South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa says “boycott politics doesn’t work” as he hit back at US President Donald Trump’s decision to skip the G20 leaders’ summit in Johannesburg later this month.
Trump has said that no US official would attend the gathering over widely discredited claims that white people are being persecuted in South Africa.
Speaking outside parliament, Ramaphosa said the US’s “absence is their loss” and that the boycott would not prevent the meeting from going ahead, according to the AFP news agency.
He added that the US was “giving up the very important role that they should be playing as the biggest economy in the world”.