Johannesburg G-20 ‘consensus’ exposed: Political gaslighting and distorted reality

Key topics:G20 “consensus” in Johannesburg was misleading; no true agreement achievedLanguage manipulation fuels political gaslighting and public misunderstandingSouth Africa’s EWC and race laws distort reality, harming policy discourse.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Martin van Staden*.Just like “nil” is supposedly a form of “compensation”, and “race conscious” laws are apparently not “racial”, we were told that the Group of 20 (G20) summit in Johannesburg this past week had adopted a Leaders’ Declaration by “consensus”. Except, of course, there was no consensus.In the world of policy advocacy, opinion, interpretation, and persuasion are the name of the game.That doing nothing is one of the best policy solutions to poverty, for example, is not intuitive – despite being true – which means that there will be a lot of clashes of views and beliefs in the process. This is to be expected.But for normative conversations like this to be possible, there must be baseline agreement between all the parties involved about the basic meaning of words and concepts. In other words, our perception of reality must more or less proceed along a shared framework.In a debate between a hardline communist and an idealistic capitalist, to take one example, both must agree what the other means when they talk of “property”.That is why the constant inability in South Africa’s various public discourses to achieve such agreement on the most basic questions of fact and reality – long before any disagreement about substance has even begun – is so frustrating..We’ve already seen this film: EWC and race law.Sections 25(2) and (3) of the Constitution provide that there must be a payment of an amount of compensation upon expropriation. “Payment”, “amount”, and “compensation”, are all words with relatively fixed meanings, and within the legal paradigm especially, unequivocally fixed meanings.This is not my opinion, but a statement of verifiable fact.We can have a clash of views about the desirability of property confiscation, or even about the legitimacy of the “Eurocentric-colonialist” Constitution and property rights, but if we are disagreeing about the fact that this is what the constitutional text provides, something is wrong at a meta level.Under those circumstances, discourse around the Constitution is entirely fruitless.Similarly, South Africa has many hundreds of race laws on the statute book as recorded in the Institute of Race Relations’ Index of Race Law.It is entirely permissible for us to debate, vigorously, whether the law may or even must be “race conscious” in order to fulfil its functions in our post-Apartheid society. What is less productive is a years-long spat about whether a legal provision requiring a minister to set aside seats on a statutory body for people on the basis of their skin-colour qualifies as “racial”.If we cannot agree that factoring in a person’s race – whether in their favour or against them – is a “racial” phenomenon, there is no possible constructive discourse that can occur between us..Consensus at the G20.And, for the purposes of this week’s gaslighting, it would be perfectly alright for us to disagree about whether the United States’s boycott of the G20 meeting in Johannesburg was constructive, or whether the substance of South Africa’s G20 agenda is desirable.But what, of course, we decided instead, was to get the framework of the discourse wrong from the jump.It is an established rule in the G20 that Leaders’ Declarations are issued upon the achievement of consensus. If consensus cannot be achieved, the intended Declaration has to be watered down, as has happened at successive G20 meetings, recently especially around the conflict in Ukraine.And, finally, if even then consensus cannot be achieved, the host state is perfectly within its rights to issue a Chair’s Summary of the summit.Since Saturday, 22 November, the South African public and the world has been bombarded by the media and analysts with the notion that a Leaders’ Declaration was issued. This is already treated as a fact in the discourse, just like many pretend that expropriation without compensation is constitutional and there are no race laws in South Africa.In reality, no Leaders’ Declaration was issued – it simply did not happen.With our keen acceptance, the South African government and its acolytes in the press and academia have become adept at using formalistic tricks of language to pretend that all is well.Indeed, something called a “leaders’ declaration” was issued.But if the African Christian Democratic Party’s parliamentary caucus wrote something on the back of a napkin and called it the “Free the Clowns Act”, it does not in fact make of that napkin an Act of Parliament.This is, again, not my view or my opinion. It is established South African jurisprudence dating back at least to the Appellate Division judgment of Minister of the Interior v Harris from 1952. In that judgment, the Court unanimously held that just because Parliament under certain circumstances started calling itself a “High Court” did not mean that Parliament had truly become a court of law. Mere pretence (formalism) does not by itself give rise to the substance of what is being presented.The