Does the Brenthurst Foundation's funding of Rivonia Circle unravel a broader scheme behind the 2024 elections?
In my last article I revealed that the Brenthurst Foundation is apparently, according to a well-informed and reliable source, the main funder of Rivonia Circle and the seed funder of RiseMzansi. Both these organisations were founded by corporate spokesperson Songezo Zibi. That fatally undermines much of the rhetoric and supposedly progressive, even ‘left-wing radical’, political positioning of both organisations. Even more important than that, though, is what this can tell us about a broader and more ambitious strategy to determine the outcome of the 2024 elections and the subsequent political and societal trajectory of South Africa.
To start, consider this very strange fact: one of the most senior South African members of the Brenthurst Foundation’s advisory board is senior ANC leader and former national president Kgalema Motlanthe. Motlanthe was appointed by Cyril Ramaphosa, and of course the ANC’s executive structures, as the head of the ANC’s election committee. This is especially remarkable because back in 2017 Motlanthe argued that to be able to reform itself the ANC needed to lose an election. Among Motlanthe’s board members are an aspirant UK prime minister (Rory Stewart) who has been credibly alleged to have worked for the British foreign intelligence agency (MI6) and various ‘former’ high ranking officers from the US military.
So the facts suggest that we have the head of the election committee for the incumbent liberation party (ANC) advising an organisation that apparently covertly bankrolled an aspirant opposition president’s civil society platform (Rivonia Circle) and his political party (RiseMzansi) using funds from the wealthiest family in the country (the Oppenheimers). And this was presumably supported by advisory board members who previously worked for foreign governments, foreign militaries and foreign intelligence agencies. And it comes at a time when the ANC is at serious risk of losing its electoral majority.
To this one could add that Motlanthe has been linked to apartheid ‘nepo(tism) baby’ Rob Hersov, who I have written about before (here and here). The Motlanthe Foundation has been holding an annual Drakensberg conference to which a range of individuals involved in efforts to remove the ANC have been invited. Zibi has been one of the keynote speakers at that conference. And the funders of the Foundation, as well as these lavish conferences, are not fully known.
Another individual from the ANC playing this kind of role is Mcebisi Jonas. Jonas is also on the Brenthurst board, has appeared at Motlanthe’s Drakensberg Conferences espousing similar rhetoric to Zibi and co-edited a book for the Brenthurst Foundation on ‘better choices’ for South Africa. He appears to have been rewarded for his efforts in a number of ways, including lucrative corporate board appointments.
In one of my earlier paywalled posts (here and here) I argued that the two key factions in the ANC both want the party to get less than 50% in order to use the resultant leverage to get rid of their opponents. Ramaphosa would use it to get rid of individuals associated with State Capture along with others opposed to the interests he is serving, while the faction aligned with those individuals and seemingly coalescing around Paul Mashatile would get rid of Ramaphosa and his allies. In each case, one can provide more generous and less generous interpretations of these factions’ motives.
Let us assume for argument’s sake that the motive of Ramaphosa and Motlanthe in trying to lose the election and participate in manufacturing a coalition partner like RiseMzansi is really to counter the negative elements of the ANC and move the country in a better direction. Even if their motives were so pure, the people they are working with are unlikely to be similarly motivated. Neither the Oppenheimer Family nor proxies of foreign militaries and intelligence agencies are likely to have the broad public interest of South Africans as their highest priority. The result could be that this supposedly clever scheme fatally undermines South Africa’s sovereignty by facilitating the rise of a Manchurian candidate or the political party equivalent. To add to the red flags: RiseMzansi’s head of policy was previously closely associated with a key figure in State Capture and now works for the Tony Blair Foundation.
A less generous interpretation is that Ramaphosa and Motlanthe are knowingly undermining the country’s democracy and sovereignty in order to serve powerful local and foreign interests. This would, for instance, be consistent with long-standing - but never substantiated - claims that Ramaphosa was recruited by covert agencies during apartheid. One piece of evidence that supports this pessimistic perspectives is that Ramaphosa has decapitated the State Security Agency in the year leading up to the elections – effectively leaving the country defenceless against foreign interference. Furthermore, this does not appear to have been mere inaction or incompetence since Ramaphosa went out of his way to provide rhetorical cover for these actions: he made a widely-reported, controversial statement about the risk of foreign interference in the elections, which was duly attacked by a range of commentators, while his actual actions were ensuring that South Africa’s intelligence agencies would not be able to counter such interference. Ramaphosa has also overseen the deliberate underfunding of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), thereby making ‘voter education’ and information campaigns, as well as election monitoring, reliant on supposed civil society organisations…such as Rivonia Circle.
There is further evidence to support this theory, in the form of an organisation registered in 2013 under the name CitizensZA. According to the companies register the directors are: Songezo Zibi, James Motlatsi, Richard Menell, Bobby Godsell and Adrian Enthoven. Motlatsi is known to be one of Ramaphosa’s closest confidantes. Godsell and Ramaphosa are also very close. Menell, as I have already discussed, is linked to Rob Hersov, and has also been quietly funding various initiatives aimed at removing the ANC’s majority. The White House Chief of Staff is Menell’s brother-in-law. Enthoven is another behind-the-scenes operator, but first appeared in my analysis when I discovered he has been funding another supposedly radical organisation: the Institute for Economic Justice (IEJ). That can explain IEJ’s silence about social grant payment point closures before the election, which I have written about here and here.
So: Kgalema Motlanthe sits on the advisory board of an organisation covertly bankrolling Zibi. Meanwhile Zibi is a director of a paper organisation alongside two of Ramaphosa’s close confidantes. One of the directors is bankrolling a supposed ‘economic justice’ non-profit that has stayed completely silent on social grant payment point closures that will favour opposition parties, while the other is co-funding ‘former’ opposition politicians involved in astroturfing ‘independent election observer missions’. And those are only some of the links one could make.
All of this points to a wide-ranging strategy – some might call it a conspiracy – to manipulate the outcomes of the 2024 elections, the aftermath and the political trajectory of the country. How South Africans interpret this may vary, but what is clear is that the citizens of a democracy deserve to know about this kind of scheming. Especially before they go to the polls.
In my next piece I will write about the very serious implications of the covert funding of Rivonia Circle and RiseMzansi for political party funding laws and regulations in South Africa, with special attention to the role of ‘civil society organisations’, the media and the judiciary in covering up or overlooking these threats. I will then also write about how South Africans are being fed very restricted information by conflicted and covertly funded civil society organisations with assistance from partisan media outlets.