How Many Times Did Lamola Get This Wrong?
Minister Ronald Lamola told South Africans to prepare for the worst on 20 September 2026, saying the country is being forced to surrender its sovereignty to the United States. A check of his claims in Washington and New York against South Africa’s own laws, the American policy behind this dispute, and the ANC’s own history shows several of them do not hold up. The refugee programme he called apartheid 2.0 is not what he described it as, and the history he used to dismiss a rights complaint runs backwards. The warning that does hold up was not really aimed at the public.
Ronald Lamola sat down with SABC’s Sherwin Bryce-Pease in New York on 20 September 2026 and said South Africans must prepare for the worst, because the country is being asked to surrender its sovereignty on land reform, on BEE, and on its own foreign policy.
That claim does not hold up against what the United States has actually done. The visa restrictions Washington announced this month do not touch a single South African law. They restrict who gets a US visa. Separately, the same laws Washington objects to put South Africa’s AGOA trade benefits at risk, because AGOA’s own rules require member countries to protect property rights. That is a second, different form of pressure, not something contained inside the visa policy, and Lamola does not draw that distinction for his audience.
A country deciding who it lets in and what it trades is not stripping another country of its sovereignty. It is exercising its own. Every country lives with other countries reacting to its choices.
Whose Job Is This Anyway
International Relations and Cooperation sits inside the Government of National Unity cabinet, but the ANC runs that department alone. The DA, the IFP, and the other coalition parties have no say over it. When Lamola picks this fight with Washington, he is doing it as the ANC, not as South Africa’s government as a whole.
This is my own reading of what that means. If Ramaphosa had made this trip himself, the GNU partners could hold him accountable for how he represented the country, because the Presidency answers to the coalition as a whole. He could not go. He is unwell and recovering. With Lamola standing in for him, running a department the ANC controls entirely on its own, nobody in the GNU gets a say in what gets said on South Africa’s behalf in Washington and New York. That looks less like South Africa’s government making its case, and more like the ANC making its case with South Africa’s passport.
There is also a question worth asking about who Lamola’s warning is actually for. Ask who loses something if BEE rules change or the Expropriation Act gets watered down. Not the average South African standing in a queue at a clinic or a police station. The people who lose are the ones whose tenders, shareholding deals, and government contracts depend on race-based policy staying exactly as it is. When Lamola tells South Africa to prepare for the worst, the people that warning protects are the tender class, the politically connected, and everyone whose income depends on the ANC’s empowerment rules staying exactly as they are.
Apartheid 2.0
Lamola has called the American refugee programme for Afrikaners apartheid 2.0. Speaking to the African Diaspora Forum in Washington, and reported by News24’s Emsie Ferreira, he went further, saying the programme allows “only white Afrikaners from South Africa… to be refugees here, and all of you or any other race is not allowed”, and describing a “genocide that has now opened the doors” for the programme. Take note, these are his claims, not settled facts.
The claim that the programme is whites only does not match the published eligibility criteria, which extend to any racial minority in South Africa facing discrimination, not just Afrikaners. And the genocide claim does not appear anywhere in the actual executive order that created the programme. It comes from separate political statements made by US officials, not the legal document itself.
Bryce-Pease put the apartheid 2.0 description to Lamola directly on air, and Lamola did not push back on it. He said, “yeah, you’re correct”.
That comparison does not hold. Apartheid ended 32 years ago. It was enforced by a National Party government that most South Africans alive today never had a chance to vote for or against, because they were either too young or not yet born when it ended in 1994. That is no different from holding the current United States government responsible for something the Kennedy administration did. And yet the ANC keeps holding today’s white South Africans responsible for it, using apartheid to justify BEE, land expropriation, and every other policy aimed at them now, regardless of whether they were even alive when it ended. A refugee programme run by a different country, that nobody is forced to apply for, is not apartheid. It is a foreign government’s own immigration rule. Calling it apartheid does not describe the policy. It cheapens the word for everyone who actually lived under the real one.
The Ballot Box Claim
Lamola also said some of the people raising these complaints in Washington are minority groups who, in his words, “lost them in the ballot box”.
