South African scholar says US debt pulls G20 away from Global South

Summary

Ashraf Patel is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue, part of the University of South Africa (UNISA). In an article published on 24 September 2026, he criticises the G20 meeting hosted by the US in Asheville, North Carolina. In the author's view, the meeting, run under US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, put US interests first and left the Global South's agenda out. Patel notes that US public debt has passed 40 trillion dollars. By his own calculation, that amounts to about 300,000 dollars of debt for every US household outside the richest 1%. In his view, this debt burden is passed on to the rest of the world through the dollar.

The author argues that the communiqué made no mention of climate change, climate finance, the Nepal floods in which thousands died or went missing, or the ongoing wars. He also notes that initiatives left over from South Africa's 2025 presidency, such as the inequality panel and the financing panel, went unmentioned. He reads South Africa's exclusion from the 2026 G20 meetings as an erasure of the country's development agenda. He adds, however, that it may also give Pretoria an opportunity to turn towards the Global South. Patel's central thesis is that US economic nationalism is pushing its own Global South partners towards BRICS, where trade in local currencies and moves away from the dollar are accelerating.