March 15, (THEWILL) – The United States Government has declared South Africa’s ambassador, Ebrahim Rasool, ‘persona non grata’.
US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, who announced this in a statement on Friday, described Rasool as a “race-baiting politician who hates America”.
In a post on X, Rubio said Rasool was “no longer welcome in our great country”.
Rasool, South Africa’s ambassador to United States had criticised President Donald Trump over his foreign policy he described as “supremacism”.
“What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilising a supremacism against the incumbency, at home . . . and abroad”, Rasool said during an online lecture hosted by South Africa’s Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection about the Trump administration’s foreign policy and its implications for South Africa.
Rasool’s expulsion is the latest episode in the rapid deterioration of relations between Washington and Pretoria since Trump took office.
South Africa brought proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice at the end of 2023, accusing Israel of violating international laws on genocide during its war against Hamas in Gaza, something Israel vigorously denies.
Last month, Trump froze foreign assistance to South Africa, partly in retaliation for the ICJ case, as well as his complaints over Pretoria’s land expropriation policies, which have angered the president and his South African-born billionaire adviser, Elon Musk.
In his lecture, Rasool added that Trump’s “supremacist assault on incumbency” is visible “in the domestic politics of the USA, the Maga 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.”
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