US PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s decision to boycott the Group of 20 summit in South Africa next weekend is the US’s loss, the host country’s President Cyril Ramaphosa has said.

Mr Ramaphosa added that “the US needs to think again whether boycott politics actually works, because in my experience it doesn’t work.”

Mr Trump announced on social media last week that no US government official would attend the November 22-23 meeting of leaders from 19 of the world’s richest countries and leading developing economies in Johannesburg.

The US president repeated his bogus claims that members of a white minority group in South Africa are being violently persecuted and having their land taken from them because of their race.

He has continually attacked South Africa’s black-led government over that and other issues, including its decision to accuse US ally Israel of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza in an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice.

“It is unfortunate that the US decided not to attend the G20,” Mr Ramaphosa told reporters outside the South African parliament. 

“The US, by not being at the G20, one must never think that we are not going to go on with the G20. The G20 will go on. All other heads of state will be here. In the end, we will take fundamental decisions and their absence is their loss.”

The South African president added that the US was “giving up the very important role that they should be playing as the biggest economy in the world.”

It was during White House talks in May that Mr Trump ambushed Mr Ramaphosa with his baseless claims that Afrikaners were being killed in widespread attacks. 

The latter lobbied Mr Trump at that meeting to attend this month’s G20 summit, the first to be held in Africa.