After its decision to remain non-aligned in the war between Russia and Ukraine, South Africa came under intense and at times frenzied pressure from the United States, including via its white-run local media and NGO proxies in South Africa.
That pressure escalated, tremendously, when South Africa had the temerity to charge Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Its membership and influence in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) has fuelled the fire of Western hostility.
This week that pressure will be ratcheted up several notches as a major civil society conference organized and funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) will be held in Johannesburg from 20 to 22 November.
Dubbed the 12th Global Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy, the conference aims to bring influential South African NGOs and personalities into the orbit of the NED and to present the US as a democratic force holding the line against authoritarian rivals.
The history of the NED’s support for coups against elected governments is well known in South Africa, where former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide found sanctuary after he was deposed by a US backed coup in 2004.
Opposition from trade unions and the Left
There has been stiff opposition to the NED conference led by the two major trade union federations, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) and the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu).
Both federations have come out very strongly against the conference calling for a boycott. Individual unions, such as the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (Sactwu) have taken similar positions, as have leading figures in the South African left such as former guerilla leader Ronnie Kasrils.
Palestine solidarity organizations have taken a similar position.
As a result of this pressure several of the NGOs initially scheduled to attend the NED conference have pulled out.
The growing pressure from the US to whip South Africa into line on geopolitical questions has mostly been channelled through local Western aligned media and NGO projects.
In March 2024, just before the watershed South African elections the following month, The Brenthurst Foundation, co-hosting with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the National Endowment for Democracy-funded World Liberty Congress, brought together over fifty political and civil society leaders.
Among them were figures like Viktor Yushchenko, former President of Ukraine and leader of the Orange Revolution, and Leopoldo López, a US-educated scion of the Venezuelan political elite who specializes in moving cryptocurrency to support political causes friendly to the US regime.
The gathering was less about promoting democracy and more about consolidating influence. Held in the part of the South African parliamentary precinct that wasn’t burned to a crisp in an arson attack in January 2022, it aimed to set fire to South Africa’s aspirations for a multipolar world.
In 2023, the same group had gathered in Gdańsk, ostensibly to combat the rise of authoritarianism. Their true agenda was far more calculated: to strategize the reshaping of political landscapes in key regions, with a keen eye on South Africa.
In 2002, The Brenthurst Foundation inaugurated the first of many annual events called “The Tswalu Dialogues”. These were multi-day retreats, with leaders of governments and US and Nato aligned think tanks and personnel.
The Brenthurst Foundation is an alliance between white South African capital in the form of the Oppenheimer family and Western interests, with strong ties to Nato and the US and UK military.
General Richard Myers, a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, serves on its Advisory Board. Its director, Greg Mills, is a Senior Associate Fellow and Advisory Board Member of the Royal United Services Institute, the world’s oldest military think tank.
Mills was also a special advisor to the Nato Commander of the Ninth International Security Assistance Force David Richards as they stomped their way through an illegal invasion of Afghanistan.
Mills is also ‘editor at large’ at the Daily Maverick, the white dominated and stridently Western-aligned online publication.
Emphasis on the Ukraine Crisis
A notable aspect of both the Brenthurst and NED conferences is their concerted emphasis on the Ukraine crisis. The gatherings have centered discussions on supporting Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, framing it as a pivotal struggle between democracy and authoritarianism.
The presentation of the situation in Ukraine as the great moral issue of our time has not been matched by any concern for the situation in Gaza. The NED conference, perhaps in response to rising pressure, has given a 15-minute slot to discuss Palestine in its three-day program, without noting who will speak.
The local backdrop to the NED conference that will run this week is a South Africa reeling from a seismic political shift. The once-dominant African National Congress (ANC) fell to an unprecedented 40% in the polls in May, necessitating a government of national unity.
Having failed to deliver meaningful change while austerity, inflation and inequality bite, voters punished the ANC, who then chose to forge a bond with an unlikely political partner.
This coalition, essentially a marriage of convenience between the liberal faction within the ANC and the Democratic Alliance (DA), represents a significant realignment.
The white dominated and often hysterical pro-West DA, known for its pro-business, neoliberal stance, now holds considerable influence in shaping the nation’s policy trajectory.
