US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said South Africa’s ambassador to the US “is no longer welcome” in the country after the top envoy made comments about US President Donald Trump, escalating a running feud between Washington and Pretoria.
Rubio made the announcement in a post on X, linking to a Breitbart News article on a lengthy conversation that South African ambassador Ebrahim Rasool had with a think tank in Johannesburg. Rasool said that Trump and his “Make America Great Again” supporters are effectively a “supremacist” movement projecting “white victimhood.”
“Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS,” Rubio wrote, tagging Trump’s official X account. “We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.”
Photo: EPA-EFE
The South African Presidency called the expulsion “regrettable.”
Declaring the diplomat persona non grata means the Trump administration would refuse to engage with him, and it could force him to leave the country or spur his government to recall him.
South Africa “urges all relevant and impacted stakeholders to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter,” the country’s presidential office said in a statement.
“South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship” with the US, it said.
The diplomatic episode is only the latest in a bitter, racially charged feud between the two countries, spurred in part by Trump’s South African-born billionaire adviser Elon Musk, who has spread the conspiracy theory of a “genocide” against South Africa’s white farmers.
That led to a White House executive order halting US foreign assistance to South Africa and declaring that the US refugee system would give priority to Afrikaner “victims of unjust racial discrimination,” with Trump claiming that South Africa was expropriating their land.
The South African authorities have not confiscated any private land since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Ties between Washington and one of Africa’s largest economies had already been frayed after South Africa filed a case in the International Court of Justice accusing Israel, a top US ally, committing a genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, as well as the African nation’s ties with Russia, Iran and China.
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