diff --git a/core/ninja.mk b/core/ninja.mk
index c8ae3fc1f5..3004f41a69 100644
--- a/core/ninja.mk
+++ b/core/ninja.mk
@@ -114,7 +114,7 @@ endif
 # proceeding with undefined behavior.
 NINJA_EXTRA_ARGS += -w dupbuild=err
 
-ifdef USE_GOMA
+ifneq ($(filter-out false,$(USE_GOMA)),)
 KATI_MAKEPARALLEL := $(MAKEPARALLEL)
 # Ninja runs remote jobs (i.e., commands which contain gomacc) with
 # this parallelism. Note the parallelism of all other jobs is still