South Africa Is The Most Dangerous Country To Live In If You Are Black, Male and Under 35
Decolonising statistics in South Africa: a hard-hitting analysis of the neoliberal constructing of gender-based violence and the erasure of truths around Black male deaths, poverty and structural inequality.
The Untouchable Humanitarian: Rethinking Imtiaz Sooliman’s Power, Politics and Shadow Networks
By Sipho Singiswa Sipho Singiswa’s article interrogates the power, politics and public mythology surrounding Gift of the Givers. It traces the organisation’s influence across humanitarian diplomacy, media narratives and corporate partnerships. It examines the contradictions between its public image and its entanglement with Western economic interests. And it asks why these tensions remain shielded from national scrutiny. A Crisis That Revealed Too Much The chaotic arrival of the so-called “153 Palestinian refugees” in Johannesburg, marked by confused media reports and the strangely guarded statements of Dr Imtiaz Sooliman, echoed by N’aheem Jeenah of BDS South Africa, opened a window into something far more unsettling than a bureaucratic delay. It revealed a moment in which a private humanitarian organisation appeared to possess more information, influence and operational certainty than the South African state itself. The incident now forces a larger question: does Gift of the Givers operate as an alternative centre of foreign-policy power inside South Africa? In order to answer this, we have to look back at the organisation’s history and the carefully cultivated campaign of ‘sainthood’ that has accompanied it from the beginning. The public narrative around Gift of the Givers has long been shaped by a blend of spiritual branding, moral spectacle and uncritical media adulation, an ecosystem that has elevated Sooliman to near-mythic status while shielding the organisation from the kind of scrutiny routinely applied to other NGOs operating in politically sensitive spaces. Manufactured Saviours South Africa has a strange habit of elevating “national saviours” the moment the state falters. This reflex is born from the trauma of decades of non-delivery. It is a response that begins to feel like mass clarity in the abyss of hopelessness experienced by the poor and the disparagement of native African leadership projected by the upper classes. The result is familiar. In 2022 many callers phoned in to talk radio insisting that Sooliman should be president. Others argued he already governed better than the Cabinet. His image was canonised as the man who arrives with boreholes, blankets and dignity while the state dithers. In a collapsing society, competence is treated as divinity. But sainthood is the most effective camouflage for power, and it is time to ask the questions no one cares to ask. Despite the myth of monk-like austerity, Sooliman lives a distinctly elite lifestyle in Pietermaritzburg, a lifestyle at odds with the image of the ascetic humanitarian. Gift of the Givers, originally founded as Waqful Waqifin, registers itself as a South African humanitarian NGO and operates as a registered NPO under the Public Benefit Organisation framework. Yet its fiscal posture mirrors that of the broader donor-funded NGO sector long captured by global philanthropic interests. The organisation allegedly provides no audited statements or detailed financial disclosures on its public platforms, offering only the claim that it has distributed R6 billion in aid across 47 countries over 32 years. An entity of this scale, influence and geopolitical reach should not be allowed to operate behind such a thin veil of financial murkiness. South Africans do not interrogate this because they are afraid of puncturing the only institution that seems to work. Yet this is exactly why interrogation is required. Gift of the Givers became the de facto parallel state. That does not happen through purity of heart alone. It happens through networks, patronage, geopolitical alliances and ideological positioning. At the centre of it is a founder who claims no political interest, yet moves in unmistakably political ways. The Forgotten Political History It is worth remembering that Sooliman did try to enter formal politics. The Africa Muslim Party, AMP, was a small South African Muslim political formation founded in 1994, with Gulam Sabdia as its founding chairperson and Dr Imtiaz Sooliman as national leader. It entered the first democratic election that year with an ambitious slate of 60 National Assembly candidates and 25 candidates for the Council of Provinces, but failed to win representation. In 1999 the party rebranded as the Africa Moral Party, contested only in the Western Cape, received 9,513 votes and no seats. It later secured limited municipal representation in Cape Town. After the 2006 elections the AMP joined the DA-led multi-party coalition that supported Helen Zille’s mayoral administration, but was expelled in 2007 after councillor Badih Chaaban was implicated in negotiations with the ANC to collapse the coalition. In the 2014 national and provincial elections the AMP aligned itself with Al Jama-ah, again failing to secure seats. This history matters because it shows political ambition is not foreign to him, it is simply repackaged through the moral authority of humanitarianism. The DA’s Golden Technocrat Sooliman’s open courting by the Democratic Alliance, whose leadership suggested he join government, was not dismissed publicly with the force one would expect from someone committed purely to humanitarian neutrality. Instead, he stayed in that ambiguous middle ground, the space preferred by actors who understand the value of future political capital. The DA’s interest was predictable. Sooliman embodies the model the DA venerates, the technocratic humanitarian who takes over state functions without challenging the political economy that caused collapse. For a party allergic to redistribution and obsessed with outsourcing, he is the perfect symbol. The DA could not manufacture legitimacy in township and rural communities, but Sooliman already possessed it. His brand softened their neoliberal edges. His public silence about their policies made him safe. His charisma could be deployed to mask the party’s deeper political project. That is why no one asks what his macro-economic worldview actually is. What governance model does he believe in? What is his stance on public ownership of services? Wealth redistribution? Labour rights? Mining accountability? State regulation? Silence is often treated as virtue, but silence is also strategy. When an individual commands this level of moral authority without offering a transparent political framework, the danger is not corruption, it is unchecked influence. In this video, white miner workers were transported in a luxury bus by Gift of the Givers – to collect their food donations. Humanitarianism often