Expelled US ambassador Ebrahim Rasool says he attempted to engage Washington on issues affecting South Africa but was met with resistance.
Rasool and his wife, Rashieda, arrived in Cape Town to a hero’s welcome at Cape Town International Airport, where supporters from the provincial African National Congress (ANC) and its alliance partners gathered at the international arrivals gate.
Rasool was declared persona non grata by the United States government following remarks he made in a webinar linking former US President Donald Trump to white supremacy.
“We have tried to engage, met with executive orders that cut aid, now sit with millions reinfected with HIV, dangerous things are happening. It’s why we must mend relations with the US or sit out the next four years,” Rasool says.
Rasool answers media questions
He maintains that his comments were not a personal attack on the White House but an analysis of political conditions in the US.
“My remarks were on the Mistra Mapungubwe Forum, speaking to South African intelligentsia, intellectuals, political leaders, and others to alert them to a changed condition in the United States. That the old way of doing business with the US was not going to work. And so there’s nothing that I will say there that I would not say elsewhere. And so I would stand by my analysis because we were analysing a political phenomenon, not a personality, not a nation, and not even a government. And so I stand by that,” Rasool says.
Rasool added that it was of utmost importance that relations with the US government should be mended.
“We are not here to call on you not to throw away interests with the US because our workers depend on AGOA, depend on those investments – but we will do so with full dignity, with our sovereignty intact, and with our pride in what people have died for from one massacre to another in this country.”
A hero’s welcome for Ebrahim Rasool
