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.
‘EYE FOR AN EYE’: Two of the men were shot by a male relative of the victims, whose families turned down the opportunity to offer them amnesty, the Supreme Court said Four men were yesterday publicly executed in Afghanistan, the Supreme Court said, the highest number of executions to be carried out in one day since the Taliban’s return to power. The executions in three separate provinces brought to 10 the number of men publicly put to death since 2021, according to an Agence France-Presse tally. Public executions were common during the Taliban’s first rule from 1996 to 2001, with most of them carried out publicly in sports stadiums. Two men were shot around six or seven times by a male relative of the victims in front of spectators in Qala-i-Naw, the center
Incumbent Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa on Sunday claimed a runaway victory in the nation’s presidential election, after voters endorsed the young leader’s “iron fist” approach to rampant cartel violence. With more than 90 percent of the votes counted, the National Election Council said Noboa had an unassailable 12-point lead over his leftist rival Luisa Gonzalez. Official results showed Noboa with 56 percent of the vote, against Gonzalez’s 44 percent — a far bigger winning margin than expected after a virtual tie in the first round. Speaking to jubilant supporters in his hometown of Olon, the 37-year-old president claimed a “historic victory.” “A huge hug
Two Belgian teenagers on Tuesday were charged with wildlife piracy after they were found with thousands of ants packed in test tubes in what Kenyan authorities said was part of a trend in trafficking smaller and lesser-known species. Lornoy David and Seppe Lodewijckx, two 19-year-olds who were arrested on April 5 with 5,000 ants at a guest house, appeared distraught during their appearance before a magistrate in Nairobi and were comforted in the courtroom by relatives. They told the magistrate that they were collecting the ants for fun and did not know that it was illegal. In a separate criminal case, Kenyan Dennis
The US will help bolster the Philippines’ arsenal and step up joint military exercises, Manila’s defense chief said, as tensions between Washington and China escalate. The longtime US ally is expecting a sustained US$500 million in annual defense funding from Washington through 2029 to boost its military capabilities and deter China’s “aggression” in the region, Philippine Secretary of Defense Gilberto Teodoro said in an interview in Manila on Thursday. “It is a no-brainer for anybody, because of the aggressive behavior of China,” Teodoro said on close military ties with the US under President Donald Trump. “The efforts for deterrence, for joint resilience
RSS