PortalsGate

BY ISAIAH-PHILLIPS AKINTOLA

We stand at a pivotal moment in human history, marked by unprecedented instability yet illuminated by glimpses of transformative possibility. The world has careened through months of policy turbulence and political discord. Yet amid this chaos, we have witnessed something remarkable: South Africa’s successful hosting of the G20 summit, a diplomatic triumph that signals the emergence of a new leadership paradigm the world desperately needs. This achievement demands deeper reflection on what it represents for Africa, for multilateral cooperation, and for the evolution of global governance itself.

South Africa’s Diplomatic Victory

Few predicted South Africa could navigate the treacherous diplomatic waters of hosting a G20 summit while enduring public confrontation with the Trump administration. The tensions were real, the stakes enormous, and the scrutiny unrelenting. Yet South Africa not only persevered; it excelled. The nation demonstrated that principled leadership, meticulous preparation, and unwavering commitment to multilateralism can overcome even the most daunting geopolitical headwinds.

This success transcends logistics and ceremony. It represents a statement about Africa’s place at the table of global decision-making. For too long, the continent has been spoken about rather than listened to, its challenges dissected by external voices while its solutions remain undervalued. South Africa’s G20 hosting challenges this paradigm. African leadership can convene the world’s most powerful nations, facilitate difficult conversations, and model the collaborative spirit that our interconnected crises demand.

The excellence displayed in every facet of the summit, from security coordination to substantive policy discussions, should be celebrated as an indication of what becomes possible when African nations are empowered to lead rather than merely participate.

The Broader Context
To fully appreciate this moment, we must understand the leadership landscape from which it emerges. The reelection of Donald Trump and the subsequent years of “America First” doctrine have exposed fundamental fractures in the global order. We have witnessed a retreat from multilateralism, the weaponization of trade relationships, and the elevation of transactional politics over collaborative problem-solving.

This approach may generate headlines and short-term political gains, but it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of 21st-century challenges. Climate change does not respect national sovereignty. Pandemics do not pause at borders. Artificial intelligence development in one nation reverberates across all societies. The crises we face are inherently collective, yet our leadership responses have remained stubbornly siloed.

For Africa and for South Africa specifically, this context presents both challenge and opportunity. The challenge lies in navigating a world where power dynamics remain skewed, where historical inequities persist, and where African voices still struggle for parity in global forums. The opportunity emerges precisely from the failures of the old paradigm; as traditional power centers falter in their zero-sum thinking, space opens for alternative models of leadership rooted in wisdom, collaboration, and long-term stewardship.

The Crisis of Collective Responsibility
We are living through what future historians may call the crisis of collective responsibility. COVID-19 revealed this starkly: a virus indifferent to nationalism met with fractured, nationalist responses. Misinformation flourished where coordination should have thrived. Vaccine hoarding replaced global solidarity. The result was needless suffering and prolonged pandemic conditions that no single nation could escape by acting alone.

Climate change presents an even more existential version of this crisis. Carbon emissions continue rising as nations prioritize immediate economic considerations over planetary survival. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement exemplified this shortsightedness, a retreat from global cooperation in favor of a unilateralism that ultimately serves no one’s long-term interests, including America’s own.

True leadership in our era must reconcile national interests with global interdependence. Whether addressing AI governance, nuclear proliferation, economic inequality, or refugee displacement, sustainable solutions require frameworks where nations act as stewards of shared futures rather than competitors in a zero-sum game. South Africa’s G20 leadership models this approach. By successfully convening diverse nations with competing interests, by facilitating dialogue rather than dictating outcomes, the summit demonstrated that collaborative governance remains both possible and essential.

Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Test of Leadership Vision
Perhaps no challenge better illustrates the need for evolved leadership than artificial intelligence. AI presents humanity with extraordinary opportunities: breakthroughs in medicine, solutions to climate modeling, unprecedented efficiencies across sectors. Yet it simultaneously poses existential risks: mass job displacement, algorithmic bias that entrenches discrimination, autonomous weapons systems, surveillance capabilities that threaten human freedom, and potentially the loss of human control over intelligent systems.

