G20 in South Africa: an invitation to justice and to real change
From November 22 to 23, the world converged in Johannesburg, South Africa for the first G20 summit on African soil, a rare and interesting moment.
For Oil Watch Africa, this moment marked a turning point as a unique chance to shift from decades of extractive exploitation to a new paradigm rooted in equity, sustainability, transparency and true partnership. Prior to G20, Oil Watch Africa held its 2025 Kampala conference: From Exploitation to Restoration: Climate Justice, Debt Cancellation, and Reparations for Africa. The conference made clear: Africa’s wealth, especially its resources, must no longer be for the benefit of external powers but harnessed for the continent’s own wellbeing and future.
Resource extraction on the continent remains largely exploitative. It is a root cause of profound environmental and social deterioration. The costs of this devastation are systematically externalized to resource rich African countries and communities, ultimately trapping them in cycles of poverty and debt. This pattern of exploitation is compounded by human rights abuses, the militarization of extraction zones and the varying forms of intimidation, persecution and murder of citizens who resist destructive practices.
The G20-Johannesburg Summit is a potential turning point; but a very important question remains, will this be a moment of real transformation and change, or yet another tokenistic moment full of rhetoric?
This is where the Jubilee 2025: Turn Debt into Hope campaign comes in. For Canada, and for Canadian people of faith and conscience, there’s a moral and political obligation to support a new global financial and ecological order. This order recognizes debt and ecological justice, honours resource sovereignty and supports a permanent, transparent and binding global debt-resolution framework under the United Nations. Such a a framework would give nations the fiscal breathing room to build sustainable economies and nurture social infrastructure and finally allow countries in the Global South to chart and lead their own developmental path.
Here’s how the Jubilee campaign resonates with the G20, and with the continent’s commitment and calls for a shifting paradigm on debt, resource extraction and ecological justice:
- Oil Watch Africa’s Kampala pre-G20 brought together representatives from resource-producing communities, which are the most affected by extraction: fisherfolk, peasants, trade-unionists, civil society and others. They were unanimous in calling for an urgent and fundamental break with extractive capitalism, as evidence was shared from decades of resource exploitation and ongoing minerals conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, oil devastation in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, new pressures in Botswana’s Okavango and across southern Africa.
- The exploitation of Africa’s resources has created environmental harm and destruction over the years as well as a “double burden”: first with the ecological debt, due to environmental damage and climate impacts largely caused by the Global North, and second the unsustainable financial sovereign debt that countries owe as a result of unequal, predatory global financial architectures. These systems force African countries to service debt rather than invest in social services, climate resilience or domestic development.
- The 2025 Jubilee campaign explicitly links these crises and calls for debt cancellation, global financial reform and a binding international mechanism for fair debt resolution under the auspices of the United Nations. In fact, we must keep in mind that the results of this unfair system are intergenerational impoverishment, dependence and structural injustice.
What should we do to support the Jubilee campaign?
As a country claiming to uphold human rights, foster environmental responsibility and global solidarity, Canada has a responsibility at this moment to help shift the script through specific actions. KAIROS Canada and its partners urge:
- Debt cancellation for unjust, unsustainable debts.
- Global financial reform to prevent future crises.
- Recognition of ecological debt.
- An end to new exploitative extractive projects.
- Support for impacted communities, land and water defenders and a shift away from top-down, extractive development models.
- Furthermore, under the Jubilee 2025 platform, KAIROS demands Canada to adopt corporate accountability legislation, end exploitative extractivism and prioritize ecological and human rights in trade and trade-development policies.
Canada’s role and outcomes from the G20:
During the G20 Summit, Canada’s official stance drew attention and concern when the Prime Minister announced that Canada was no longer committed to an explicit feminist foreign policy, including a feminist international assistance policy. For KAIROS, community partners and allies worldwide demanding justice, change and accountability, this announcement is deeply troubling and will have devastating impacts. The issue is real, not ideological. This was made clear during the G20 when on November 21st just days before the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, South African women brought their country to a standstill with a powerful message to their government with over one million signatures: declare gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster.
Gender, ecological, climate, debt justice are not independent from one another but all directly interconnected. Without structural transformation that addresses these intersectionalities, any commitments concerning the empowerment of marginalized communities and accountability for resource extraction, debt and climate damage will sound like rhetoric and fall on closed ears with no actions.
By Danielle Kamtié, Global Partnerships Coordinator: Africa and Climate Justice
