US President Donald Trump revealed on Friday that his administration will not invite South Africa to the 2026 G20 Summit to be hosted in Miami, Florida, escalating a significant diplomatic row between the two nations. This announcement follows the US’s high-profile decision to skip the recent G20 Leaders’ Summit hosted by South Africa in Johannesburg.
The Basis for Exclusion: ‘White Genocide’ Claims
In a lengthy post on the social media platform X, President Trump laid out his reasoning for excluding the country, primarily citing alleged human rights violations.
- Trump’s Allegation: Trump accused the South African government of neglecting what he termed “horrific Human Right Abuses endured by Afrikaners, and other descendants of Dutch, French, and German settlers.” He further stated: “To put it more bluntly, they are killing white people, and randomly allowing their farms to be taken from them.”
- Context on Violence: It is important to note that these claims of targeted “white genocide” and widespread farm seizures have been widely discredited by independent observers, the South African government, and white leaders in the country. South Africa acknowledges it faces a severe overall law-and-order crisis. For context, in the last quarter of 2024, South African police recorded 12 murders on farms (which include both black and white-owned smallholder plots), out of nearly 7,000 murders recorded across the country in the same period.
G20 Handover Dispute and Punitive Measures
The President also cited a diplomatic row that occurred at the closing of the Johannesburg summit.
- Handover Claim: Trump claimed that South Africa refused to hand over the G20 Presidency to a representative from the American Embassy present at the closing ceremony. He stated: “Therefore, at my direction, South Africa will NOT be receiving an invitation to the 2026 G20, which will be hosted in the Great City of Miami, Florida next year.”
- South Africa’s Protocol: The South African Presidency countered this, stating that as the US did not send a high-level head of state or cabinet minister to the summit, it would have been a protocol breach for President Ramaphosa to hand the gavel to a junior official. The official statement clarified that the “instruments of the G20 presidency were duly handed over to a US Embassy official at the Headquarters of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation.”
- Aid Cuts: Following his announcement, Trump also declared his intention to “stop all payments and subsidies to them [South Africa], effective immediately,” although the US aid budget to Pretoria had already been curtailed from a high of $564 million in 2024 to a planned $103 million in 2025.
South Africa’s Rebuttal and G20 Norms
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa called the exclusion decision “regrettable,” stating his administration had made numerous attempts to reset the diplomatic relationship with the US.
- Ramaphosa’s office forcefully rebutted Trump’s attempt to impose a unilateral ban, stating that South Africa is a G20 member “in its own name and right” and its membership is “at the behest of all other members.”
- G20 Consensus: Legal and institutional norms surrounding the G20 affirm that it is an informal, consensus-based forum. No single member state, including the US, has the power to unilaterally expel another, a fact that has been widely acknowledged in previous controversies regarding other member states.
The exclusion attempt has been viewed as a high-stakes challenge to the G20’s cohesion, forcing other member nations to confront a diplomatic fracture as preparations for the 2026 summit begin.