South Africa urges G20 to provide solutions to global conflict, insecurity, rising inequality

By Hassan Isilow

JOHANNESBURG (AA) – South Africa has asked G20 leaders to take on ongoing challenges by offering workable solutions and approaches to issues that are fueling global conflict, division, insecurity, and growing inequality.

“The world is watching to see whether the most powerful can initiate a reversal of our slide to disaster,” International Relations and Cooperation Minister Naledi Pandor said at the ongoing G20 Foreign Ministers Meeting in Brazil.

According to a statement posted on her ministry's official website, Pandor said in her address to the meeting's agenda item on Wednesday about the G20's role in dealing with ongoing international tensions that global tensions have been fueled by a variety of developments over the last decade.

They involve, she said, "trade tensions between the largest economies in the world, the economic fallout related to COVID-19, ongoing terrorism and extremism and the difficulties of battling it, growing debt burdens of poor and middle-income countries."

Pandor added that tensions and conflicts have been fueled by “feelings of exclusion, inequality and abandonment in some regions of the world including Palestine, the Russia Ukraine war and infringement of UN prescripts and lately the Israel war on Gaza and related breaches of International law.”

She said all of these have placed the world in a more precarious situation, and that the G20 must attempt to craft implementable responses.

The top South African diplomat also said if developing countries are to achieve greater progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals, then suitable sustainable funding will be needed from multilateral development banks.

“The international tension we see today require balanced and fair approaches to global challenges, respect for diversity of opinion and belief and acceptance that global bodies are most successful when they act in the interests of all equally,” Pandor said.