Donald Trump has announced that South Africa will not be invited to G20 events in the United States when it hosts the forum next year, escalating a diplomatic dispute between the two countries. The US president repeated widely discredited claims that South Africa is 'killing white people' and confiscating their land, prompting a sharp rebuke from Pretoria.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said South Africa had 'refused to hand off the G20 Presidency to a Senior Representative from our U.S. Embassy' at the closing ceremony of the recent summit in Johannesburg. He added that, at his direction, South Africa would not receive an invitation to the 2026 G20, to be held in Miami, Florida, and that all payments and subsidies to the country would be stopped.
South Africa’s presidency issued a statement calling the move 'regrettable' and 'punitive', based on 'misinformation and distortions'. It emphasised that South Africa is a sovereign constitutional democracy and a G20 member in its own right, and rejected what it described as insults from another country.
The row began after the US boycotted last weekend’s G20 leaders summit in Johannesburg, the first held in Africa, and also skipped other G20 events in South Africa. Washington demanded that the presidency be handed over to its acting ambassador at the closing ceremony, but Pretoria refused, saying it would be a breach of protocol for President Cyril Ramaphosa to give the symbolic handover to a 'junior' diplomat.
Trump and US officials have continued to repeat false claims about the treatment of white Afrikaners in South Africa. In the last quarter of 2024, South African police recorded 12 murders on farms, including black-owned smallholdings, out of almost 7,000 murders nationwide. Private land ownership remains heavily concentrated among the white minority, and land restitution has occurred only in a handful of cases after lengthy legal processes.
