Xolisa Ngwadla - Paul Thompson
Empires do not yield power gracefully. At the height of the Roman Empire, legionaries carried the gladius—a short, precise instrument of dominance. But as the empire declined, soldiers eventually switched to the longer spatha, a choice that implied a loss of confidence vis-à-vis rivals and new challengers. The analogy is instructive, now that American hegemony is giving way to a multipolar world. The transition away from the post-war Bretton Woods monetary architecture and the rules-based trading order will be turbulent. The weapons are already getting longer, and Africa must decide how it will respond.
At the center of this upheaval lies the global energy transition. The shift from fossil fuels to low-carbon, climate-resilient economies—intertwined with the digital transformation—is not merely an environmental imperative; it is the organizing principle of the next world order. It will inevitably produce winners and losers, and history offers no guarantee that justice will determine which is which.
Fortunately, Africa is not without power or agency. Two recent African climate summits—in Nairobi in 2023 and Addis Ababa in 2025—signaled that the continent intends to position itself as a significant contributor to global solutions, not a perpetual supplicant or the epitome of a continent mired in dependent development. That framing matters.
Still, framing without strategy is mere rhetoric. The question now is whether Africa, notwithstanding its intent and positioning, can turn its moral high ground and its extraordinary endowments—massive renewable-energy potential, large reserves of critical minerals, and a young, growing labor force—into durable geopolitical and economic leverage.
The African Union’s 2023 induction into the G20 as a permanent member offers the continent a strategic opening that it still needs to capitalize on. The G20 has proven its capacity to shape the multilateral agenda. Language from its communiqués calling for a tripling of renewables commitments, a phase-down of fossil-fuel subsidies, and reforms to the financial architecture has consistently migrated to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. By its very nature, the G20 represents the center of the global economy, not the periphery.
But lest we forget, the 2002 Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development went further in embedding African priorities into the global policy agenda. Among its most important elements were commitments to electrify the continent (now enshrined in Mission 300, which aims to connect 300 million people to electricity by 2030), to promote clean cooking, and critically, to address illicit financial flows. Over two decades later, illicit flows, driven largely by extractive industries, drain an estimated $88 billion annually from African economies – a problem that will only intensify as the world scrambles for the minerals that underpin the green transition.
This scramble is positioning Africa at the core of a reconstituted global economy, one that is not driven solely by demand for fossil fuels and a shifting governance architecture that supplants the colonial-type matrices of asymmetrical power relations. Thus, for the first time in the continent’s post-colonial history, it can leverage strategic leadership and the weight of a broader historical transformation to exert control over its own resources and developmental priorities.
Seizing this opportunity calls for a two-pronged strategy. Africa should use multilateralism as a shield, insisting on rules, norms, and principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibilities in the name of protecting smaller powers in an anarchic world. At the same time, Africa must use minilateral engagements as a sword, advancing concrete development goals where the rules are still being written.
Within the G20 context, the African Union Commission should pursue integrative opportunities for regional and sub-regional economic development. For example, greater investment is needed to link regional industrialization in the ARISE Integrated Industrial Platforms and regional transport corridors with the energy-minerals nexus of Africa’s Green Minerals Strategy, the Continental Power System Masterplan, and the African Single Electricity Market.
The G20, and potentially the BRICS+ groupings, offers the type of platform Africa needs at this point in the continent’s socio-economic development trajectory. An African Union presence in BRICS+, even as an observer, would diversify the continent’s global engagement and open channels for infrastructure and climate finance that do not run exclusively through Western-dominated institutions. A technical team drawing on the African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat, Afreximbank, the African Development Bank, the African Group of Negotiators, and the UN Economic Commission for Africa (among other bodies) would give such engagement real substance.
The moral dimension of this strategy should not be underestimated. The G20 has been conspicuously reluctant to engage seriously on climate adaptation and loss and damage (compensation for irreversible climate-driven harms), because doing so would implicate its members in questions of historical responsibility that they prefer to avoid. For that reason, the G20 is precisely where African political capital should be concentrated. By holding the moral high ground on climate justice, Africa gains leverage not only in the UNFCCC process but also in broader discussions over priorities for 21st-century global development.
Strategic opportunity is not destiny. But the confluence of a fracturing world order, the energy transition, and Africa’s demographic and resource endowments creates conditions that have not existed before. The continent’s leaders, its negotiators, and its institutions have the tools to usher in a new paradigm. But they must use them strategically and in concert. The move from gladius to spatha said a lot about the evolving nature of power in Roman times. The situation today is no different. The choice of instrument, and who wields it, will define the coming era.
*Xolisa Ngwadla is a senior climate policy expert and lead negotiator for the African Group of Negotiators.
*Paul Thompson is a lecturer at Nelson Mandela University and a strategist and policy adviser on international climate and global development issues.
