South African (SA) President Cyril Ramaphosa has been booked off from public engagements due to ill health on the advice of his medical \u200cteam, his office said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
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Ramaphosa, 73, returned to SA on Monday after attending the BRICS leaders’ summit in India and was advised to rest and recover, his office said in a statement.<\/p>\n
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The \u2060statement said Ramaphosa had asked cabinet ministers to represent him at scheduled public events where possible, without saying how long his absence might last.<\/p>\n
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SA’s Deputy President, Paul Mashatile, is also resting on the advice of his doctors after a medical procedure.<\/p>\n
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Foreign affairs minister Ronald Lamola will lead SA’s delegation to this year’s United Nations \u200cGeneral \u2060Assembly in Ramaphosa’s absence, the SABC reported.<\/p>\n
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Lamola will arrive in the United States (US) at a time of renewed diplomatic tensions after the (US) imposed visa restrictions on some South \u2060Africans over what it called race-based discrimination.<\/p>\n
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US President Donald Trump’s administration has made false claims that SA’s white Afrikaner minority \u2060is being persecuted.<\/p>\n
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SA rejects that, saying there is no evidence of discrimination against whites and that \u2060it has a right to put in place policies to address the legacy of centuries of racial injustice.<\/p>\n
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–Reuters\/SABC–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":45699,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[26],"class_list":["post-45698","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"President Cyril Ramaphosa has been booked off from public engagements due to ill health","published_date":"2026-09-17 07:27:21","news_description":"President Cyril Ramaphosa has been booked off from public engagements due to ill health","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/45698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/45698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45700,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/45698\/revisions\/45700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/45699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=45698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}