The choice of Jonas suggests that the ongoing spat with South Africa isn’t going away anytime soon.
South Africa’s new special envoy to the U.S. will retain his role as chairman of the board of a telecom firm that co-owns Iran’s biggest cellular operator with the Islamist country’s government, and he has called President Trump a “racist homophobe,” potentially teeing up another diplomatic clash between the Trump administration and Pretoria.
Mcebisi Jonas, a former deputy finance minister whom South African president Cyril Ramaphosa named to the new role on Monday, has publicly criticized President Trump in strident terms. Speaking on a webinar on November 7, 2020, days after the U.S. presidential election that year, he said: “Right now the U.S. is undergoing a watershed moment. With Biden a certain winner in the presidential race against the racist homophobe Donald Trump. How we got to the situation where a narcissistic right-winger took charge of the world’s largest economic and military powerhouse is something that we need to ponder over.
While the envoy job is different from that of the Washington-based ambassador to the U.S., the choice of Jonas suggests that the ongoing spat isn’t going away anytime soon. The ambassadorial post currently sits empty, as Trump expelled Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool in March, after Breitbart unearthed comments he made on a webinar criticizing Trump and the MAGA movement as white supremacists.
Trump has taken aim at South African policies allowing for the expropriation of white landowners’ property. In a post to Truth Social on Friday, Trump reiterated this criticism and said that America would not participate in the upcoming G-20 summit in Johannesburg, citing South Africa’s “white genocide.”
Michael Walsh, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an expert on U.S.-South Africa ties, told National Review that Jonas’s ties to Iran and his criticism of Trump are already a subject of concern in Washington.
The appointment may indicate “that the Ramaphosa administration has chosen to pursue the path of confrontation over reconciliation in future relations with the Trump administration,” Walsh said. “If so, then we may be headed toward a complete rupture in U.S.-South African relations before the midterm elections if not the G-20 Summit. Among other things that would have severe impact on the South African economy.”
The Trump administration has raised concerns about the country’s ties to Iran, with which South African maintains robust economic and military ties. Trump’s February executive order cutting U.S. aid to South Africa cited its relations with Iran. More recently, South Africa’s minister of mineral and petroleum resources recently indicated that the country would welcome a civilian nuclear-cooperation agreement with Iran or Russia.
In his statement announcing Jonas’s appointment, Ramaphosa said that the envoy will simultaneously retain his current role as independent non-executive chairman of the MTN Group. The company owns a significant stake in Iran’s largest cellular carrier, MTN Irancell, alongside an Iranian-government-controlled consortium. In a 2023, a federal judge found that a group of Gold Star family members could sue Irancell under the Antiterrorism Act, on the basis that it worked with fronts for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.