South African president bangs gavel after rejecting plan from US, which hosts next meeting, for him to hand over to junior official
South Africa’s president, Cyril Ramaphosa, closed the G20 summit in Johannesburg by banging a gavel, having rejected a US proposal for him to hand over to a relatively junior embassy official for the next summit in Florida in a year’s time.
South Africa presented the two-day event as a triumph for multilateralism but it was marred by a boycott by the US, which has repeatedly accused South Africa of discriminating against white-minority Afrikaners, a claim that has been widely discredited.
Ramaphosa said in his closing speech: “We’ve met in the face of significant challenges and demonstrated our ability to come together, even in times of great difficulty, to pursue a better world.”
Wrapping up his address, he said: “This gavel of this G20 summit formally closes this summit and now moves on to the next president of the G20, which is the United States, where we shall see each other again next year.” It was Ramaphosa’s only mention of the country absent from the gathering of the world’s largest economies.
