This past week exposed a structure that has long shaped South African public life while remaining difficult to name.

This argument is about accountability. Accountability that operates across the full field of power, rather than being selectively imposed. Accountability that reaches beyond individuals and into systems that shape legitimacy, judgement and political consequence. The question is not whether scrutiny is necessary, but who is scrutinised, by whom, and within which power arrangements.

It began with Advocate Muzi Sikhakhane SC publishing The Futility of Commissions of Inquiry and South Africa’s Unfinished Moral Break in Independent Online on January 14, 2026. Sikhakhane’s intervention interrogates South Africa’s dependence on commissions and tribunals as instruments of public accounting. He shows how these processes have become predictable performances, cycling endlessly through testimony and spectacle, while deeper relations of power remain intact.

His argument concerns direction. It concerns how scrutiny is repeatedly focused on Black authority, Black conduct and Black political life, while the broader systems that shape power, legitimacy and influence remain unexamined. The outcome is cumulative. Over time, ethical instability becomes associated with Black governance itself, while structural power presents as neutral, rational and corrective.

On the same day that article was published, Parliament’s Ad Hoc Committee on Matters Relating to the South African Police Service heard testimony from Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Phahlane, former National Commissioner of the South African Police Service. Phahlane appeared before the committee in the context of parliamentary oversight into allegations of political interference, abuse of power, and the use of media and private operatives in internal policing battles.

These two moments did not collide by accident. They emerged simultaneously, as if summoned by historical memory itself. Their convergence produced a rare moment of clarity, creating the conditions for public recognition of how media power and political judgement operate in concert. It sharpened social receptivity to what is usually denied: the mechanics of media collusion as a governing force.

South African media operates inside a wider foreign-funded ecosystem that includes international NGOs, foundations, civil-society organisations, academic centres, litigation vehicles, advocacy projects and training programmes. These entities are financially connected. Funding moves through them. Language, priorities and assumptions repeat across platforms.

Major international donors sustain this ecosystem, including the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, alongside European foundations and democracy-promotion institutes.

South African law permits foreign funding of NGOs and media platforms, subject to tax and governance compliance. At the same time, the Political Party Funding Act prohibits foreign funding of political parties, recognising the danger such funding poses to democratic sovereignty.

This legal distinction draws a boundary around elections. Political power extends beyond elections.

Media platforms and the NGO sector exercise political power. They shape public consent, define legitimacy, select urgency, determine investigative focus and narrow the range of acceptable political thought. They collaborate with political actors, align with institutional processes and intervene in governance outcomes. They operate in the domain of persuasion and belief.

They capture hearts and minds.

When such actors are foreign-funded, the issue is sovereignty. Foreign funding of media and NGOs functions as external influence over the country’s political imagination. It shapes how South Africans understand corruption, reform, resistance, legitimacy and authority.

South African media also carries a long record of reputational destruction aimed at figures who threaten liberal dominance. These are individuals who generate political agency, who articulate alternatives to empire-aligned narratives, and who move people toward autonomous action.

Such figures destabilise narrative control. They interrupt the smooth reproduction of liberal assumptions. They create space for Black Consciousness, African epistemologies and revolutionary thought to circulate outside donor-approved frames.

The response follows a recognisable pattern. Allegations accumulate without resolution. Headlines substitute for evidence. Association becomes guilt. Silence is read as admission. Over time, repetition produces certainty. Reputations collapse. Platforms disappear. Economic life becomes precarious. Political legitimacy is withdrawn.

One could accurately describe this process as a purge of divergent political thinkers, carried out through media authority rather than formal repression. It is a method of maintaining ideological discipline while preserving the appearance of free expression.

Phahlane’s testimony before the Ad Hoc Committee on Matters Relating to the South African Police Service carries significance because it places media activity within a formal parliamentary accountability process. His allegations, made under oath, describe journalists acting in coordination with private operator Paul O’Sullivan as part of a broader campaign to destroy his reputation and remove him from institutional authority. The journalists he named on record included Marianne Thamm, Karima Brown, Abraham Mashego, Barry Bateman and Karyn Maughn.

This carries significance because it situates media power inside a parliamentary accountability process, rather than outside it as a neutral observer.

Within this donor-funded political field, whiteness consolidates authority. It circulates through professional status, philanthropic legitimacy and epistemic privilege. It speaks in the register of neutrality and expertise, while occupying a structurally advantaged position.

Black political traditions encounter this field as constraint. African epistemologies are filtered, managed or treated as suspect when they exceed liberal boundaries. Revolutionary memory is reframed as extremism. Political imagination contracts without censorship.

South Africa has convened commissions on corruption, governance failure and institutional collapse. It has scrutinised Black political life exhaustively.

A decolonial commission would examine whiteness as power, particularly where it operates through donor funding, media authority and civil-society legitimacy.

Such a commission would examine how foreign funding shapes editorial authority and investigative priorities, how NGOs and media align with political actors while claiming independence, how donor ecosystems influence public judgement and legitimacy, and how African epistemologies are constrained within liberal frames.

This inquiry concerns sovereignty and self-determination.

Accountability that excludes donor-funded media and civil-society power remains partial. Accountability that includes them begins to reflect the real distribution of power in contemporary South Africa.

* Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, poet, and uncompromising social justice activist. Founder of Media for Justice and co-owner of handHeld Films, she is recognised for hard-hitting documentaries and incisive opinion pieces that dismantle whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and imperial power.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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