When NED comes to town

The 'CIA cutout' National Endowment for Democracy is in South Africa to 'promote democracy' but who are the local collaborators?

The National Endowment Democracy (‘NED’) is one of the most important organisations you may never have heard of. Established during the Cold War under the Reagan administration to promote US geopolitical interests under the guise of democracy promotion, it continued its activities after the Cold War officially ended. In effect, it funds and collaborates with ‘civil society’ and media organisations and individuals to manipulate societal dynamics in other countries in the interest of the United States. Such manipulation often extends to contributing to ‘soft coups’ in which democratically elected governments insufficiently aligned to US interests are removed through supposedly democratic processes.

On the 20th and 21st of November the NED will be hosting the 12th Global Assembly of the World Movement for Democracy in Johannesburg. Much to my amusement, a large number of individuals and organisations from ‘civil society’ (in South Africa and abroad) who I have already written about, or was going to write about, as seemingly serving foreign interests are on the lists of speakers. There has been an outcry from some civil society organisations, such as the Media Review Network and SAFTU, and supporters of the Kathrada and Tutu foundations have raised similar concerns to those I list below.¹ Although some criticisms have, in my view, been too focused on the Israel-Palestine issue and understated the relevance to South African democracy itself.

There have also been some other good write-ups, such as this one, but the criticism has not come to the attention of the broader public. Part of my purpose with this article is to contribute to increasing awareness about this issue, but also to make connections to a range of other issues I have already written about and will elaborate on in future. Predictably, the Daily Maverick has attempted to disparage such criticisms. This is entirely unsurprising given that its founder and editor Branko Brkic, a rightwing Eastern European emigre, will be speaking at the event [a fact strangely and, I would suggest, unethically omitted from the article] and that Daily Maverick has dozens of links to similar individuals and organisations. As unsurprising, News24 published an article gushingly regurgitating one of the main speakers’ criticisms of ‘social media manipulation’ while failing to mention that those behind the organisation whose event she is headlining may well be involved in such manipulation.

The NED as a ‘CIA cutout’ organisation

The Chinese government has recently made its assessment of NED very clear:

NED claims to be an NGO that provides support for democracy abroad. In fact, it acts as the US government’s “white gloves” in carrying out subversion, infiltration and sabotage across the world.

Defenders of NED may respond that the Chinese government would necessarily be threatened by an organisation that promotes democracy. Unfortunately for this line of argument, the publicly available evidence - which no doubt is only the tip of an iceberg - supports the view that the NED is a ‘CIA cutout’ organisation. Famously, in a Washington Post interview in 1991, one of the founders of NED stated that:

A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA

In other words, it is an organisation that conducts operations of a kind that overlap with and promote the strategic objectives of US intelligence agencies. Moreover, there is a great deal more confirmatory evidence - as indicated by the Chinese government document that relies entirely on publicly available sources. The reality is that NED’s nature has been well-known for decades. And despite attempts of NED staff to deny the obvious, that is simply not convincing. This means that participants in NED activities and recipients of NED funding cannot claim ignorance: they are wilfully culpable.

South African involvement: the dots keep joining themselves…

Some notable names among the South Africans on the ‘World Movement for Democracy’ agenda are former DA leader Mbali Ntuli, former ANC leader Matthews Phosa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa [who will pop up again in one of my next articles], the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation (and its executive director Neeshan Balton), the Desmond and Leah Tutu Foundation (and its CEO Janet Jobson), the supposed civil society organisation called ‘Defend our Democracy’ (and some of its board members such as Rekgotsofetse Chikane and Balton already mentioned), the deputy minister of finance from the Democratic Alliance (Ashor Sarupen), Daily Maverick editor and founder Brkic already mentioned, and supposed social justice activist, Daily Maverick former section editor and failed politician Mark Heywood. Shockingly, the current president of COSATU - the largest trade union federation in South Africa - Zingiswa Losi is on the speaker list, seemingly confirming the impression that the trade union movement has been captured by undemocratic (local and foreign) interests. (An interesting foreign ‘partner’ is the International Republican Institute: they will pop up in another article sometime in the next year). It would also be very interesting to see the full list of attendees but that is not currently in the public domain.