Currently, AI development proceeds in a chaotic race dominated by a handful of corporations and superpowers competing for technological supremacy. This paradigm is fundamentally dangerous. Without ethical guardrails and international oversight, AI will likely deepen inequality, erode privacy, and destabilize societies in ways we are only beginning to comprehend.

Leadership here demands more than technical expertise; it requires wisdom. Specifically: Global Regulatory Frameworks. Just as nuclear non-proliferation treaties emerged from the ashes of World War II, AI requires binding international agreements to prevent catastrophic misuse. These frameworks must be negotiated not through dominance but through genuine multilateral cooperation.

Ethical Governance. Leaders must prioritize long-term human security over short-term technological advantage. The race to deploy AI should not override fundamental questions about its impact on human dignity, autonomy, and flourishing. Inclusive Decision-Making. The future of AI cannot be determined solely by Silicon Valley executives and Pentagon strategists. Developing nations, ethicists, civil society organizations, and diverse cultural perspectives must shape AI’s trajectory. African voices, representing a significant portion of humanity’s future population, must be integral to these conversations, not as afterthoughts but as co-architects.

The current leadership vacuum, where technology races ahead of governance, where corporations operate with minimal oversight, and where governments lag behind, is unsustainable. South Africa’s successful G20 hosting suggests the possibility of a different approach: one where emerging powers help establish new norms for governing transformative technologies.

The DNA of Future Leadership
What, then, defines leadership adequate to our moment? Three qualities stand essential. Learning from History. Great leaders study history not to romanticize the past but to understand patterns that transcend specific eras. The failures of isolationism in the 1930s enabled catastrophe. The dangers of unchecked technological arms races nearly ended civilization. The fragility of polarized societies that collapse into violence. These are not abstract lessons but urgent warnings.

The Marshall Plan after World War II offers a powerful example. Rather than punishing defeated nations, the United States invested in rebuilding Europe, recognizing that shared prosperity would prevent future conflict. This vision created decades of relative stability and economic growth. Today’s zero-sum trade wars and nationalist posturing represent amnesia about these lessons. True leadership remembers that today’s decisions ripple across generations, that vengeance breeds future conflict, and that investment in collective flourishing serves everyone’s long-term interests.

Contextual Intelligence. Leadership is not one-size-fits-all. Strategies effective in peacetime fail during crisis. Policies that work in one cultural context backfire in another. The COVID-19 response illustrated this painfully; public health measures that succeeded in some nations through collective action struggled in others with different cultural relationships to individual liberty and government authority.

Contextual intelligence means adapting methods to specific challenges while maintaining core principles. It requires humility to recognize that no single nation or leader possesses all answers. South Africa’s approach to the G20, facilitating dialogue rather than imposing solutions, embodies this intelligence.

For Africa specifically, contextual intelligence means recognizing both the continent’s unique challenges and its distinct advantages. Africa’s young population represents tremendous potential in an aging world. Its experience navigating complexity with limited resources breeds innovation. Its cultural emphasis on ubuntu, the recognition that “I am because we are,” offers philosophical grounding for the collaborative leadership our interconnected world requires.

Future-Oriented Impact Assessment. Every major decision must be weighed against long-term implications. Climate policies, economic reforms, and technological deployments should be stress-tested against future scenarios, not just immediate political calculations. Leadership is about ensuring viable futures for coming generations.

This requires courage to make unpopular short-term decisions for long-term benefit. It demands resisting the tyranny of immediate gratification and quarterly earnings reports. It means asking not “What serves my interests today?” but “What world are we creating for those who follow?”

