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”.
\u201cI just thought that he is so uninformed, truly uninformed,\u201d Ramaphosa told the New York Times.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI 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.\u201d
Ramaphosa said of Trump. \u201cI 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.\u201d
In the interview, Ramaphosa said that Ukraine should not seek to join NATO and stressed the importance of \u201cnonaligned\u201d middle powers like his, particularly during times of crisis and conflict. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He defended South Africa’s relations with Tehran, arguing that South Africa\u2019s critics \u201chave much deeper dealings with the very countries that they malign\u201d.
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: \u201cI do think the Afrikaner policy is racist.
\u201cIt 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.
\u201cThere\u2019s no white genocide and there is no grabbing of land, of white people\u2019s land,\u201d Ramaphosa told The Times. \u201cAnd white farmers are not being driven out of the country and badly treated.\u201d
He said he was \u201ctruly bemused\u201d when Trump turned down the lights to play the video in the Oval Office. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what was happening,\u201d he said. \u201cAs I sort of unpacked it later, I realised that it was an ambush, and I was least prepared for that.\u201d
In the months after that meeting, Trump has continued his attacks on South Africa, slapped the country with 30% tariffs \u2014 among the highest in Africa \u2014 skipped the Group of 20 meeting in Johannesburg and disinvited South Africa from this year\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The White House meeting \u201cin many ways, just shook the relationship quite a bit,\u201d he told the New York Times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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”.\u201cI just thought that he is so uninformed, truly uninformed,\u201d Ramaphosa told the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1605,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[205,13],"tags":[66,23],"class_list":{"0":"post-1604","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-secondary-story","8":"category-south-africa","9":"tag-ramaphosa","10":"tag-trump"},"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1606,"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions\/1606"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1nationmedia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}