South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa says “boycott politics doesn’t work” as he hit back at US President Donald Trump’s decision to skip the G20 leaders’ summit in Johannesburg later this month.

Trump has said that no US official would attend the gathering over widely discredited claims that white people are being persecuted in South Africa.

Speaking outside parliament, Ramaphosa said the US’s “absence is their loss” and that the boycott would not prevent the meeting from going ahead, according to AFP.

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

The G20 summit is taking place between 22-23 November but Trump, in a post on social media, said it was a “total disgrace” that South Africa was hosting it.

Trump had earlier said South Africa should not be in the G20 at all, and that he would send Vice-President JD Vance, instead of attending himself.

Over the weekend, he backtracked while doubling down on his claims that “Afrikaners [people who are descended from Dutch settlers, and also French and German immigrants] are being killed and slaughtered, and their land and farms are being illegally confiscated”.

“No US government official will attend as long as these human rights abuses continue,” he added.

South Africa’s government has said that claims of a white genocide are “widely discredited and unsupported by reliable evidence”.

It also says that no white farmers have seen their land confiscated without compensation.