Case Explained: President Trump is right: The G20 cannot reward governments that harbour wildlife crime – Legal Perspective

The Miami summit presents an historic opportunity to turn the fight against illicit wildlife trafficking into a pillar of economic security — but only if the G20 holds its own members to account.

By Dr Dion George

When President Trump announced that South Africa would not be invited to the 2026 G20 summit in Miami, a chorus of outrage followed. Multilateralists called it a breach of norms. African Union diplomats protested. Editorial pages warned of precedent-setting exclusions. But those who understand what has been happening inside South Africa’s governing structures and what those structures have allowed to happen to the country’s wildlife know that President Trump’s decision reflects a harder truth that polite diplomacy prefers to ignore: you cannot credibly lead a global fight against environmental crime while your own government is riddled with complicity in the criminal networks that drive it.

I write this with the authority of direct experience. As South Africa’s Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment from July 2024 to November 2025, I chaired the G20 Environment and Climate Sustainability Working Group under South Africa’s presidency. In October 2025, in Cape Town, I led the adoption of the Cape Town Ministerial Declaration on Crimes that Affect the Environment, the first time in two decades of G20 history that major economies formally recognised environmental crime as organised crime requiring a coordinated multilateral response. I am proud of that achievement. But I am under no illusions about the forces that were working against it from within my own country’s political establishment.

The African National Congress, South Africa’s dominant governing party for three decades, has presided over a catastrophic failure to confront the wildlife crime syndicates that operate with near impunity across the country. The evidence is not speculative. It is documented in court records, investigative journalism, parliamentary briefings, and the research of organisations like the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime and the Institute for Security Studies. In Mpumalanga province, which borders the Kruger National Park, the jewel of South Africa’s conservation estate, provincial ANC officeholders have been identified as having close connections to rhino poaching kingpins. Senior party figures attended the funeral of Petros Mabuza, a known poaching syndicate leader, in a public display of the entanglement between political power and criminal enterprise that has become normalised in ANC-governed provinces.

The rot extends deep into the institutions of state. Police officers have been arrested for trading in rhino horn. Hawks investigator Lieutenant Colonel Leroy Brewer, a key figure in fighting organised wildlife crime, was assassinated in 2020. Anton Mzimba, an incorruptible ranger at the Timbavati Reserve, was gunned down in 2022 in what investigators believe was a syndicate-ordered killing. Court cases against suspected poaching kingpins have been frustrated by thirty or more postponements, only to be dismissed on procedural technicalities by a judicial system whose integrity has been compromised. One suspected syndicate leader, Dumisani Gwala, was arrested in 2014 on rhino poaching charges. His trial was delayed for nine years before a magistrate dismissed the case because the prosecution’s evidence was ruled inadmissible.

This is not law enforcement falling short despite best efforts. This is systemic failure enabled by political patronage, institutional corruption, and the deliberate sabotage of prosecutorial capacity. The ANC’s three decades in power have produced a state apparatus in which wildlife crime syndicates can recruit national park employees, bribe border officials, corrupt judges, and eliminate investigators, all while the governing party looks the other way or, worse, benefits from the proceeds.

It was precisely this state of affairs that I was determined to confront. Under my watch, we froze the establishment of new captive lion breeding facilities. We pushed the lion bone export quota to zero. We initiated voluntary exit pathways for existing lion bone stockpiles. We advanced the closure of South Africa’s captive lion industry, the only commercial lion breeding industry in the world, an industry that feeds directly into transnational trafficking networks. We gazetted the National Elephant Heritage Strategy. We started removing wrecks and upgraded security at Hout Bay Harbour, the epicentre of abalone poaching in South Africa. We recommended listing dried abalone under CITES Appendix II. We opposed any reopening of trade in ivory or rhino horn.

And for this, I was fired.

Within days of a final workshop to close out the Threatened or Protected Species legislation and the lion breeding regulations, a process designed to shut down the captive lion industry once and for all, the Democratic Alliance (DA) leader asked President Ramaphosa to remove me. I was replaced by a man publicly aligned with the captive wildlife-breeding lobby. I was fired because I took on the illicit wildlife trade. The forces that profit from the commodification and exploitation of South Africa’s natural heritage proved stronger than the political will to stop them.

It is precisely because conservation policy proved so vulnerable to political capture that I have taken on a new role. This month, I assumed the position of inaugural Executive Chairman of the Conservation Trust, a global organisation dedicated to closing the gap between policy commitments and operational reality in the fight against the illegal wildlife trade. The Conservation Trust is not a fund. It is not a think tank. It is an executive mechanism designed to push policy into implementation and keep it there, designing legal and regulatory frameworks, identifying cross-border enforcement gaps, and working with governments to ensure that international commitments like the Cape Town Declaration are translated into durable institutional action that can survive the next political reshuffle. The lesson of my time in government is clear: good policy without institutional teeth can be dismantled overnight. The Conservation Trust exists to provide those teeth.