The reasons behind the involvement of each of these individuals and organisations would be worth unpacking but would take up too much space for one article, so I focus here on only a few additional points.

The involvement of foundations dedicated to the legacies of these struggle heroes raises very serious questions. Is it just that those running these organisations are happy to be proxies for an organisation that substitutes for a foreign intelligence agency, or should we infer that some of those struggle heroes themselves may have been in that category? More on that another time, but suffice to say that I have observed a pattern of such organisations - including recently the Nelson Mandela Foundation - being taken over by a connected collections of individuals who are sympathetic or linked to organisations like NED and associated agendas.

Defend our Democracy has been a notably dubious new CSO that emerged in recent years in South Africa, which almost serves as an umbrella or coordinating body for dubious CSOs engaged in dubious activites. These include meddling in election-related matters, court cases about the electoral system, conducting so-called ‘independent election monitoring’, and trying to control and direct the narrative about State Capture - often funded by local and foreign billionaires such as Michiel Le Roux (via the Millenium Trust), the Oppenheimers (via the Brenthurst Foundation and other proxies) and George Soros (through the Open Society Foundation). Its website does not clearly list its current board members or its funders. Early documentation indicates the involvement of individuals like Discovery founder Adrian Gore and the consistently two-faced Mavuso Msimang - both of whom I will write ‘alternative profiles’ of in due course. Ironically in the current context, clause 7 of Defend Our Democracy’s founding declaration commits to ‘standing up against destabilisation of democracy’. Unfortunately that only seems to apply to one specific subset of destabilisation efforts and excludes foreign destabilisation actors such as the NED.

‘Charity’ should begin at home

Beyond the obvious concerns this raises, there is also a grim irony in NED continuing with ‘democracy promotion’ at a time when many of those associated with it refer to the former and incoming US president as a fascists or as ‘America’s Hitler’. I have indicated previously that some of that rhetoric about Trump is exaggerated, but since these are the same people it is appropriate to hold them to it. NED is under de facto control of the US president, so what exactly is it doing ‘promoting democracy’ in other countries when in its own country a dictatorially-minded proto-fascist has had 50% chance of winning the last 3 elections and won 2 of them.² If NED is really independent, why is it not focusing on the USA? And if it is not independent but is genuinely committed to democracy promotion, why is it not disbanding itself with another Trump administration looming.

The obvious answer, to which all the objective evidence points, is that the NED is not about promoting democracy but about using democracy promotion to interfere in other countries - including sabotaging democracies that do not serve US interests. I previously listed 14 reasons to be concerned that South Africa’s 2024 election results may have been manipulated or rigged, a number of those connect to people and organisations who are participating in the NED conference. One of those was Mbali Ntuli, who led a supposedly ‘independent’ election monitoring initiative but who I noted previously has apparently been funded by the brother-in-law of the White House chief of staff. I subsequently wrote about a 15th reason: the gangster and now-minister Gayton McKenzie ‘predicting’ the election result more than two years in advance. A few weeks ago that gangster met with the outgoing US ambassador, Reuben Brigety, who had previously falsely accused the South African government of smuggling weapons to Russia - they both declared each other ‘great friends’.

There are rarely smoking guns in these matters and it is rarely possible to discern with absolute confidence the degree of complicity of those involved, but the NED conference and its participant list add to a growing body of suggestive evidence that the US government and its proxies continue to be highly influential meddlers in South African democracy.

[Note: I would be happy to publish any responses from any conference participant listed here who would like to justify their attendance or/and participation: responses will be appended to this post]

1. I have only seen these from mailing list discussions and I do not know of any published version

2. With the caveat that I in previous analysis of the 2024 US elections I suggested some caution about the narrative around Trump’s victory and there are still two months left until the presidential inauguration.