Losing an election tells you a group lost an argument. It tells you nothing about whether their complaint is true. That is exactly why constitutions have bills of rights, so a majority winning a vote is never the final word on whether a minority’s rights are being respected. South Africa’s own constitution runs on that principle.
More than that, the claim gets the history backwards. Apartheid did not end because the whole country voted together in 1994. Parliament repealed the core apartheid laws in 1991. White South Africans then voted themselves, in a referendum on 17 March 1992, to end the system and back a negotiated new constitution. Almost 69% said yes. They did not lose apartheid at the ballot box. They voted it away, 2 years before the country’s first democratic election ever took place.
Lamola’s version flips that history. It turns a group that voted to dismantle its own system into a group that lost a fight to keep it. It is the same story the ANC has told for 3 decades, that 1994 was the moment democracy defeated apartheid in one vote, when the vote that actually ended apartheid happened 2 years earlier, cast by the same group Lamola is now describing as the ones who lost. He said this on a national broadcaster, on the record, and got the basic sequence backwards. What does he tell the people he meets when the cameras are not running?
Before He Even Landed
Before Lamola set foot in Washington, he told Business Day that Trump was carrying out “economic sabotage”, and that Trump was targeting South Africa partly to please his MAGA base ahead of the midterm elections. That interview came out on 17 September 2026, before any of the Washington meetings had even happened. Two days later, his own department called the same trip productive. Those are not the words of one mind speaking for itself.
Who He Actually Met
Lamola told Bryce-Pease that South Africa has “been engaging with the White House, with clear and good intentions”. Some of that is real. Ramaphosa’s own ambassador did meet the White House before this trip, and that meeting reportedly went well. But that happened before Rubio announced the visa restrictions, not during this visit.
According to DIRCO’s own account of the Washington trip, published by SAnews, his programme there consisted of members of Congress, the Congressional Black Caucus, the US Chamber of Commerce, and bipartisan think tanks. Nowhere in that account, and nowhere in his own description of the trip, is there a meeting with the State Department, the White House, or the trade officials who run AGOA.
Lamola also said South Africa has no clarity on who the new visa restrictions even target. That does not hold up. The State Department published this policy on its own website on 15 September 2026, describing exactly who is covered: anyone responsible for, or complicit in, enacting or enforcing laws that allow uncompensated land seizures, race-based discrimination, or incitement of violence against a minority group. It does not name individuals because it does not need to; it works by description, the same way visa restrictions of this kind always have. His own department read that description days before he made this claim. DIRCO issued a statement responding to the same announcement on 16 September 2026, 4 days before this interview. He either did not read the announcement his own department had already answered, or he read it and called it unclear anyway.
The Expropriation Act
Underneath all of this sits the Expropriation Act, the law that lets the state take land with no payment in some cases. Lamola treats it as settled and purely domestic. It is neither. The Act has not come into force. Ramaphosa signed it in January 2025 and still has not proclaimed a date for it to start operating. The Democratic Alliance and AfriForum challenged it in the Western Cape High Court, arguing both that Parliament passed it unlawfully and that it breaches property rights in the constitution. The court heard that case in August 2026 and has not ruled.
It is not purely domestic either. AGOA requires member countries to protect property rights, and the American executive order ties this Act directly to that requirement. A law can be entirely South Africa’s own business to write. It still carries consequences the moment another country responds to it.
The Pattern
Put it together and it points the same way every time. Sovereignty surrendered, when the US made no such demand. History flipped, casting the people who voted to end apartheid as the ones who lost it. A relationship called productive in one place and sabotage in another, 2 days apart. Engagement with the White House claimed for a trip where the confirmed meetings were Congress and business groups. No clarity claimed on a policy his own department had already read and answered days earlier. Certainty about a law’s legality, while his own country’s courts are still deciding it.
Every one of those points the same direction. Lamola reaches for the version that sounds worse for Washington and better for the ANC, every time the real version is not dramatic enough. And the one warning he gave that actually holds up, prepare for the worst, was never really meant for the public. It was meant for the people whose tenders depend on none of this ever changing.
