US President Trump bars South Africa from attending G20 summit next year in Miami
Cape Town, South Africa (PANA) – South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has expressed grave concern over US President Donald Trump announcement that South Africa will not be invited to the next G20 Leaders’ Summit in Miami.
Trump’s Wednesday night announcement came just days after South Africa hosted a successful G20 event in Johannesburg. South Africa is a founding member of the G20, but Trump continued his broadsides against Pretoria in a post on his social media platform, again making false claims of a white genocide in the country.
He also questioned SA’s membership of the G20 group: "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,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. He added that South Africa “has demonstrated to the World they are not a country worthy of membership anywhere, and we are going to stop all payments and subsidies to them, effective immediately”.
Trump also complained that South Africa refused to hand off the G20 Presidency to a senior representative of the US Embassy, who attended the closing ceremony. Trump was widely ridiculed for snubbing the mega summit.
The Office of the South African Presidency labelled Trump’s move as “regrettable”. “President Cyril Ramaphosa has noted the regrettable statement by President Donald Trump on SA’s participation in the 2026 G20 meetings” it said in a statement. “The summit produced a declaration that affirmed the indisputable strength and value of multilateralism in response to the most pressing challenges facing the world.”
Officials in Pretoria familiar with the dispute, said the most likely course of action would be for Washington to withhold visas for South African officials expected to attend the dozens of meetings scheduled over the next year. Any change in membership would require consensus among G20 nations, as was the case ahead of the 2023 summit in India, when the African Union was admitted as a full member.
-0- PANA CU/MA 27Nov2025