substance-over-form rule is a bedrock of any and all modern, sophisticated legal systems around the world.The apparent, so-called, ostensible “leaders’ declaration” adopted last Saturday in Johannesburg was not a Leaders’ Declaration for the purpose of a G20 meeting, and the reason is exceedingly simple:Consensus was not achieved.Vocabulary.com explains it helpfully as if to prepare elementary schoolers for life: “When there’s a consensus, everyone agrees on something. If you’re going to a movie with friends, you need to reach a consensus about which movie everyone wants to see.”The United States of America did not simply boycott attending the Johannesburg summit, but has repeatedly expressed its disagreement with the substance of South Africa’s G20 agenda as well. Similarly, the Argentine Republic did in fact attend the summit and declared its non-support at that summit. They even had to put out a statement afterwards when South Africa refused to recognise the lack of consensus..Toxic positivity.This has not stopped News24 Editor in Chief Adriaan Basson from spreading the disinformation of a “unanimous” adoption of the text, or the Democratic Alliance similarly calling it a “Leaders’ Declaration” (John Steenhuisen himself joined in the disinformation campaign).City Press even reported that “a G20 Leaders’ Summit declaration has been adopted despite the absence of the US”. This is the equivalent of saying the Free the Clowns Act had been adopted by Parliament despite not having received the requisite number of votes in the National Assembly.The spin came fast. “Consensus”, we are now told, does not mean “unanimity” (despite some press houses reporting both consensus and unanimity).Just three decades ago, every politically conscious South African understood what consensus meant, which is why the negotiating parties at CODESA specifically agreed on the principle of so-called “sufficient” consensus to avoid the gridlock that consensual unanimity would entail.This was repeated more recently, in 2024, when sufficient consensus was again brought into South Africa’s political lexicon to lower the expectation of unanimity among the parties to the Government of National Unity.Now, suddenly, from November 2025 onwards, we are to be gaslighted into believing that consensus has always just been a different way of saying “the majority has agreed”.I feel particularly sorry for companies with bylaws that require certain decisions to be adopted by “consensus” of the executive or the board, because apparently from now on, only a majority would be needed.All this spin from the press and ostensibly reform-minded parties and civil society came in service of what is being called “toxic positivity” (implicitly noted by Jonathan Katzenellenbogen this week) among South Africans who just desperately need everything to be okay. We cheer on any “good news”, even when it is just bad news reframed (gaslighting the public) by the political elite..Adding insult to injury.The gaslighting around the G20 did not stop there, though.At his joint press conference with the presidents of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and European Council, António Costa, the man who pretends to be our head of state smiled and welcomed what he thought to be the United States’s decision to participate to a limited extent in the G20. The “practicality” of that participation would need to be discussed, said Ramaphosa.(Turns out the Americans just wanted to organise the handover of the presidency.)But after the President said this, his underlings in government clarified that no, they rejected the participation by the United States because they deemed the representatives to be too “junior” – no question of “practicality”. In reality, the chargé d’affaires, who the Americans elected to send, is the most senior representative of the US federal government in South Africa.Ramaphosa represents, on a good day (he only has bad days), 65 million South Africans to the world. The American chargé d’affaires represents some 340 million Americans to South Africa.It is not quite so simple to say that the South African government and its press lackeys are “lying”.To say “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” is to lie. Enough of this happens, too. But to say “I was simply helping her clear her airways” is the kind of gaslighting we are being constantly and relentlessly exposed to.South Africa had two choices: honourably accept hosting the first G20 summit where consensus was not reached and obey the established rule; or dishonourably ask the rules to be bent for the first African G20, so that the government could save face with another “declaration” by (contrived) “consensus”.It chose the latter option.The soft bigotry of low expectations struck again this weekend. Only the real G20 countries can obey the rules. When an African country hosts, to ensure its feelings are not hurt, the standards need to be lowered, and we need to pretend that they have not been.What a pity..Why does it matter?.Some might ask why we should care about this, given that G20 Leaders’ Declarations are not binding policy or law. With the United States not buying in, this year’s fake “declaration” will hold even less practical weight than prior ones.There are, broadly, two reasons why it