For most South Africans, the debate over their country’s relationship with the United States is not an abstraction. It lands on their ability to find work, build a business, hold onto their homes. That is the message the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) wants Washington to hear, and it has taken the unusual step of writing directly to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to make the case.
The Institute’s plea is a simple one: when weighing changes in American foreign policy towards Pretoria, the US should take care to distinguish between the government of South Africa and the people who live under it. The concern is that measures aimed at pressuring the state, including visa restrictions already in place, may end up hurting ordinary citizens who do not support the very policies that drew Washington’s ire in the first place.
Makone Maja, the IRR’s strategic engagements manager, put it plainly. “The Institute’s plea to the US is that South Africans should not be assumed to hold the same views as their government, nor should policies directed at changing government behaviour inadvertently impose costs on citizens who themselves oppose the policies in question,” she said.
To back that argument, the IRR has shared with the State Department the results of its own polling, published under the title IRR Polling 2026: Race and Race Relations in South Africa. The report points to a wide gap between the political opinions of South Africans and the sentiments of their government, and it documents the extent to which ordinary people have become victims of the very policies that have attracted the US’s visa restrictions. Among those policies are race laws and expropriation without compensation legislation.
The polling numbers tell a striking story. Seventy per cent of respondents said the government should not continue using apartheid-era racial categories to decide who qualifies for business and job opportunities. That view cut across racial lines: 64% of black respondents shared it, along with 85% of coloured respondents, 74% of Indian respondents and 97% of white respondents.
The survey also tested a claim that has travelled far beyond South Africa’s borders. Seventy-two per cent of South Africans rejected the idea that a “white genocide” is occurring in the country, while 19% agreed with it. Even among white respondents, the group that might, in theory, have reason to advance such a claim, half disagreed with it and 37% agreed.
There is more in the findings that cuts against the picture painted by heated political rhetoric. An overwhelming share of South Africans support interracial cooperation as the key to progress: 89% of respondents agreed that people of different races need one another, and that there should be full opportunity for people of all colours. At the same time, 77% agreed that politicians use racism and colonialism to excuse their failures. Taken together, the IRR argues, these results show that racial rhetoric employed by political actors should not automatically be read as a reflection of what the South African population actually thinks.
Meanwhile, the Institute also drew Secretary Rubio’s attention to a quieter, less dramatic threat to property rights: the one million title-deeds backlog. The point being made is that property rights in South Africa are threatened not only by the risk of land seizures, but in other ways too, ways that stem from the government’s own failures to deliver.
Maja’s closing appeal returns to the theme with which the letter opens. “These are some of the reasons why it is important that the United States distinguish between the South African government and the South African people,” she said. “The US has the prerogative to determine its foreign policy in accordance with its interest and values; our request is that South African public opinion be afforded the appropriate weight in that process.”
For the citizens behind those polling numbers, the stakes are concrete. They are the people who live with the consequences of race laws and expropriation legislation, and who, according to the IRR’s findings, largely wish those policies would change. The Institute’s argument to Washington is that their voices deserve to be counted, separately from their government’s, before decisions are made that will shape their futures.
Media contact is Makone Maja, IRR Strategic Engagements Manager, on 079 418 6676 or at [email protected]. Media enquiries can be directed to Michael Morris, IRR Head of Media, on 066 302 1968 or at [email protected].