South Africa’s finance minister took aim at Donald Trump as he delivered the medium-term budget update, days after the US president announced his nation would boycott the upcoming Group of 20 summit in Johannesburg.
Enoch Godongwana used his policy statement to reject false claims of a genocide being carried out against white Afrikaners in South Africa — a sustained source of tension with the US, the nation’s second-largest trading partner. Godongwana said that the world was grappling with mounting economic and political divisions.
“It is against this fractured landscape that South Africa has been falsely accused of genocide against its white community and threatened with punitive sanctions based on these falsehoods,” he told lawmakers in Cape Town on Wednesday before tabling the budget update.
Negotiations among G20 members are underway with a view to reaching a consensus that will result in a summit declaration. South Africa will host the gathering on November 22 to 23.
South African officials say the absence of the US may make it easier to get a declaration agreed, which they would herald as an indicator of the success of nation’s G-20 presidency before handing over to Washington in December. Still, the officials — who declined to be identified talking about private matters — say other countries that are present could still block a declaration.
“My experience in politics is that boycotts never really work — they have a...
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