By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Germany on Thursday said that it would persuade U.S President, Donald Trump to reverse his decision not to invite South Africa to next year’s G20 summit in Florida, following the U.S. president’s false claims that the country is mistreating its white minority.
Since taking office for a second time in January, Trump has repeatedly alleged that South Africa’s black-majority government persecutes its white population.
In a social media post on Wednesday, Trump said “South Africa has demonstrated to the world they are not a country worthy of membership anywhere”, saying he would not invite it to next year’s summit.
The US leader had in May confronted President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House with widely discredited reports of a genocide of white farmers.
Washington boycotted the G20 leaders’ meeting in Johannesburg this month, citing “human rights abuses” in South Africa. The group adopted a declaration addressing the climate crisis and other global challenges, despite U.S. objections.
Ramaphosa’s spokesperson Vincent Magwenya told Reuters that “a lot” of G20 members had sent private messages of support to South Africa.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said publicly that he would seek to persuade Trump to extend an invitation to South Africa.
“In my view, the G7 and G20 are formats that should not be made smaller without good reason,” Merz told reporters in Berlin. “I will try to convince him (Trump) to invite the South African government as well.”
Ramaphosa’s office said South Africa would continue to participate in the G20 and “does not appreciate insults from another country about its worth in participating in global platforms”.
However his spokesperson said South Africa would not lobby individual nations for support.
“We … understand and appreciate that at a bilateral level, some of these countries are in a precarious sort of position with the United States,” Magwenya told local radio station 702.
In his Wednesday post, Trump cited as a reason for excluding Pretoria from G20 meetings that it had refused to hand off the G20 presidency to a representative from the U.S. Embassy at the end of the Johannesburg summit.
South Africa says the U.S. delegation was not present at the summit and that the presidency was handed over to an embassy official this week.
