Marco Rubio's sanctions against South Africans pursuing apartheid restitution signal a dangerous racial veto - IOL

As tensions rise in the discourse surrounding restitution for apartheid crimes, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ignited a fierce debate.

On the evening of 15 September 2026, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State of the United States of America, announced on X that South Africans who pursue restitution for the crimes of apartheid will be treated as people who "have no place in the United States."

He wrapped the announcement in Donald Trump's language: that our people are being failed by a government "destroying its economy through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance against the Afrikaner minority."

I read that sentence as a South African who sat in the cells of the apartheid state for refusing to accept white supremacy as the natural order of this country. I read it as a Member of Parliament who still deals with the wreckage apartheid left in our institutions, and in a society whose land and wealth were organised as a racial fortress. And I read it as a citizen who will not allow Kallie Kriel, Ernst Roets, AfriForum, Solidarity and Lex Libertas to launder their project through the United States State Department.

Let us be precise. Under Section 212(a)(3)(C) of the United States Immigration and Nationality Act, Washington will now treat as inadmissible those it deems responsible for, or complicit in, laws or policies that enable "uncompensated land seizures," "race-based discrimination," or the "incitement of imminent violence" against minority groups in South Africa.

Family members, we are told, may also be covered. In plain language: if you legislate land reform, implement transformation, or refuse to treat the racial order inherited from apartheid as sacred, you may be barred from the United States, and your family with you. That is not diplomacy. That is a racial veto dressed as immigration policy.

I have watched AfriForum and Solidarity, and I have watched Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roets, travel the circuit of American conservatism with a story so false that only an audience hungry for a white-victim mythology could swallow it. Their story is that the central injustice in South Africa is not the dispossession of the African majority, but the discomfort of those who inherited the proceeds of that dispossession. Farm murders, which are real crimes and must be fought as crimes, are inflated into a unique racial genocide. A liberation song born in the struggle against a system that classified, robbed, jailed and killed people by race is presented as a government programme of extermination. Land reform is called confiscation. Employment equity is called racism. The entire project of undoing apartheid is recast as a new apartheid against whites.

I believe this is a lie, and a lie with a purpose: to recruit a foreign power to freeze the property relations of 1994, and if possible to roll them back; to persuade the world that justice for the Black majority is persecution of the white minority; to make restitution itself the crime.

Lex Libertas, the vehicle through which Ernst Roets now operates after years at the centre of AfriForum and the Solidarity Movement, intends to plant three thousand white crosses on the National Mall in Washington on 26 September 2026, in partnership with American right-wing formations. They will hold a conference. They will hand over a petition. They will speak of "self-governance."

In my view, this spectacle is not a memorial in any honest sense. It is a lobbyist's installation, designed to tell Americans that whites in South Africa are being hunted and that the correct response is to punish those who pursue redress. When a Secretary of State then announces visa restrictions against the people engaged in that redress, the line from that narrative to the sanction is no longer theoretical. It is operational.

I do not use the word treason lightly. As I understand it, treason is not only the taking up of arms against the Republic. It can also be the act of going to a foreign government, feeding it a fabricated account of your own country, and inviting that government to apply coercive measures against your fellow citizens for carrying out the historical task of addressing the crimes of the past. It is my view that AfriForum, Solidarity, Kallie Kriel and Ernst Roets have done exactly that, that they have taken an internal political dispute about the pace and content of transformation and internationalised it as a plea for American punishment of South Africans. They found their audience in Trump's MAGA project. Rubio has given them their prize.

I believe these individuals' conduct should be investigated as treason, and I say this as a public representative, not as a man trading in slogans. The National Prosecuting Authority and the intelligence services of this Republic cannot treat as a tourist curiosity an organised effort to procure foreign sanctions against South Africans engaged in restitution. In my assessment, unpatriotic and vicious lies, sold abroad with the intention of bringing the power of the United States down upon the majority's claim to land and dignity, are not merely a difference of opinion. They are an attack on the sovereignty of the Republic, and those responsible, Kallie Kriel, Ernst Roets, the leadership of AfriForum and Solidarity, and those who have built Lex Libertas as an offshore extension of the same movement, ought to face investigation and, if the evidence supports it, prosecution.

This fight is not abstract to me. I am an Afrikaans-speaking South African. Afrikaans is the language of my childhood, of family conversation, of the literature that formed me, and of the intimate spaces in which I still think and feel. I have never accepted, and I will never accept, that this language must be surrendered to AfriForum, to Solidarity, or to those who have weaponised "Afrikaner" as a project of racial exclusivity and inherited privilege. They do not speak for Afrikaans. They speak for a politics that wants the future to resemble the past: a South Africa in which the children of those who owned the land under apartheid continue to own it, and in which any African claim on that land can be denounced in Washington as racism. That is not culture. That is the preservation of a caste.

When Rubio writes of "race-based discriminatory policies against Afrikaners," he is describing the still inadequate instruments with which a democratic state has tried to loosen a racial monopoly. He is describing expropriation legislation that, even in its present timid form, allows nil compensation only in narrowly defined circumstances. He is describing employment measures that exist because the labour market was designed as a machine for white advancement and Black exclusion. He is describing political speech that names the enemy that named us first: white supremacy. To take that record and call it the persecution of a minority is, in my view, to stand with Verwoerd against history, while pretending to stand with human rights.

Trump and Rubio are not confused. They are choosing a side. MAGA has constructed an international politics in which any challenge to white property and white veto is framed as civilisational decline. South Africa is useful to them because our majority is Black and our unfinished revolution is visible. That is why the alliance between our local right wing and the American right wing is not accidental. It is, I believe, an unholy alliance between those who want to perpetuate apartheid, and if possible build a new apartheid under the slogans of "minority rights" and "self-governance", and those in the United States who have made whiteness a foreign-policy interest. The three thousand crosses on the Mall are the sacrament of that alliance. Rubio's visa list is its first administrative fruit.

I will not join the queue of South Africans who respond to this insult with a begging letter to Washington. We do not need a visa to the United States in order to be a people. We need land, industries, and a state that stops outsourcing its spine. The ANC government's fear of capital and of being called racist for naming racism created the vacuum in which AfriForum and Solidarity could internationalise their campaign. That failure must be said. But the remedy is not to retreat from restitution so that Marco Rubio will smile. The remedy is to accelerate justice, to tell the truth about who owns what and how they came to own it, and to treat those who invite foreign punishment of that justice as the enemies of the Republic they have chosen to be.

The Economic Freedom Fighters will not tolerate this meddling. I will not tolerate it. I did not survive the apartheid police state in order to watch a later generation of organised white privilege phone the American empire and ask it to discipline the majority. Restitution for the crimes of apartheid is not optional, and it is not a "racial grievance." It is the least that a stolen country owes the people from whom it was stolen.

Investigate the authors of this campaign for the treason I believe they have committed. Reject Rubio's announcement as the racist instrument that it is. Proceed, without apology, with the return of the land. History will not ask whether we were polite to MAGA. History will ask whether we finished the work.

* Ambassador Carl Niehaus is an EFF Member of Parliament.