Ambassador Gjermund Saether said Norway and South Africa grew closer in defending international law. Gjermund Saether has concluded his term as Norway’s ambassador to South Africa on a high note, lifted by his country’s full participation in a year of meetings of the G20 forum, as a special guest of South Africa. In a drollvideoposted on X – which has gone viral – he said his only complaint about South Africa was the poor “skiing conditions”.
But, undeterred, he turned and propelled himself from Waterkloof towards OR Tambo International Airport on roller skiis, powered by Nordic ski poles. Saether had told Daily Maverick earlier that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s invitation to Norway – not a G20 member – to participate fully in the G20 as a guest had raised relations between the two countries to a “new high”. Saether said it was “very unfortunate” that the US boycotted most of the G20, including the summit, last month and that the reason President Donald Trump had given for the US not attending the summit – that Afrikaners were being “slaughtered and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated” – was in thewordsof the Norwegian prime minister “really not acceptable”.
Norway also found it “very unfortunate and very difficult to comprehend” that Trump had refused to invite South Africa to the US-led G20 of 2026, which began on 15 and 16 December with a meeting of the G20 sherpas in Washington, DC. America’s absence from South Africa’s G20 inevitably did detract something from its success, particularly by diminishing the importance of Africa, since this was very much an African G20, Saether said. He saw the US boycott as a symptom of a wider decline in support for multilateralism.
Read Full Article on Daily Maverick
[paywall]
Argentina, for instance, also dissociated itself from the declaration of the Johannesburg G20 Summit. Saether thought South Africa did well in the circumstances, first by getting a summit declaration at all (which had been in doubt), and second by not giving too much space to viewpoints held by just a few countries, by foregoing some ministerial declarations on the road to the summit rather than agreeing to declarations which would have taken the world “in the wrong direction and contradicted important principles and rights”. “Norway and South Africa share a deep belief in multilateralism and the close cooperation during G20 was a perfect illustration of that,” he said.
Norway also liked South Africa’s focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, on financing for development, and the focus on Africa more generally, including the African Engagement Framework (AEF) which the summit had adopted. The AEF focused on improving the continent’s economies and governance, including how to boost regional infrastructure to facilitate the African Continental Free Trade Area. And Saether said South Africa’s G20 had done “very important work” in addressing illicit financial flows such as the tax dodges which cost Africa at least $80-billion a year in lost revenue.
And he said the two expert panels South Africa had commissioned – one headed by American Nobel economic laureate Joseph Stiglitz on inequality and the other headed by former South African finance minister Trevor Manuel on African debt and development – had put very important issues on the agenda. Saether also mentioned proposals on disaster risk reduction, on the renewed impetus to the G20 Compact with Africa and on improving the G20 Common Framework on debt relief, as particular important achievements of the G20 for Norway.
[/paywall]
