliance of G20 members with the key commitments they made at their previous summit in Rome last year.

South Africa scored just 50% on average in a list of 21 main commitments by all the G20 members last year, according to a report by the G20 Research Group, based at the University of Toronto, and the Center for International Institutions Research of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

They released their compliance report on Monday, on the eve of the start of this year’s summit in Bali, Indonesia, which President Cyril Ramaphosa is attending.

South Africa is the only African member of the G20, though Senegal’s President Macky Sall is also due to attend this year’s summit ex officio, as the current chairperson of the African Union.

g20 Mounted police patrol on 13 November 2022, before the G20 Bali Summit in Nusa Dua, Indonesia. The G20 leaders’ meeting will take place this week. (Photo: Agung Parameswara / Getty Images)

The authors of the report say it “analyses compliance by G20 members with 21 priority commitments carefully selected from the total of 225 commitments made at the Rome Summit hosted by Italy on 30-31 October 2021”.

The report assesses actions taken by members between November 2021 and 14 October 2022, to keep the promises they made in Rome.

On average, the G20 members achieved 73% of these priority commitments; 13% lower than their compliance over 2020-2021 with commitments made at the Riyadh summit in 2020.

The report said that over the past year, the UK achieved the highest compliance, of 95% with the Rome summit promises, followed by the European Union at 90%, and Germany at 88%. Indonesia, which is hosting the 2022 summit this week, placed 17th for compliance alongside Turkey, with 60%.

“South Africa had the lowest compliance at 50%, and Russia had the second lowest compliance at 57%,” the report said.

In the report’s scoring system, countries get 100% for full compliance with each key commitment; 50% for partial compliance or work in progress; and 0% for a complete failure to comply or for actions taken directly opposite to the commitment.

Priority commitments

The priority commitments range from broad macroeconomic goals such as strengthening long-term financial resilience inclusive growth; major trade goals such as ensuring level trade and investment playing fields; through to greater vaccine equity and accelerated efforts towards carbon neutrality to combat climate change.

On one key concrete commitment, to develop model rules and multilateral instruments to prevent multinational companies from dodging their international tax commitments, all G20 members did poorly. None was rated as having achieved full compliance, and all were assessed to have achieved only partial compliance, thus, each scored 50%.

South Africa was deemed to have complied fully (with a 100%) score on four of the Rome commitments. It was judged “fair and inclusive” in providing access to new forms of work, “leaving no one behind”.

The report assessed that it had made its contribution towards an inclusive, equitable and resilient global economic recovery, accelerating progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.

South Africa was judged to have helped advance toward the global goals of vaccinating at least 40% of the population in all countries by the end of 2021 and 70% by mid-2022. This might have, in part, reflected South Africa’s campaign for a compulsory waiver of patents on Covid-19 vaccines to allow developing countries to make them.

The authors also gave SA full marks for its national plan to counter climate change.

Conversely, the country scored zero for its compliance with another four of the 21 commitments. These included a failure to contribute to the development of “trustworthy human-centred Artificial Intelligence (AI)”.

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South Africa was deemed to have failed the Crime and Corruption commitment, which required countries to take adequate measures to curb money laundering, including by improving transparency about who actually owns assets. These measures were supposed to be in line with Financial Action Task Force recommendations. This assessment comes at a time when FATF has threatened to greylist South Africa for its failure to counter money laundering and terrorist financing

The report judged South Africa to have failed to comply with the G20 commitment to end “the provision of international public finance for new unabated coal power generation abroad by the end of 2021”.

And the report also — inexplicably — deemed South Africa to have failed to comply with the commitment by developed countries to jointly mobilise $100-billion a year by 2020 and then annually through 2025, to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change.

As a developing country, South Africa is supposed to receive some of this $100-billion a year, not contribute to it.

On all the 13 other priority commitments, SA scored 50%.

But it is possible its score also suffered unfairly on some of these other commitments, devised essentially for developed countries, and so a developing country could do little to advance them — for example, the commitment to curb tax evasion by multinational enterprises.

Last year, South Africa came 18th in the same ranking, with Mexico 19th and India 20th and last. DM

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