Rubio says South African ambassador ‘no longer welcome’ in US

By Jennifer Hansler, CNN

(CNN) — US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday said that South Africa’s ambassador to the United States “is no longer welcome in our great country.”

“Ebrahim Rasool is a race-baiting politician who hates America and hates” President Donald Trump, Rubio alleged in a post on X.

“We have nothing to discuss with him and so he is considered PERSONA NON GRATA,” Rubio wrote. Declaring someone persona non grata (PNG) is a severe diplomatic rebuke and usually forces them to leave the host country.

Rasool must leave the US by March 21, a State Department spokesperson told CNN Saturday.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa called the decision “regrettable” and expressed his commitment to building a “mutually beneficial relationship.”

“The Presidency urges all relevant and impacted stakeholders to maintain the established diplomatic decorum in their engagement with the matter,” Ramaphosa’s office said in a statement.

Rubio’s post linked to an article from the right-wing news outlet Breitbart about Rasool’s comments to a think tank Friday about Trump’s election and presidency.

The PNG declaration against Rasool is the latest chapter in the plummeting relationship between the US and South Africa. There had been tensions between the two countries under the Biden administration. However, since Trump began his second term the US has taken a series of punitive measures against South Africa, whose government has been met with ire not only from Trump, but also his ally tech billionaire Elon Musk, who was born and raised in the country.

Both Trump and Musk have alleged that White farmers in the country are being discriminated against under land reform policies that South Africa’s government says are necessary to remedy the legacy of apartheid.

In the comments that seem to have triggered Rubio’s PNG declaration, Rasool was discussing the “continuities” from the Biden administration as well as the “discontinuities.”

“What Donald Trump is launching is an assault on incumbency, those who are in power, by mobilizing a supremacism against the incumbency at home and … abroad as well,” said Rasool, who was on his second tour as ambassador to the US. He presented his credentials in mid-January to then President Joe Biden and previously served in Washington, DC, under the Obama administration.

He said that the Make America Great Again movement was a response “not simply to a supremacist instinct,” but to shifts in US demographics “in which the voting electorate in the USA is projected to become 48% white and that the possibility of a majority of minorities is looming on the horizon.”

“So that needs to be factored in, so that we understand some of the things that we think are instinctive, nativist, racist things, I think that there’s data that, for example, would support that, that would go to this wall being built, the deportation movement, etc. etc.,” he said as part of his nearly 20-minute-long remarks to the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection (MISTRA).

Rasool said “it’s no accident” that Musk has involved himself in far-right British politics and that Vice President JD Vance met with the leader of a far-right German political party before the elections there.

“That then begins to say what was the role then of Afrikaners in that whole project,” he continued. “Very clearly it’s to project white victimhood as a dog whistle.”

In January, South Africa enacted the Expropriation Act, seeking to undo the legacy of apartheid, which created huge disparities in land ownership among its majority Black and minority White population.

Under apartheid, non-White South Africans were forcibly dispossessed from their lands for the benefit of Whites. Today, some three decades after racial segregation officially ended in the country, Black South Africans, who comprise over 80% of the population of 63 million, own only around 4% of private land.

The expropriation law empowers South Africa’s government to take land and redistribute it – with no obligation to pay compensation in some instances – if the seizure is found to be “just and equitable and in the public interest.”

Ramaphosa said the legislation would “ensure public access to land in an equitable and just manner.” But the White House disagrees and Trump and Musk believe the land reform policy discriminates against White South Africans.

The policy has prompted a strong reaction from the Trump administration.

In early February, Rubio announced he would not attend the meeting of the G20 foreign ministers in Johannesburg, saying at the time that “South Africa is doing very bad things.”

“Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability.’ In other words: DEI and climate change,” the top US diplomat alleged. “My job is to advance America’s national interests, not waste taxpayer money or coddle anti-Americanism.”

Just days later, Trump suspended aid to South Africa, alleging discrimination against White farmers. In that same executive order, the president said the US would “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.” Earlier this month, Trump said in a post on social media that “any Farmer (with family!) from South Africa, seeking to flee that country for reasons of safety, will be invited into the United States of America with a rapid pathway to Citizenship.”

The State Department spokesperson told CNN Saturday that the agency “is coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security and has begun implementing refugee resettlement” for Afrikaners, adding that “initial interviews are underway.”

CNN’s Nimi Princewill and Lucas Lilieholm contributed to this report.

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