Marco Rubio says South Africa’s ambassador ’no longer welcome’ to U.S.

The U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared South African ambassador Ebrahim Rasool persona non grata over his criticism of Donald Trump

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday (March 14, 2025) that South Africa’s ambassador to the United States “is no longer welcome” in the country, accusing Ebrahim Rasool of being a “race-baiting politician” who hates President Donald Trump.

Mr. Rubio declared the South African diplomat “persona non grata.”

Neither Mr. 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 Mr. Rubio linked to a Breitbart story about a talk Mr. Rasool gave earlier Friday (March 14, 2025) 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 Mr. Trump and his ally Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa, have criticised 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.

Phone calls to the South African Embassy seeking comment, made at the end of the work day, were not answered.

Mr. Rasool previously served as his country’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2010 to 2015 before returning to the post in January.

As a child, he and his family were evicted from a Cape Town neighborhood designated for white people. Mr. Rasool became an anti-apartheid campaigner, serving time in prison for his activism and identifying as a comrade of the country’s first post-apartheid President, Nelson Mandela. He later became a politician in Mandela’s African National Congress political party.

In Friday’s (March 14, 2025) webinar, Mr. Rasool, speaking by videoconference, talked in academic language of the Trump administration’s crackdowns on diversity and equity programs and immigration.

“The supremacist assault on incumbency, we see it in the domestic politics of the U.S.A., the MAGA movement, the Make America Great Again movement, as a response not simply to a supremacist instinct, but to very clear data that shows great demographic shifts in the U.S.A. in which the voting electorate in the U.S.A. is projected to become 48% white,” the South African ambassador said.

He pointed to Musk’s outreach to far-right figures in Europe, calling it a “dog whistle” in a global movement trying to rally people who see themselves as part of an “embattled white community.”

Mr. Rasool made no pointed attack on Mr. Trump and instead offered tips for dealing with his administration, saying, “This is not a moment to antagonize the United States” and “Let’s avoid things that cock a snoot at the United States.”

His ouster comes after Mr. Trump signed an executive order that cut aid and assistance to the Black-led South African government. In the order, Mr. Trump said South Africa’s Afrikaners, who are descendants of mainly Dutch colonial settlers, were being targeted by a new law that allows the government to expropriate private land.

The South African government has denied its new law is tied to race and says Mr. Trump’s claims over the country and the law have been full of misinformation and distortions.

Mr. Trump said land was being expropriated from Afrikaners, when no land has been taken under the law.

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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.

Mr. 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.

Mr. Musk, who heads Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has highlighted the land law in social media posts and cast it as a threat to South Africa’s white minority.

Mr. 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.”

Published - March 15, 2025 07:35 am IST