Lessons from History: When Leadership Transforms Crisis
History offers profound examples of leadership that transformed crises through wisdom and collaboration. The Marshall Plan. Post-World War II Europe lay in ruins: economies shattered, cities destroyed, millions displaced. The risk of communist expansion and renewed conflict loomed ominously.

U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall proposed an unprecedented solution: not punishment for defeated nations, but collaborative economic rebuilding. The Marshall Plan invested billions in European recovery, tying it to democracy and trade interdependence. This vision achieved multiple aims: it prevented another war, created lasting alliances, and demonstrated that leadership grounded in shared prosperity generates stability far more effectively than domination. The contrast with today’s approach to international relations is stark. Where the Marshall Plan saw shared prosperity as mutual security, contemporary nationalism treats every gain by another nation as a loss for oneself.

The Montreal Protocol. When scientists discovered that chlorofluorocarbons were destroying the ozone layer, threatening catastrophic consequences, world leaders faced a choice: prioritize short-term corporate interests or act decisively on scientific evidence. The Montreal Protocol became the first universally ratified UN treaty, successfully phasing out CFCs. Its success rested on several leadership principles: deference to scientific expertise over political convenience, global consensus that transcended Cold War rivalries, and recognition that environmental threats require collective action. This model offers crucial lessons for today’s climate and AI challenges. When leaders prioritize collective survival over short-term profits, when science guides policy, when even rivals recognize shared stakes, humanity succeeds.

Nelson Mandela. Post-apartheid South Africa risked descending into vengeance and civil war. Nelson Mandela championed an alternative path: restorative justice through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Rather than Nuremberg-style trials, South Africa pursued public confessions and amnesty in exchange for truth.

Mandela’s leadership embodied principles desperately needed today. He understood that national unity requires empathy alongside justice. His personal acts of forgiveness, wearing the Springbok rugby jersey, meeting with apartheid architects, modeled reconciliation as strength rather than weakness. He shared power, ensuring minority voices weren’t marginalized in the new order. This legacy directly informs South Africa’s current leadership on the global stage. The nation that transformed itself through collaborative wisdom rather than vengeance brings that same spirit to international forums like the G20.

Biblical Wisdom
Scripture offers complementary insights. Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem’s walls through collective effort that united all levels of society: priests, merchants, laborers working side by side. His leadership combined prayer with pragmatic action, spiritual conviction with strategic planning. Esther’s story reveals how leadership sometimes requires working within flawed systems to transform them. Her calculated courage, risking death to approach the king, mobilizing her community, using diplomatic tact rather than confrontation, prevented genocide. Her example reminds us that silence in crisis becomes complicity, that “for such a time as this” applies to every generation facing injustice.

David unified a fractured Israel through reconciliation rather than vengeance, making Jerusalem a neutral capital for all tribes. His willingness to publicly repent after moral failure demonstrated that accountability strengthens rather than weakens leadership authority. These examples share common threads: collaboration over competition, wisdom over ideology, moral clarity paired with pragmatism, and long-term stewardship over short-term gain.

Africa’s Prophetic Role
This brings us to the deeper significance of South Africa’s G20 achievement within Africa’s broader calling. The challenges facing the world, instability, inequality, environmental crisis, technological disruption, are not obstacles to African advancement but the very context in which African leadership becomes essential.

Africa’s experience navigating complexity, managing scarcity, maintaining communal bonds amid hardship, and building despite historical exploitation has forged capacities the world now desperately needs. The continent’s emphasis on relational wisdom over mere technical expertise, on community flourishing over individual accumulation, on long-term thinking born from intergenerational awareness, these are precisely the leadership qualities our global moment requires.

This is not to romanticize Africa’s challenges or minimize very real governance failures across the continent. Rather, it is to recognize that Africa’s journey equips it to speak prophetically into a world order that has lost its way. As traditional power centers double down on nationalism and short-term thinking, Africa can model alternative approaches grounded in ubuntu, in collaborative problem-solving, in the recognition that true security comes through shared flourishing.