matters, nonetheless.The first is that language is exceptionally important.Every time we chip away at language’s integrity, we undermine public discourse and mutual understanding. The meaning of words and phrases always drifts and changes over time, but we play with fire when we politically engineer words out of their meanings for ad hoc political purposes.If we adopt a practically postmodern approach to words, whereby “woman”, “liberal”, “compensation”, “race”, or “consensus” are taken to mean whatever is convenient in the moment for whoever happens to be speaking, we make it difficult for our children and their children to continue having fruitful conversations with one another.The second reason is more particular to South Africa.The South African government has developed a method by which it can have its cake and eat it too, at the expense of substantive policy reform and accountability.When it comes to EWC, the political elite has contrived a situation where it can have property confiscation and have it be constitutional at the same time. It “does pay” compensation but the amount of compensation just happens to be “nil”. Thus, South Africa supposedly remains an investable destination and a member of the free world where fair compensation is always “paid” when government needs to seize property… and the government happens to get the power to confiscate property without paying a cent when it feels the need, all at the same time.With race law, the elite seeks to contrive a situation where South Africa is regarded as a “non-racial democracy” with equality before the law, while also allowing the state to continue racialised rent seeking. There are no race laws in South Africa, but we would be committing a great injustice if we made empowerment law race-neutral, we are told.And with the G20 so-called “leaders’ declaration”, the South African government seeks to pretend that it has pulled off a geopolitical coup and successfully led an international summit to a consensus decision, while in fact the country is at its absolute lowest geopolitical point since the heyday of Apartheid.Indeed, in trying to be cute, the so-called President, at the G20 Social Summit, said “(b)eautiful things are happening in South Africa”.This could not be further from the truth.Domestically, South African society continues to collapse under crippling unemployment and below 1% economic “growth”. South Africa continues to have some of the highest violent crime rates in the world. Indeed, as the make-believe president said beautiful things were happening, the Vietnamese G20 delegation was being robbed in Sandton. Basic services, taken for granted in the other poorer G20 countries, are far from a sure thing for many South Africans.And one of the reasons for this is because Ramaphosa’s own friends and colleagues loot every cent of public money they can lay their hands on. Another reason, of course, is that Ramaphosa and his party think it is still 1977, with the Cold War in full-swing, and that socialism and the National Democratic Revolution still have a chance at defeating Western capitalism.Internationally, South Africa is more isolated than it has ever been. The United States has notably made this isolation rhetorically clear, but South Africans would be mistaken for presuming that the Europeans, with their fake smiles, are happy about South Africa remaining in a cozy relationship with Russia.They are also not exactly falling over themselves to encourage investment by European companies in South Africa. Of course they are not. They are just as concerned about property confiscation and race law as the Americans are – they just do not share in Donald Trump’s bombastic temperament when articulating these feelings..See through the pretences.All this to say: in an effort to maintain our spirits, South Africans keep going along with the political elite’s presentation of “reality” when in fact it is not reflective of true reality.“Expropriation at nil compensation” is neither expropriation (it is confiscation), nor compensation (it is the absence thereof), nor is it constitutional (the Constitution is clear). It will destroy our economy if implemented, and the Europeans are not going to rescue us.“Transformation” and “redress” laws do not cease to bring racial considerations into commercial decision-making just because we call them “transformation” and “redress” laws with good intentions. They do discourage investment, even from Ramaphosa’s new best friends in Germany.And the G20 was not a magnificent coup for South African diplomacy. In the absence of a sincere and substantive willingness to reform the domestic policy environment and create real economic and moral power in South Africa, the entire thing was a façade for a society being dragged down by its political elite.South Africans deserve better. But first, we need to start shedding our easy deference to formalistic pretences..*Martin van Staden is the Head of Policy at the Free Market Foundation and former Deputy Head of Policy Research at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR)..*This article was originally published by Daily Friend and has been republished with permission.

Johannesburg G-20 ‘consensus’ exposed: Political gaslighting and distorted reality

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