South Africa's ambassador no longer welcomed in US: Marco Rubio

Washington: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that South Africa’s ambassador to the United States “is no longer welcome” in the country, in the latest Trump administration move targeting the African nation. Rubio, in a post on X, accused Ebrahim Rasool of being a “race-baiting politician” who hates President Donald Trump. Rubio declared the South African diplomat “persona non grata.”

Neither Rubio, who posted as he was flying back to Washington from a Group of 7 foreign ministers meeting in Canada, nor the State Department gave any immediate explanation for the decision. But Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Rasool gave earlier Friday as part of a South African think tank's webinar in which he spoke about actions taken by the Trump administration in the context of a United States where white people soon would no longer be in the majority.

Both Trump and his ally Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa, have criticized the country's Black-led government over a new land law they claim discriminates against white people. It is highly unusual for the U.S. to expel a foreign ambassador, although lower-ranking diplomats are more frequently targeted with persona non grata status. At the height of U.S.-Russia diplomatic expulsions during the Cold War and then again over Russia’s 2014 annexation



of Crimea, allegations of interference in the 2016 U.S. election and the 2018 poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer in Britain, neither Washington nor Moscow saw fit to expel the respective ambassadors.

The South African government has denied its new law is tied to race and says Trump’s claims over the country and the law have been full of misinformation and distortions. Trump said land was being expropriated from Afrikaners, when no land has been taken under the law. The law allows the government to take land in specific instances where it is not being used, or where it would be in the public interest if it is redistributed. 

It aims to address some of the wrongs of South Africa’s racist apartheid era , when Black people had land taken away from them. Trump also announced a plan to offer Afrikaners refugee status in the U.S. They are only one part of South Africa’s white minority. Musk, who heads Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency , has highlighted the land law in social media posts and cast it as a threat to South Africa’s white minority. Musk earlier this month also targeted South Africa's government over business decisions, saying in a post on X that it had opted not to do business with his Starlink “because I'm not black.”