Those who wish South Africa to fall into line behind the West sense a moment of opportunity.
A local white run online media project recently reported, gleefully, that white South African oligarch, Johann Rupert, met with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and organized an ad-hoc call with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa.
Following the standard playbook, a reliably pro-Western media has been established in South Africa to amplify and support the work of organizations like the Brenthurst Foundation and the NED. There is an ecosystem of white run media projects openly aligned to Western interests.
The most influential is the Daily Maverick, an online publication that is a reliable and strident stenographer of Western interests.
Drawing parallels, we can look to historical examples like La Prensa, a Nicaraguan newspaper.
During the 1980s, La Prensa was widely regarded as a mouthpiece for U.S. interests amid the Sandinista revolution and played a significant role in disseminating narratives that opposed the Sandinista government, aligning with U.S. efforts to influence Nicaraguan politics.
The NED’s Role in Influencing Media
Professor of Sociology at the University of California and author William I. Robinson outlines the infocomplex that captured one of Nicaragua’s foremost publications, “La Prensa” and the key role played by the NED in putting the imperial thumb on the democratic scale in that country.
“Despite the emphasis on externally based propaganda, the CIA, the USIA (United States Information Agency), and the NED maintained a foothold in the internal opposition media outlets throughout the 1980s, the most important of these being La Prensa.
Given its prominence for the United States as a leading symbol of the anti-Sandinista campaign, that La Prensa’s publisher went on to become the presidential candidate for the UNO coalition should come as no surprise.
The United States had to generate an image of La Prensa as a struggling ‘independent’ news outlet defending freedom and democracy in the face of Sandinista repression.”
One NED document exclaimed “the history of La Prensa is one of struggle, courage and, at times, tragedy, parallel to that endured by the country and the people of Nicaragua. While La Prensa is by no means the sole key to a political opening in Nicaragua, it is probably true that without La Prensa a meaningful political opening cannot occur.”
Of course, there was nothing ‘independent’ about La Prensa. It was funded by the United States and functioned as an important outlet inside Nicaragua for the U.S. war and as an official organ of the internal opposition.
At an NED board meeting in that year Gershman called the “victory of the democratic opposition in Nicaragua… a tremendous victory for the Endowment as well.”
The NED continues to fund right-wing media in Nicaragua today.
Similarly, the Daily Maverick’s coverage of geopolitical affairs is dominated by individuals associated with the Brenthurst Foundation and other Western-aligned entities, most notably the Director of the Brenthurst Foundation, Greg Mills.
Its editorial line is relentlessly pro-West and its aggressively pro-West editor, Branko Brkic, not only attended the Gdansk conference as a delegate but signed on to its declaration. He was also a delegate at the Cape Town conference Brkic and will also be a speaker at the NED conference.
Creating liberal consensus and unsubstantiated narratives
The Daily Maverick has often gone beyond expressing pro-West opinion and degenerated into trading in geopolitical conspiracies. It convinced a large swathe of opinion that South Africa was selling arms to Russia, based on the uncritical reception of an unevidenced and now debunked allegation by the US Ambassador to South Africa Reuben E. Brigety II.
It gave space to people who alleged, again without any evidence, that South Africa was bribed by Iran to take Israel to the International Court of Justice. It also claimed, once again without providing any evidence,
that a now defunct and largely black edited rival left leaning publication, New Fame, was a propaganda operation for Russia and China.
It seems clear that the first two conspiracy theories were ‘whispered’ by US officials of some kind. The conspiracy theory about New Frame was derived from an article in New Lines, a US government funded magazine in Washington with many former intelligence people working at the institute that puts the magazine out.
Unsurprisingly, as opposition to the NED conference escalated, it was the Daily Maverick that came out to launder the NED’s history and minimize its role as an arm of the US government.
A recent piece in the Daily Maverick twice dismissed Saftu General Secretary Zwelinzima Vavi’s objections to the NED’s conference as a “screed” in the first four paragraphs, minimizing real concerns but turning the volume up on the angry black man trope.
When the writer, Kevin Bloom, asked for comment from the NED, they responded with a blanket reassurance, which the writer took as the end of any need for debate.
