CAPE TOWN: US President Donald Trump’s decision that the United States government boycott the Group of 20 summit next weekend in South Africa is “their loss,” South Africa’s leader said Wednesday.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa added that “the United States needs to think again whether boycott politics actually works, because in my experience it doesn’t work.”
Trump announced last week on social media that no US government official would attend the Nov. 22-23 meeting of leaders from 19 of the world’s richest and leading developing economies in Johannesburg, citing his widely rejected claims that members of a white minority group in South Africa are being violently persecuted and having their land taken from them because of their race.
The US president has for months targeted South Africa’s Black-led government for criticism over that and a range of other issues, including its decision to accuse US ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza in an ongoing and highly contentious case at the United Nations’ top court.
“It is unfortunate that the United States decided not to attend the G20,” Ramaphosa told reporters outside the South African Parliament. “The United States by not being at the G20, one must never think that we are not going to go on with the G20. The G20 will go on, all other heads of state will be here. In the end we will take fundamental decisions and their absence is their loss.”
