By Nco Dube | 3 November 2026

AfriForum and Solidarity took our quarrels to Washington. The pressure they asked for can now land in the order book of an Eastern Cape factory or take a shift off the roster at a citrus packhouse. By the time it reaches a worker’s pay packet, there will be nothing abstract about it.

On 2 November, the Trump administration announced its intention to end South Africa’s preferential access under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) from 1 January 2027. AfriForum promptly held Cyril Ramaphosa and other ANC leaders directly responsible. This is the same organisation that went to the White House in February 2025 asking the Americans to intensify pressure on South African leaders over expropriation, school language policy and racial redress. The request is in its own memorandum. AfriForum wants credit for getting Washington’s attention. The moment that attention threatens a South African livelihood, it wants to be counted among the bystanders.

The Solidarity Movement had the blame worked out as early as March 2025. If Washington kicked South Africa out of AGOA, it said, responsibility should lie squarely with the Ramaphosa government. It takes a particular kind of nerve to ask a foreign power to bear down on your country and then speak as though you were watching from across the street. The lobby understood the danger well enough to assign blame for it in advance. It pressed ahead.

What they sold in Washington

The campaign was years in the making. AfriForum took its account of farm murders to Tucker Carlson’s audience in 2018. By 2025, it had a documentary asking whether Trump was right about South Africa. Elon Musk shared it. Farm attacks, land reform and race laws were assembled into a single story of white persecution, ready for an American right that had its own reasons to tell it. In that version of South Africa, the trouble begins when black people acquire the power to govern it. The dispossession that made land reform necessary barely gets a hearing. Our history is made to begin at the moment white people can be cast as its principal victims.

In September, the leaders of AfriForum, Solidarity and the Solidarity Movement put their names to the claim that the ANC was targeting the continued existence of Afrikaners. They offered farm murders, race laws and language policy as evidence. There is no white genocide in South Africa. A farm murder leaves a family with grief, fear and a case they need the police to solve. Turning that loss into evidence of a campaign to destroy a people serves the politics of those who tell the story. Put alongside disputes about school language and employment, it makes the country sound like a place in need of an American rescue. Washington can then dress up coercion as a favour.

Then there are the 145 race laws in AfriForum’s report. The Institute of Race Relations index it draws on includes nine laws from which racial provisions had already been removed. Even a corrected count would leave the real question unanswered. What does each law do, and to whom? A law that reserved opportunity for white people and a measure intended to widen access after apartheid can both refer to race. Counting each as one tells us almost nothing about the country either was designed to produce. Section 9 of our Constitution provides for measures to advance people disadvantaged by unfair discrimination. Judge those measures by who benefits. Too often the same people collect the rewards while the people in whose name the policy exists remain where they were.

Trump put presidential power behind the story. In February 2025, his executive order presented the Expropriation Act as a means to seize Afrikaner farms and directed US agencies to halt aid to South Africa, subject to exceptions. The Act sets out when nil compensation for land expropriated in the public interest may be just and equitable. It sets no racial test for whose land may be taken. In May, with Ramaphosa sitting in the Oval Office, Trump held up an image and described the dead as white farmers. The bodies were in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A picture from another country was good enough for the story he wanted to tell about ours.

Where the cost falls

Washington’s trade notice cited barriers to US trade and investment, corruption and threats to American security and foreign policy interests. Trump has made access to the American market a means of making Pretoria bend. The lobby spent years inviting Washington into our domestic politics. Here is what that invitation looks like when Washington acts on it. An American official issues a notice in Washington. A South African exporter has to work out what it means for the price of the next shipment.

About US$1.7 billion in South African goods entered the US under AGOA in 2025, roughly one per cent of our global exports. The percentage can look reassuring from Pretoria. It looks different in a citrus town where the crop is already on the trees and an American buyer can move an order elsewhere. A components plant can stay open and still lose the contract that would have kept a second shift going. The loss may never announce itself with a factory closure. It can arrive as fewer hours on a Friday payslip, then fewer hours again the following week.

Pretoria owes those workers more than a recital of what Washington got wrong. Trade Minister Parks Tau met his American counterpart in September. Government says it offered concessions and secured new markets for some fruit exports. It should now tell exporters and workers where the greatest risks lie, what can still be negotiated and what help will reach them in time to keep people on the payroll. A minister can announce a new market in an afternoon. A grower still needs clearance to sell there, a buyer willing to take the crop and a ship that can get it there in time. Those arrangements take months, sometimes years. The prospect of losing AGOA was clear long before the notice arrived.

South Africa has its own work to do. Corruption and erratic administration cost us investment long before an American trade official puts them in a statement. A government serious about redress should confront the deals that enrich insiders while leaving exclusion in place. It should explain the interests it pursues abroad and what it has done to protect workers from the economic risks it can see coming. We should negotiate hard for access to the American market. The people who stand to lose wages have every right to expect that of their government.

The arguments over land, language and redress belong in our courts, our Parliament and among the people who live with the results. AfriForum and Solidarity took those arguments to a foreign president and asked him to make them harder for South Africa to resist. They were willing to put the country’s relationship with a major trading partner in play. Now they owe an account to the worker who may come home with a thinner pay packet and still has the same rent to pay. That worker never put a livelihood on the table. The right-wing lobby did.