In January 2026, South Africa’s Ad Hoc Committee on Media Interference heard devastating testimony from former police general Khomotso Phahlane, who laid bare how media platforms were used in coordinated campaigns to destroy reputations, assign guilt in advance, and deny public figures any route to redemption. His words gave voice to an experience many of us have lived — though establishment media has worked hard to discredit, mock, or erase it.

In response to the political moment created by these hearings, I made the decision to share a body of research and writing I have been developing around media power, donor influence, and reputational warfare. This work forms part of my ongoing advocacy and contributes to a book chapter that will be published soon. The diagram I released was one part of a broader intellectual and political intervention confronting how power circulates through media ecosystems and civil society networks under the banner of liberal democracy.

Soon after the diagram went viral, delegitimisation tactics began.

The Tactic of Delegitimisation

Delegitimisation has long served as a tool for protecting power without exposing it to real challenge. It operates by discrediting the speaker, rather than taking on the argument. The aim is to remove context, cast doubt on legitimacy, and strip political work of its impact.

Proxy confrontation is one of the most common methods. Institutions send out figures with surface affiliations to perform the dismissal. These proxies serve to insulate the establishment while offering a performance of internal dissent. The institution stays silent, while the proxy closes the debate on its behalf.

No evidence is required. A vague claim of “inaccuracy” circulates. The original critique is buried under implication and innuendo. The speaker becomes unmentionable. The work remains unaddressed but discredited through association.

This is the function of delegitimisation: preserve the status quo by removing the disruptor without engagement. It shapes who may speak, who is silenced, and which ideas are allowed to gain traction.

The Proxy Attack

Just as SANEF once positioned Hopewell Radebe to publicly defend their elitism and dismiss my critique, this time it was Zwelinzima Vavi who stepped forward. A Black man with union credentials and familiarity with Marxist rhetoric was sent to attack my work. He attributed to it a comment it never made and dismissed the entire intervention on that basis.

The objective was to sever the diagram from its context, shift attention to an unrelated comment, and destroy its impact. This made it possible for liberal media and civil society actors to distance themselves without ever confronting the actual content.

This kind of deployment is calculated. A figure with struggle history is used to absorb and deflect critique. Once they speak, the matter is considered closed.

Vavi’s public history includes alignment with formations that marched against President Zuma and worked alongside donor-aligned civil society organisations. His criticism of my work relied on the rhetoric of Marxism while defending liberal institutional terrain. This tension reveals the function his response was intended to serve.

What follows is my direct reply.

This image is being circulated to make a very specific political claim:

“These are the NGOs operating in SA and their funders… no shock, it’s Soros and the CIA.”

That conclusion is politically lazy and analytically wrong, even though the diagram itself contains partial truths.… pic.twitter.com/5rihHFUaHG

— Zwelinzima Vavi (@Zwelinzima1) January 18, 2026

An Open Letter to Zwelinzima Vavi

Zwelinzima Vavi,

I am writing this as a public letter because your response to my diagram displaced it from its political moment and then judged it as though it had emerged in abstraction. It did not. I produced and circulated that diagram in the wake of Khomotso Phahlane’s testimony, in which he described how media platforms were used in coordinated ways to destroy reputations, fix guilt in advance, and deny people any real opportunity to answer for themselves. That testimony gave institutional form to an experience that many have lived through for years. The diagram was an attempt to locate that experience within its material and political conditions.

I did not write “CIA” on the diagram. I did not need to. The person who made that comment understands something you chose not to engage, namely that the National Endowment for Democracy was established as the soft, civilian-facing arm of US intelligence strategy. This is documented, including in the language of its founders. NED exists to shape political environments overtly through funding, training, and the allocation of legitimacy. It does not require covert instruction. It operates by embedding assumptions into institutions that then reproduce those assumptions as neutral or democratic common sense.

The diagram did not accuse anyone of being an agent. It did not allege secret commands. It mapped funding pathways and institutional proximity between NGOs and media organisations operating within the same moral and ideological space. The fact that so much energy was expended on deflecting attention to a third-party social media comment, rather than engaging what the diagram actually shows, is itself revealing.

You accused me of abandoning Marxism and sliding into guilt-by-association politics. You then presented yourself as the sober Marxist voice, defending civil society, invoking the courts, and warning against excess. In doing so, you reached immediately for liberal reflexes and presented them as analytical seriousness. That move needs to be confronted directly.

You state that Marxism asks which class interests are served, what material work is being done, who benefits in practice rather than on paper, and what contradictions exist inside institutions. I agree. Those questions are precisely why the diagram exists. What you have done instead is answer those questions with a moral defence rather than a material analysis.

You argue that many NGOs have done objectively progressive work. You list landmark socio-economic rights cases, exposure of corruption, defence of vulnerable communities, and expansion of access to services. None of that is denied. None of it is dismissed. To suggest otherwise is to misrepresent the argument entirely.

The question is how a professionalised, donor-dependent NGO sector now functions within a liberal capitalist order in which mass organisation has been displaced into courts, media platforms, expert advocacy, and reputational governance. Marxism does not ask whether an institution once produced progressive outcomes. It asks what role that institution now plays in stabilising or unsettling existing power relations.

Institutions can produce progressive victories and still function as buffers against deeper transformation. Litigation can secure rights while simultaneously relocating struggle away from organised people. Advocacy can expose abuse while narrowing politics into technocratic management. These are contradictions. Marxist analysis requires naming them. Institutions cannot be shielded behind their past achievements.

The same applies to media.

When media organisations operate through clustered reporting, repetitive moral framing, and the collapse of allegation into verdict, they exercise disciplinary power. When civil society actors validate those framings, or remain silent when their allies are doing the damage, they become part of a closed circuit of legitimacy production. This is a description of how power now operates.

You invoke the courts to defend NGOs and civil society, suggesting that legal process provides balance and protection. What you fail to address is that media delegitimisation precedes law and structures the terrain on which courts later act. Once public legitimacy has been withdrawn, no court ruling restores it. Legal victories do not undo reputational destruction. Courts adjudicate disputes. They do not reverse social death. To defend NGOs by pointing to courts is beside the point.

Your attempt to counter this analysis by invoking the Soviet Union is historically confused. The Soviet Union funded liberation movements. It supported armed struggle, political education, and anti-colonial resistance. It did not fund NGOs embedded in capitalist democracies to manage dissent, regulate media ethics, or professionalise politics. To conflate liberation support with contemporary Western NGO and media funding is analytically sloppy and politically misleading.

Today, South African NGOs and media institutions are funded by Western donor states, international foundations, development agencies, and global technology corporations. Organisations such as South African National Editors’ Forum openly declare funding linked to NED. Bodies like Media Monitoring Africa receive funding from Google, a global monopoly with direct interests in content moderation and narrative control. These facts do not invalidate their work. They locate it politically.

Marxism does not ask us to ignore these locations because some good outcomes were achieved. It asks us to analyse what those locations now do, who they serve, and which forms of politics they reward or marginalise.

Your response treats the diagram as an attack on struggle itself. The diagram visualises how power circulates through funding, media, and civil society in the present conjuncture. It raises questions about why certain actors are protected, why others are destroyed, and why reputational discipline has replaced organised political contestation.

You speak as a unionist, but your argument no longer speaks from the terrain of organised workers. It speaks from within a civil society–media ecosystem that places faith in institutions, courts, and professional intermediaries, while treating popular critique as a threat. That is a liberal position.

I did not produce the diagram to insult struggles or erase histories. I produced it to make visible a system that depends on remaining unnamed. The anxiety it provoked, and the way it has been deflected, confirm how necessary that naming has become.

* 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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