SOUTH Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has described as “regrettable” the announcement by US President Donald Trump that South Africa would not be invited to take part in next year’s G20 summit in Florida.
In a social media post, Trump said South Africa had refused to hand over the G20 presidency to a US embassy representative at last week’s summit in Johannesburg.
“Therefore, at my direction, South Africa will NOT be receiving an invitation to the 2026 G20, which will be hosted in the Great City of Miami, Florida next year.”
Members of the G20 – a gathering of the world’s biggest economies – do not need an invite but can possibly be barred through visa restrictions.
South Africa’s presidential spokesman Vincent Magwenya said they “should by now accept” at the highest level of political leadership that “there won’t be a reset of the relationship” between the two countries despite the efforts they had undertaken.
“If visas are denied, well, then we will have to move on and look beyond the G20 in the US,” he told the BBC, in response to a question on how they would proceed.
He said they were focused on working with other G20 members to carry the momentum of the issues deliberated at the summit in Johannesburg.
Trump boycotted the summit because of a widely discredited claim that South Africa’s white minority is the victim of large-scale killings and land grabs.
Ramaphosa said in a statement that the US had been expected to participate in the G20 meetings, “but unfortunately, it elected not to attend the G20 Leaders Summit in Johannesburg out of its own volition”. He however noted that some US businesses and civil society entities were present.
He said that since the US delegation was not there, “instruments of the G20 Presidency were duly handed over to a US Embassy official at the Headquarters of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation”.
The low-key handover appears to have further angered Trump, who has been critical of the South African government’s domestic and foreign policies.
He has in the past claimed that a white genocide was taking place in South Africa, and on Wednesday he said the government was “killing white people and randomly allowing their farms to be taken from them”.
The South African government has consistently rejected such claims as widely discredited and lacking reliable evidence.
Ramaphosa said it was regrettable that despite efforts to reset relations with the US, Trump continued “to apply punitive measures against South Africa based on misinformation and distortions about our country”.
In the Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump said South Africa had “demonstrated to the world they were not a country worthy of membership anywhere” and announced a stop to “all payments and subsidies to them, effective immediately”.
South African officials have called for solidarity and urged other G20 members to defend the integrity of the gathering and the rights of all its member states.
The G20 summit, which was for the first time held in Africa, ended with a joint declaration committing to “multilateral co-operation” on climate change mitigation and economic inequality.
The declaration was adopted despite objections from the US, which has accused South Africa of weaponising its leadership of the group this year.