South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has slammed some of the policies of US President Donald Trump as “racist”.
in a candid interview with the New York Times, Ramaphosa said his Oval Office meeting with Trump last year turned into a “spectacle” and an “ambush”.
“I just thought that he is so uninformed, truly uninformed,” Ramaphosa told the New York Times.
“I realized that he is looking at South Africa through a completely, sort of, foggy lens, without realising the real, real harm that apartheid did. In my view, he was just dismissive.”
Ramaphosa said of Trump. “I realised that he is looking at South Africa through a completely, sort of, foggy lens, without realising the real, real harm that apartheid did. In my view, he was just dismissive.”
In the interview, Ramaphosa said that Ukraine should not seek to join NATO and stressed the importance of “nonaligned” middle powers like his, particularly during times of crisis and conflict.
He defended South Africa’s relations with Tehran, arguing that South Africa’s critics “have much deeper dealings with the very countries that they malign”.
On Trump’s views on the so-called genocide against white Afrikaners in South Africa and granting them special refugee status in the US, he said: “I do think the Afrikaner policy is racist.
“It is that racist sort of demeanor that we want to be able to whittle down so that he can see the truth of the situation.
“There’s no white genocide and there is no grabbing of land, of white people’s land,” Ramaphosa told The Times. “And white farmers are not being driven out of the country and badly treated.”
He said he was “truly bemused” when Trump turned down the lights to play the video in the Oval Office. “I didn’t know what was happening,” he said. “As I sort of unpacked it later, I realised that it was an ambush, and I was least prepared for that.”
In the months after that meeting, Trump has continued his attacks on South Africa, slapped the country with 30% tariffs — among the highest in Africa — skipped the Group of 20 meeting in Johannesburg and disinvited South Africa from this year’s G20 meeting hosted by Trump in Florida.
Ramaphosa said he invited Trump for a state visit ahead of the G20 summit last November, but did not receive a response.
The White House meeting “in many ways, just shook the relationship quite a bit,” he told the New York Times.