South Africa’s Ronald Lamola Seeks Africa-Wide Migration Talks as AU Rejects Ghana Agenda Bid

South Africa is pressing for Africa-wide talks on irregular migration after violent anti-immigration protests led many migrants to leave the country, Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola said on Aug. 5, 2026. The initiative has already exposed diplomatic tensions with some African governments, while the African Union has rejected Ghana’s proposal to place South Africa’s migration tensions on the agenda of its next coordination meeting in October.

The proposed talks would address both migration policy and the conditions driving people to move. Lamola said the discussions should examine the causes of irregular migration, including conditions in North Africa. South Africa has not yet announced the talks’ final format, participants or agenda.

A proposal following violent protests

The South African government’s push follows violent protests directed at immigrants. The protests created a related migration crisis in which many migrants left South Africa, although the available reporting does not specify how many people departed.

The episode is centered in Johannesburg but has consequences beyond South Africa’s borders. Migration across Africa connects national decisions to neighboring governments and to countries along routes toward North Africa. The protests and departures have therefore become a diplomatic issue as well as a domestic public-order and migration-policy dispute.

The available account does not establish responsibility for individual acts of violence. It describes the protests as anti-immigration demonstrations and reports that they forced many migrants to leave, without treating the unrest as an officially declared national emergency.

African Union agenda dispute

Ghana sought to put South Africa’s migration tensions on the agenda of the African Union’s next coordination meeting. The AU rejected that proposal. The meeting is scheduled for October 2026.

The rejection means the African Union has not endorsed South Africa’s proposed talks, and the dispute has not been converted into a formal AU agenda item for that meeting. The development illustrates the political sensitivity of migration policy across the continent: South Africa is calling for a broader discussion, while at least one attempt to place the specific tensions before an AU coordination forum has failed.

The African Union has 55 member states, giving any continent-wide process a potentially broad institutional scope. But the packet does not say that all member states support South Africa’s initiative, nor does it identify which governments oppose or favor the proposed talks.

What happens next

The immediate next step is diplomatic rather than procedural: South Africa would need to define how the proposed talks would work and secure participation. No date for those talks has been announced. Their eventual agenda could include the causes of irregular migration, such as the conditions in North Africa identified by Lamola, but that remains a proposal rather than a finalized program.

The October 2026 AU coordination meeting will provide a separate test of whether the issue receives formal regional attention. Based on the approved reporting, Ghana’s proposal to add the tensions to that meeting was rejected. Whether South Africa’s broader initiative gains support outside that agenda process remains unresolved.

For governments dealing with migration and anti-immigrant violence, the stakes are practical: a continental discussion could offer a venue to address causes and diplomatic fallout together. For now, however, South Africa’s initiative remains at the proposal stage, the number of migrants who left is unknown, and the AU has not endorsed it.