This is the context that President Trump’s critics ignore when they decry South Africa’s exclusion from Miami. The question is not whether South Africa deserves a seat at the G20 table in the abstract. The question is whether a government that has demonstrably failed to dismantle the criminal networks operating within its own borders and that has in fact accommodated and in some cases been complicit with those networks can credibly participate in a forum committed to combating transnational organised crime and upholding the rule of law.

President Trump has framed his G20 presidency around three priorities: unleashing economic prosperity, securing energy supply chains, and pioneering new technologies. These are sound objectives. But I would submit to the President and his administration that combating illicit wildlife trafficking is not only compatible with this agenda; it is essential to it. The illegal wildlife trade generates an estimated twenty billion dollars annually. It is one of the world’s most lucrative criminal enterprises, ranking alongside narcotics and human trafficking. It fuels corruption, distorts markets, destabilises governance, and funds the same transnational criminal networks that traffic in drugs, weapons, and human beings. According to Moody’s Analytics, the United States itself is the world’s leading destination for illegally trafficked wildlife and wildlife products. This is not someone else’s problem. It is an American security and economic interest of the first order.

Operation Thunder 2025, coordinated by INTERPOL and the World Customs Organization across one hundred and thirty-four countries, resulted in the seizure of nearly thirty thousand live animals and identified over one thousand one hundred suspects. Record quantities of bushmeat, marine wildlife, and illegally harvested timber were intercepted. These numbers reveal a criminal economy of staggering scale, one that will not be dismantled by polite communiqués alone but by the hard-nosed enforcement and accountability that President Trump rightly demands in other domains.

The Cape Town Declaration, which I had the honour of shepherding to adoption, contains a specific, time-bound commitment: G20 members agreed to convene expert meetings on illegal trade in wildlife and wildlife products and to report back on outcomes within twenty-four months. That commitment was not South Africa’s alone. It belongs to every G20 member, and its fulfilment now falls to the American presidency. I urge President Trump to honour it, not as a concession to the environmental lobby, but as an exercise of American leadership against organised crime.

Specifically, I call on the Miami presidency to maintain the G20 Environment and Climate Sustainability Working Group with a mandate that includes environmental crime, recognising that this work directly supports the rule of law and economic integrity; to convene or support the expert meetings on illegal wildlife trade as agreed in the Cape Town Declaration; to integrate the fight against wildlife trafficking into the broader economic security agenda, with particular focus on illicit financial flows, money laundering, and the corruption of border and customs systems; and to strengthen partnerships with INTERPOL, CITES, UNODC, and the World Bank’s Global Wildlife Program, which provide the operational backbone for multilateral enforcement. The Conservation Trust, which I now lead, stands ready to support these efforts with the practical policy tools, cross-border coordination frameworks, and implementation expertise that can help turn G20 commitments into enforceable action.

President Trump has shown that he is willing to make difficult decisions and to hold governments accountable for their failures. His exclusion of South Africa from the Miami summit sends a powerful signal: the era of rewarding dysfunction with prestige is over. But that signal will be most effective if it is accompanied by substantive action. The G20 under American leadership has the opportunity to demonstrate that combating wildlife crime is not a soft-power indulgence but a hard-edged security priority, one that protects American consumers, disrupts criminal networks, defends the rule of law, and preserves the natural capital on which more than forty-four trillion dollars of global economic value depends.

I learned in my time as Minister that fighting wildlife crime means fighting corruption, challenging vested interests, and accepting personal consequences for standing on principle. I paid that price. But I did not walk away. Through the Conservation Trust, I intend to ensure that the frameworks we built, the Cape Town Declaration, the Rio Declaration, and the legal and enforcement architecture to which G20 nations committed, are defended, developed, and delivered. Now I ask President Trump and the G20 to ensure that the sacrifice of principled leadership was not in vain.

The criminal syndicates that traffic in rhino horn, pangolin scales, and lion bones do not respect borders, ideologies, or diplomatic niceties. They exploit weakness wherever they find it: in underfunded parks, in corrupt courts, and in captured ministries. The G20 must be the forum that matches their ruthlessness with resolve. Miami can be the place where the world’s most powerful economies declare, with one voice, that crimes against nature are crimes against people, and that there will be consequences.

That is the legacy the Cape Town Declaration was built to deliver. That is the challenge the American presidency now inherits. I trust President Trump to meet it.