South Africa’s G20 success represents one expression of this broader calling. It demonstrates that African nations can lead not just regionally but globally, not just in name but in substance. It shows that the excellence, sophistication, and wisdom required for 21st-century leadership exist abundantly across the continent; they need only the platform and opportunity to manifest.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution
As we advance into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterized by AI, biotechnology, quantum computing, and the fusion of physical and digital realms, Africa faces a choice. It can be shaped by these technologies, remaining perpetually dependent on external innovation. Or it can help shape their development and deployment, ensuring they serve human flourishing globally.

The latter path requires investment in education, infrastructure, and research capacity. It demands policies that encourage innovation while protecting workers from displacement. It necessitates participation in global governance frameworks for emerging technologies from the beginning, not as an afterthought.

South Africa’s leadership of the G20 creates momentum for this path. By demonstrating capability at the highest levels of global convening, it establishes credibility for African voices in technical governance discussions. By modeling collaborative rather than competitive approaches, it offers an alternative to the technological nationalism currently dominating AI development.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution need not replicate colonial patterns where Africa provided raw materials for others to process into value-added goods. Digital technologies, unlike extractive industries, don’t require geographic concentration. African nations can leapfrog traditional development stages, moving directly to cutting-edge participation in global innovation networks.

But this requires leadership within Africa and from Africa toward the world. It requires vision that sees beyond immediate constraints to long-term possibilities. It requires courage to invest in capacities that may take years to bear fruit. It requires wisdom to balance technological advancement with social cohesion and ethical governance.

A Call to African Leaders and Global Partners
To African leaders: The current global crisis is not an impediment to your continent’s emergence but the very context that makes African leadership essential. Embrace this moment. The challenges are real: climate vulnerability, infrastructure gaps, governance struggles, economic constraints. But these challenges also breed innovation, resilience, and wisdom that the world needs.

Step boldly into spaces where African voices have been marginalized. Bring the depth of ubuntu philosophy to discussions dominated by individualistic assumptions. Offer collaborative models to counter zero-sum thinking. Draw from both traditional wisdom and cutting-edge expertise to chart paths forward that serve human flourishing, not just GDP growth. South Africa has shown what’s possible. Build on this momentum. Support each other’s leadership on global stages. Speak with clarity about what Africa needs and what Africa offers.

To global partners: Recognize that Africa is not a perpetual recipient of aid but an essential partner in addressing shared challenges. The next billion people entering the global middle class will largely be African. The innovation required to provide sustainable development under resource constraints is being pioneered in African cities and villages. The collaborative leadership model the world needs is being lived in African communities.

Genuine partnership means listening, not just speaking. It means sharing power, not just resources. It means recognizing that solutions to global challenges require diverse perspectives, and that African voices bring essential wisdom to every major policy question facing humanity.

The Path Forward
As we navigate the complexities ahead, geopolitical realignment, technological transformation, environmental crisis, and the search for meaning in an increasingly fragmented world, certain leadership principles must guide us: Collaborative Over Competitive. Solutions must create shared prosperity rather than zero-sum victories. Every nation’s security depends on global stability. Every economy’s health relies on functional international systems. We succeed together or fail separately.

Wisdom Over Ideology.

We must prioritize healing and progress over ideological purity and political point-scoring. The challenges we face are too grave for performative politics. They demand substantive engagement, pragmatic compromises, and the courage to transcend partisan divisions.

Moral Clarity Paired with Pragmatism.

We must combine principled conviction with strategic sophistication. Speaking truth to power matters, but so does effectiveness. Change often requires working within flawed systems while working to transform them.

Long-Term Stewardship Over Short-Term Gain. We must have the courage to prioritize planetary and human futures over quarterly profits and electoral cycles. True leadership measures success in generations, not news cycles. Inclusive Participation. We must ensure all stakeholders contribute to solutions. Top-down impositions fail; collaborative efforts that empower diverse participants succeed.