Global polarisation will ruin us, says Cas Coovadia at Business 20

Africa has ample opportunity to capitalise on its demographic benefits to make the most of SA’s presidency of the Group of 20 (G20) in 2025, according to business leaders speaking at Business 20 (B20) in Cape Town.

The business segment of SA’s G20 activities kicked off in Cape Town on Monday night. The event comes after a spat between Pretoria and US President Donald Trump's administration over what the latter called the “confiscation” of land after President Cyril Ramaphosa’s signing of the Expropriation Act into law.

The Expropriation Act makes no provision for land confiscation and seeks to create a path between unused state land and land provision for the majority of South Africans who were legally deprived of land for at least a century since the passing of the Land Act of 1913.

The passage of the legislation prompted Trump to accuse the government of confiscating land and offer Afrikaans-speaking white South Africans asylum in the largest economy on earth, an offer lobby groups representing Afrikaner interests have rebuffed.

The "sherpa" of the business segment of the business sector of the G20 for SA and outgoing Business Unity SA (Busa) CEO Cas Coovadia said Africa had ample room to define the agenda for developing economies.

“We need to collaborate as G20 economies and work on the significant challenges we face. If we don’t grow our economies in a way that most people in countries have a stake in our economies, as businesses we are shooting ourselves in our feet,” he said to applause.

The Trump administration has antagonised a number of ’ US allies, including Canada, Ukraine and Nato. Complicating matters further, the US will take on the presidency of the G20 from SA in 2026.

Coovadia said it was an honour to host the first G20 event on African soil. He said SA should provide recommendations to the G20 summit that demonstrate the global south is the solution to some global challenges. He said growth which included the historically disenfranchised was non-negotiable.

“This isn’t about doing this because we are nice guys and gals, this isn’t about social responsibilities. This isn’t about [how] we want to feel good when we wake up in the morning. This is about ensuring we enable growth in a way that enables people to accumulate assets and access to markets.”

He said Busa, as the biggest business organisation in the country, has executed its role as an agent that showed Africa was not the problem in the global structure but a solution.

“This should enable people to have income so we expand the markets on which we depend. It’s got to be a B20 that makes interventions for all our people. We talked about the trend towards increasing protectionism in the world.”

Co-chair of the B20 and Standard Bank chair Nonkululeko Nyembezi said the G20 comes to SA at a time when Africa is in a “position of strength”.

She said on the road to 2050, the continent was well placed to provide the world with solutions in areas including low-cost banking solutions, clean energy, land mass utilisation, sustainable farming and small-scale industrialisation.

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