Following months of diplomatic tensions, President Cyril Ramaphosa and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, will meet next week in Washington, D.C., during a G20 Summit.
The meeting was confirmed by Trump during a media briefing, where he again sought to justify his stance on South Africa and granting so-called 49 Afrikaners refugee status, who arrived in the US on Monday evening.
“South African leadership is coming to see me next week. We’re supposed to have a G20 meeting,” said Trump.
Trump again repeated unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations about genocide in South Africa, which influenced his decision to resettle Afrikaners in the US, accusing the media of failing to report on the matter.
“Because they’re being killed and we don’t want to see people being killed. It’s a genocide that’s taking place, and you people don’t want to write about it. But it’s a terrible thing that is taking place. Farmers are being killed, they happen to be white, but whether they’re white or black makes no difference to me. But white farmers are being brutally killed, and their land has been confiscated in South Africa, and the newspapers and the media don’t talk about it,” remarked Trump.
Meanwhile, speaking during the Presidential Panel at the 2025 Africa CEO Forum in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Ramaphosa dismissed insinuations by Trump that the Afrikaners are refugees.
He said he made the point to Trump, during their last telephonic conversation, that he was misled by people who are opposed to transformation in South Africa.
“We’ve raised our own concern because those people who are being enticed to go to the US, do not fit the definition of a refugee. A refugee is someone who must leave their country out of fear of political persecution, religious persecution or economic persecution, and they don’t fit that description. It’s a fringe grouping that doesn’t have a lot of support, that is anti-transformation and anti-change, that will prefer to see South Africa going back to apartheid type of policies,” explained Ramaphosa.
Furthermore, Ramaphosa said the people who fled are not being persecuted, hounded, treated badly, adding that they’re leaving ostensibly because “they don’t want to embrace the changes that are taking place in our country in accordance with the country’s constitution.”
According to the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, the meeting will try to resolve diplomatic and trade relations between the two countries, including allegations of “Afrikaner genocide” in South Africa.
