US ESCALATION: Pretoria puzzled by punitive US travel bans — ‘What more must we do?’

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> Even the US ambassador has acknowledged South Africa’s progress in meeting President Donald Trump’s demands, says President Cyril Ramaphosa’s special adviser, Alistair Ruiters, in response to a travel ban on unnamed South Africans announced by the US.

The South African government says it is mystified by the US announcement on 15 September that it is imposing punitive targeted travel sanctions on South Africans, because even the US ambassador to South Africa had publicly acknowledged that South Africa has addressed two of Washington’s five key domestic demands (the “five asks”).

Pretoria says it is engaging actively with the US on the other three demands and is making progress on resolving them.

Alistair Ruiters, President Cyril Ramaphosa’s special adviser and a key negotiator with the US for more than a year, said that over the past few days US ambassador Brent Bozell had been using two words: “refusal and rejection… that we refuse to answer the question of the five asks [demands], [that] we reject the five asks. And that’s so far from the truth.”

He said Bozell himself had acknowledged in an interview with Business Day that SA had addressed the ask that Pretoria should not interfere in President Donald Trump administration’s programme of offering refugee status to Afrikaners, whom it claims (without evidence) are being persecuted in SA.

Ruiters said Bozell had also acknowledged that SA had addressed the US demand that SA should rescind expropriation without compensation.

“We both agree that the process is in the Constitutional Court. The ambassador agreed, so we’re waiting for the outcome.”

Ruiters added that in the Business Day interview published on Tuesday that Bozell had indicated “that he thinks that it’s quite likely that the [Expropriation] Act will be declared unconstitutional and then we’ll go back to the drawing board. So he’s happy with that.

“If two out of the five asks have been addressed in the mind of the ambassador, why then the punitive action?” Ruiters asked.

He was referring to the announcement on X by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on 15 September, that the US was imposing targeted visa restrictions on unnamed South Africans involved in “race-based discrimination and incitement of imminent violence, as well as uncompensated land seizures” allegedly directed at Afrikaners and other minorities in South Africa.

This was three days after South Africa had sent a letter to Trump addressing in detail his questions about the five asks that Bozell had personally conveyed in a meeting with Ramaphosa on 27 August.

Rubio said South Africa had not adequately addressed these concerns, which Trump had raised in his executive order against South Africa in February 2025. In that order, Trump said that as a result of these concerns, he was offering Afrikaners refugee status in the US.