Bloom previously published a now wholly discredited story about a grand cabal of ANC politicians Africa forming four crime cartels that looted South African energy state owned enterprise Eskom.
Other publications declined to publish based on unevidenced ‘intelligence’ produced and provided by a former apartheid operative.
While the Daily Maverick sneered at Vavi and the growing left opposition to the NED conference, it simply ignored the wealth of information about the well-documented role of the NED in US-backed regime change operations, information that has been widely shared in trade unions and other left spaces in South Africa in the lead up to the conference, information that Bloom and the Daily Maverick must have seen.
The NED as a regime change operation
This includes the fact that Carl Gershman, the president of NED from 1983 to 2021 said that “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA.
We saw that in the 60’s, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.” Allen Weinstein, the co- founder of the NED, said “A lot of what we [the NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The NED is often referred to as ‘a second CIA’.
Many examples of the NED’s role in US-backed regime change and other operations have also been shared. Some of the examples given have included:
Bolivia: Support to opposition groups leading to the ousting of President Evo Morales, who had nationalized key industries to benefit the indigenous population.
Haiti: Funding opposition groups against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was later ousted under controversial circumstances. As part of the destabilization campaign after his election, funding was channelled to various “civil society groups.“
One such anti-Aristide organization was the Democratic Convergence (CD). Founded just months after Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s election victory in 2000, the NED financed this coalition of 200 political entities seeking to overthrow his government. Led by former Port-au-Prince mayor Evans Paul, the CD included among its members industrialists, bankers, importers, media professionals, and intellectuals.
Nicaragua: Funding civil society groups critical of President Daniel Ortega, contributing to unrest and challenges to his administration.
South Africa: During the transition from apartheid, influencing economic policies toward neoliberalism, potentially limiting radical economic transformation.
The NED also funded “The Continent,” a WhatsApp-based publication via the Mail and Guardian’s Adamela Trust. This grant has since been erased from the NED’s grants awarded page, but it is still available on the internet archive.
Ukraine: Involvement in the Maidan protests, influencing political shifts that heightened tensions with Russia. It was reported that the NED deleted all public records of grants given to Ukrainian programs between 2014 and 2022. An archived webpage showed 334 grants worth $22,394,281 that are now absent from the site, ostensibly to conceal the NED’s involvement in Ukrainian nationalist groups.
Venezuela: Supporting opposition movements against Presidents Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, raising concerns about undermining democratically elected leaders.
None of this made it into Bloom’s article in the Daily Maverick.
The NED conference has provoked the most direct and united opposition against the ongoing attempts to manufacture consent for Western hegemony in South Africa for many years.
However, dissent comes at a price. In the past, people who have challenged the presentation of
the West as a shining city on the hill to which we should all show uncritical loyalty have faced vicious smear campaigns.
The Carrot and Stick of Funding
That is the stick. And then there’s the carrot of funding and partnerships in the desert of funding for NGOs. The NED operates best in an environment where funding is scarce.
These NGOs who will take part in the conference are not necessarily there because they agree with the philosophical undergirding of the imperial project - manifest destiny through the expansion of its military, economic, and cultural influence.
Some are just trying to survive and will take funding and networking opportunities where they can.
Some attendees, like the Rivonia Circle, are natural bedfellows to the NED agenda. The Rivonia Circle is the backroom think tank of the new Oppenheimer-funded liberal political party Rise Mzansi.
It managed to mobilize massive funding and to win outsized media coverage before the election in May but suffered an unqualified electoral failure.
The rationale for the attendance of other NGOs, such as the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, are harder to understand. One wonders what Ahmed Kathrada, a Communist and close comrade of Nelson Mandela, would make of a foundation in his name supporting an event that is supported by the US intelligence and military machine.
It was, after all, the CIA who gave the apartheid government the whereabouts of Nelson Mandela.
We don’t yet know what will happen at the NED conference, on and off the official program. But clear lines have been drawn before it starts, and there has been widespread discussion of the NED and a growing understanding of local collaboration with Western interests.
It seems that the decision to host the NED conference in Johannesburg has backfired.
* Roscoe Palm is a councillor in the City of Cape Town for the GOOD Party.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.