The US Secretary of State has said South Africa’s ambassador to the United States “is no longer welcome” in the country, in the latest Trump administration move targeting the African nation.
Marco Rubio, in a post on social media platform X, accused Ebrahim Rasool of being a “race-baiting politician” who hates US President Donald Trump.
Mr Rubio then declared the South African diplomat “persona non grata”.
Neither Mr Rubio, who posted as he was flying back to Washington from a Group of 7 foreign ministers meeting in Canada, nor the state department gave any immediate explanation for the decision.
But Mr Rubio linked his post to a story by a right-wing Breitbart news site about a talk Mr Rasool gave earlier on Friday, local time.
During the talk, which was part of a South African think tank webinar, Mr Rasool spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a United States where white people soon would no longer be in the majority.
Both Mr Trump and his ally Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa, have criticised the country’s Black-led government over a new land law they claim discriminates against white people.
It is highly unusual for the US to expel a foreign ambassador, although lower-ranking diplomats are more frequently targeted with persona non grata status.
At the height of US-Russia diplomatic expulsions during the Cold War and then again over Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, neither Washington nor Moscow saw fit to expel the respective ambassadors.
A statement from the office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said it had “noted the regrettable expulsion” of Mr Rasool and called on its diplomatic officials “to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter”.
“South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States of America,” the statement said.
Mr Rasool previously served as his country’s ambassador to the US from 2010 to 2015 before returning to the post in January.
Mr Rasool, a former anti-apartheid campaigner, spoke in Friday’s webinar of the Trump administration’s crackdowns on diversity and equity programs and immigration.
“The supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the USA, the MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement, as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the USA in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48 per cent white,” the South African ambassador said.
He pointed to Mr Musk’s outreach to far-right figures in Europe, calling it a “dog whistle” in a global movement trying to rally people who see themselves as part of an “embattled white community”.
Mr Rasool made no pointed attack on Mr Trump and instead offered tips for dealing with his administration, saying, “This is not a moment to antagonise the United States” and “let’s avoid things that cock a snoot at the United States”.
His ouster comes after Mr Trump signed an executive order that cut aid and assistance to the South African government.
In the order, Mr Trump said South Africa’s Afrikaners, who are descendants of mainly Dutch colonial settlers, were being targeted by a new law that allows the government to expropriate private land.
The South African government has denied its new law is tied to race and says Mr Trump’s claims over the country and the law have been full of misinformation and distortions.
Mr Trump said land was being expropriated from Afrikaners, when no land has been taken under the law.
The law allows the government to take land in specific instances where it is not being used, or where it would be in the public interest if it is redistributed.
It aims to address some of the wrongs of South Africa’s racist apartheid era, when Black people had land taken away from them.
Mr Trump also announced a plan to offer Afrikaners refugee status in the US, who are only one part of South Africa’s white minority.
AP
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