Ramaphosa Uses ANC Birthday Bash to Launch Harshest Attack Yet on the USA

Speaking in a half empty stadium in South Africa’s rural North West province, Ramaphosa reaffirmed the ANC’s commitment to the values of the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), declaring that the party would pursue them “even under the most challenging conditions”.

The NDR is the Marxist inspired ideological program adopted by the ANC whilst in Soviet exile. It seeks to allow the party to assume the levers of power in society as a step towards socialism. That program was dealt a serious setback after the ANC lost its national majority in 2024 elections.

In veiled language clearly directed at the United States (US) and its allies, Ramaphosa accused the US of mounting increasingly strident attacks against the rule of law and the rules based international order.

Ramaphosa said these attacks were aimed to “delegitimise any government that aims to address inequality”. Instead, he argued, they sought to “undermine the existing rules based order in the world” and “return human civilisation to an era of might where might is right”, and to an era “of privilege and an era of subjugation” where “imperialism becomes the order of the day for mighty and strong nations”.

The speech marked a significant escalation in Ramaphosa’s rhetoric against the US at odds with poll data showing that a strong majority of South Africans wish South Africa’s politicians to pursue improved relations with the US.

While the ANC has long criticised the US and the West in ideological terms, the speech amounted to a direct moral indictment of Washington’s global role, portraying it as an illegitimate and destabilising force seeking domination rather than cooperation. Delivered under ANC banners celebrating the party’s revolutionary heritage, the address reinforced the movement’s positioning against the US at a moment of already strained bilateral relations.

The setting of the speech underlined a powerful contrast. As Ramaphosa accused the world’s largest economy of driving humanity backwards, he did so before a sparse crowd in one of South Africa’s poorest provinces, in a country desperate for growth, investment, and trade access. In that, the speech illustrated how far his party and government is willing to push confrontation with the US, even as the economic costs of such rhetoric are borne at home.

The timing of the remarks was significant too.

The speech came shortly after the South African government tore into the US over the arrest of Venezuelan dictator and drug dealer Nicolas Maduro, in language that accused Washington of aggression and coercion. They also land on the eve of naval exercises in South African waters involving the South African military working alongside its Chinese and Iranian counterparts, a move seen internationally as a deliberate signal about Pretoria’s strategic alignments and values.