Cyril Must Cut Out Cancer

A radical cabal already dominates SA's foreign affairs department. This week, the department – once studiously aloof from the ruling party's ideological feuds – showed it, too, has been drawn into the fray.

- William Saunderson-Meyer

During an official visit to Tehran, the country's top general pledged political and military solidarity with Iran against the US and Israel.

It is the latest move in a quiet, but fierce struggle inside the ANC between a dwindling band of what passes for moderates and an emboldened bloc of extremists, many with hard-line Islamist sympathies. The former cling to the fiction of a non-aligned SA. The latter see the present global disorder as their moment to cast the country as a heroic standard-bearer of the global south, leading the fight against "Western imperialism" and "US hegemony".

General Rudzani Maphwanya, chief of the SA National Defence Force (SANDF), met in Tehran an array of Iran's top military leadership in a calculated affront to Washington. The departments of international relations and cooperation (Dirco) and defence are now scrambling to disclaim his anti-US rhetoric, even as he publicly committed South Africa to joint military ventures with a pariah state. Such denials should be taken with a generous pinch of salt.