I support the project of re-Africanising South Africa. I support what I have described as a Sahel moment: a decisive historical turn away from neoliberal supervision, donor governance, and the restoration of white power through free-market orthodoxies, managerial authority, and civil-society gatekeeping. My political grounding draws on an anti-imperialist tradition rooted in mass organisation and sovereignty. The task of the present period requires halting the rewhitenisation project as it consolidates through the Government of National Unity, the re-emergence of white male executive dominance, the tightening embrace of neoliberal governance, and parallel projects aimed at fragmenting sovereignty and securing Western validation for minority power.

This position explains how I came to enter, unintentionally yet decisively, the growing conflict between the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) and the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU).

I entered this struggle through an intervention into media power rather than through labour structures.

In January 2026, the Ad Hoc Committee on Media Interference produced a political opening of urgency. Testimony from former acting police commissioner, Lt-General Khomotso Phahlane, described how journalists and platforms participated in coordinated campaigns that destroyed public standing, assigned guilt in advance, and foreclosed routes back into legitimacy. The testimony positioned media as an instrument of political interference operating within a wider architecture of power. That moment altered the terrain by giving public form to experiences that many South Africans, including my family, had endured privately and publicly for years.

In response, I released an organogram mapping donor influence, media clustering, and the civil-society legitimacy circuit governing public life under neoliberal democracy. The diagram traced funding pathways, institutional proximity, and narrative convergence. It posed a material political-economic question concerning how power circulates, how consent forms, and how discipline operates in the present political moment. The diagram travelled widely because conditions allowed recognition. It moved beyond media critique into a broader political register.

The first major public response came from Zwelinzima Vavi, secretary general of SAFTU. His critique framed the diagram as guilt-by-association politics and defended NGOs, courts, and liberal civil society through a language borrowing selectively from Marxist vocabulary. I responded because that intervention displaced material analysis in favour of institutional defence. At that stage, the exchange followed a familiar pattern of delegitimisation. The deeper context emerged later.

That night, contact with me came from within the SAFTU coalition. I was informed that Vavi’s intervention followed an internal comment by a member of NUMSA leadership, raising the CIA question in relation to donor-funded civil society. Rather than remaining an internal strategic disagreement, Vavi carried the issue into the social media space, publishing his response on X in his capacity as secretary general. That decision altered the stakes. A diagram intended to interrogate media power intersected with a struggle over the direction of organised labor. My response therefore entered a contest over working-class political strategy in South Africa.

The conflict between NUMSA and SAFTU concerns strategy, power, and survival under imperial pressure. NUMSA, under Irvin Jim, holds a long record of opposition to African National Congress neoliberalism. It challenged GEAR, resisted austerity, rejected labour-market flexibilisation, and broke from COSATU after the ANC abandoned a working-class economic programme. That history is significant because the current move reflects pragmatic consolidation under deteriorating conditions rather than ideological reversal.

At this political moment, NUMSA has issued a call for organisational realignment. The call urges unions and Black political formations to regroup within a shared political terrain anchored in the African National Congress. It extends to the Economic Freedom Fighters, the uMkhonto weSizwe Party, and smaller African parties formed through fractures within the liberation movement. The aim concerns convergence rather than doctrinal unity. The aim concerns assembling African mass power across organisational lines capable of confronting a neoliberal-imperial order that has reasserted itself through elite consensus and institutional mediation.

South Africa faces intensified Western pressure through financial compliance regimes, donor-driven civil society, and a clustered liberal media bloc aligned with free-market discipline. Under such conditions, fragmentation within labour strengthens external management. NUMSA’s call for regroupment, including renewed alignment with COSATU and political coordination with African parties, functions as an attempt to consolidate Black working-class power at scale.

NUMSA’s repositioning alters the balance of labour politics. Should COSATU align with NUMSA’s call for political and organisational convergence, SAFTU’s influence over working-class political direction diminishes as mass organisational gravity consolidates elsewhere. This shift operates through political weight rather than administrative collapse.

For SAFTU, the present period carries finality. The weakening of its organisational base exposes reliance on NGO alliances, advocacy networks, and donor-adjacent legitimacy. Many SAFTU-aligned organisations continue important social justice work, yet this coexists with structural constraint. A significant number operate within the same donor-funded ecosystem as liberal media institutions, where funding expectations shape strategy, language, and limits of confrontation. Litigation increasingly stands in for mobilisation, while expertise substitutes for mass participation. Institutional mediation expands at the expense of class power, reshaping the terrain on which struggle takes place. Over time, organised labour yields ground to a professionalised civil-society layer that manages dissent within Western parameters rather than confronting power through collective organisation.

Another path remains available. SAFTU affiliates could exit donor dependence and re-enter a liberation movement grounded in mass organisation, anti-imperialism, and African sovereignty. Such a choice reconnects labour to historic political purpose rather than managed institutional relevance.

I did not publish the organogram on behalf of NUMSA. At the time, knowledge of its call to realign remained absent. As events unfolded, including communication from a SAFTU-affiliated organisation, convergence between NUMSA’s strategy and my own political commitments became clear. My commitment centres on African sovereignty, mass organisation, and anti-imperialist struggle. Neoliberalism functions as a contemporary technology of recolonisation. It governs through funding power, media authority, and institutional legitimacy. It produces a Black managerial stratum while restoring white dominance through expertise, neutrality, and free-market discipline. The GNU accelerates this process by normalising elite consensus and marginalising mass politics. NUMSA’s call marks an intervention long overdue.

Re-Africanisation offers the only viable response. It rejects donor rule, dismantles liberal media hegemony, and recentres power in organised people. The Sahel moment demonstrates that decolonisation advances through political realignment, organisational discipline, and analytical clarity.

The alarm against NUMSA’S Pan Africanist call expressed by liberal commentators, including Steven Friedman, reflects the stakes of the present period. Labour consolidation threatens a system reliant on fragmentation, mediation, and buffer zones insulating power from democratic pressure.

Though I entered this conflict unintentionally, engagement continues with full awareness. The position I take follows directly from my politics.

What we at Media for Justice seek, involves removing the buffer zone of donor-funded gatekeeping that shields neoliberal government, white-dominant capital, and Western interference from accountability. That buffer converts power into meritocracy and domination into management, preserving privilege through colonial oversight. Sovereignty, development, egalitarianism, and African agency define the objective. Such a break halts neoliberal regime-change politics carried through media capture, disrupts the Cape Town separatist project, and exposes the Afrikaner refugee and genocide narrative for what it functions as: an invitation to United States political and military interference framed through a manufactured hysterical emergency. It arrests a broader process through which Africans are displaced, marginalised, and slowly purged from the land to which they belong under the cover of market discipline and externally managed democracy projects. The horizon points toward self-determination and productive development without neocolonial supervision. Burkina Faso represents that direction.

Without urgent unity between Black African forces and non-Black progressives committed to anti-imperialism, the space will be entrenched by donor governance, tech giants, and managed democracy. The alternative is another century of neo-neocolonial rule administered through markets, media, and institutional proxies.

* 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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