US declares South African ambassador ‘persona non grata’

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Secretary of state Marco Rubio declared South Africa’s ambassador to the US “persona non grata” on Friday, describing him as a “race-baiting politician who hates America”.

In a post on X Rubio wrote that Ebrahim Rasool was “no longer welcome in our great country”, and linked to a report from the conservative Breitbart news site about an online lecture the ambassador gave about the Trump administration’s foreign policy and its implications for South Africa. 

“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 in the online event hosted by South Africa’s Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection.

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”, according to video of the event posted on YouTube.

The labelling of an ambassador as persona non grata is a rare and serious diplomatic move.

Last month Rubio skipped a meeting of the G20 foreign ministers in South Africa after accusing Pretoria of “anti-Americanism” and doing “very bad things”, such as expropriating private property and using the summit to promote diversity equity and inclusion and climate change.

Rasool, a veteran diplomat who has been vocal in his criticism of Israel in the past, said ahead of taking up his post in December that he would put away South Africa’s “megaphone” on Gaza as he sought to mend fraught relations with Washington.