President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office said on Saturday South Africa’s ambassador to the United States had been expelled — confirming the further deterioration in diplomatic relations between the two countries since Donald Trump was inaugurated in January.
“The Presidency has noted the regrettable expulsion of South Africa’s ambassador to the United States of America, Mr. Ebrahim Rasool. The presidency urges all relevant and impacted stakeholders to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter,” it said in a media statement.
“South Africa remains committed to building a mutually beneficial relationship with the United States of America.”
The statement came after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on social media platform X late on Friday night, South African time, that Rasool “is no longer welcome in our great country”.
“Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates @POTUS (Trump). We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA.”
Relations between the two countries have been fraught since Trump said in early February that he was suspending all aid to South Africa over what his administration claims is legislation that discriminates against whites. He has since offered white Afrikaners refugee status in the US.
In a 2 February post on his social media platform, Truth Social on 2 February — days after Ramaphosa signed the Expropriation Act into law — Trump said he was cutting aid because “South Africa is confiscating land and treating certain classes of people VERY BADLY”, warning that “The United States won’t stand for it, we will act”.
Trump followed that up with an executive order cutting aid, and falsely claiming that the Expropriation Act enabled the government “to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.
Rasool — who has previously been critical of Trump — first served as South Africa’s top envoy to the US from 2010 to 2015 and was redeployed to the post this year.
Washington has not yet appointed a new envoy to Pretoria after former ambassador Reuben Brigety announced his resignation last November, effective from January 2025, in line with the standard transition after a change in the US presidential administration.
Joel Pollak, an editor-at-large for the right-wing publication Breitbart and outspoken critic of the South African government, has been touted as a potential successor to Brigety.
In his X post stating that Rasool was no longer welcome in the US, Rubio attached a Breitbart article, with Pollak’s byline, which said the South African ambassador had told participants at a foreign policy seminar on Friday that Trump was “leading a white supremacist movement in America and around the world”.
The Breitbart report said Rasool was addressing the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection in Johannesburg.
Pretoria had initially sought to repair tattered relations — even after a defiant Ramaphosa declared in his State of the Nation address last month that the country would not be bullied into abandoning policies that Trump’s administration has branded “anti-Americanism” — an apparent reference to South Africa taking US ally Israel to the International Court of Justice over its attacks on Gaza.
But earlier this week Ramaphosa’s spokesperson Vincent Magwenya told the Mail & Guardian that the government has revised its thinking around the purpose of a planned diplomatic mission to Washington, and now hoped to rather engage the Trump administration on trade.
