Johannesburg (AFP) – President Cyril Ramaphosa has appointed a key figure in South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, Roelf Meyer, to be the next ambassador to the United States, his office said Tuesday. The role is seen as particularly sensitive given South Africa’s fraught relationship with President Donald Trump’s administration, which expelled the previous ambassador a year ago.
“I can confirm that President Cyril Ramaphosa has appointed Mr. Roelf Meyer as South Africa’s ambassador to the US,” presidential spokesman Vincent Magwenya told AFP. Meyer would start work “immediately following the completion of all protocols in Washington,” he said.
Meyer, 78, was a reformist minister in the last apartheid government led by the National Party (NP) and a key player in the transition to democracy that led to the first all-race election in 1994. A lawyer by training, he was the chief NP negotiator at multi-party talks in the early 1990s to dismantle apartheid. He left the NP in 1997 to co-found the United Democratic Movement, but the party failed to garner broad appeal.
In 2006, Meyer joined his erstwhile enemies by becoming a member of the African National Congress (ANC), which led the struggle against white minority rule. Ramaphosa last week received the diplomatic credentials of the new US ambassador, Brent Bozell, a right-wing media critic and staunch supporter of Trump.
Ties between the two countries are strained over a range of issues, from South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the UN top court, to Trump’s disputed claims that white Afrikaners are persecuted by the post-apartheid government. Meyer is from the Afrikaans minority, which the government strongly denies is being persecuted.
Washington expelled South Africa’s previous ambassador in March last year after he criticised Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. South Africa is the United States’ largest trading partner on the African continent, with more than 500 US businesses and 30,000 US citizens based in the country.
© 2024 AFP
