South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has reaffirmed his country’s firm standing as a founding and active member of the G20, responding to former U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to exclude Pretoria from the next summit.
Trump’s threat came after Washington boycotted the summit hosted by South Africa last month, where he repeated unsubstantiated claims of persecution against the white minority.
Ramaphosa dismissed those allegations — which accuse South Africa of conducting a “genocide against Afrikaners” and seizing white-owned land — as “blatant disinformation.”
Speaking during his State of the Nation address, he stressed that South Africa had formally handed over the rotating G20 presidency to the U.S. embassy in accordance with established procedures, undermining the justification Trump gave for the threatened exclusion.
