By Gillian Schutte

A rumour has been moving through the political streets about Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma and her visit to the United States. The insinuation is clear enough: because she participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program, March and March must somehow be read through the grammar of American influence.

Let us unpack that.

IVLP is indeed a United States State Department programme. It is part of the machinery of American public diplomacy. It cultivates relationships, identifies emerging voices, creates networks and folds people into US soft-power circuits. An anti-imperialist needs to pretend otherwise.

But here is where the story becomes dishonest.

The same people waving Jacinta’s US visit around as evidence of contamination seem to have missed the entire memo on the NGO and legal bloc opposing March and March. That bloc is itself saturated with US, European, Canadian and transnational donor money. Its legal infrastructure, policy language, litigation routes, social-cohesion grammar and migration-rights discourse do not float above foreign power. They are funded by it.

This is the part the smear campaign wants hidden.

SERI, the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa, represents Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia, the South African Informal Traders Forum, the Inner City Federation and Abahlali baseMjondolo in litigation against Operation Dudula. SERI publicly states that it is wholly dependent on donor funding. Its funder list includes Alliance for Open Society International, Cameron Schrier Foundation, Ford Foundation, Global Affairs Canada, MISEREOR, Norwegian People’s Aid, Open Society Foundation, Bertha Foundation, ELMA South Africa Foundation, RAITH Foundation, Solidarity Center and Wallace Global Fund.

Read that list again.

Ford. Open Society. Global Affairs Canada. MISEREOR. Norwegian People’s Aid. Bertha. ELMA. Wallace Global Fund. Solidarity Center.

Somehow they represent as sovereign civil society when what they are is a donor-backed legal and advocacy field speaking in the voice of public morality.

Note: This map shows a donor ecosystem and documented pathways, not a one-to-one claim that every listed funder funds every listed organisation.

The former CIA that, in the 80s, morphed into the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) route is also sitting there in plain sight. SERI lists the Solidarity Center as a current funder. NED itself describes the Solidarity Center as one of its core organisations. NED also names CIPE, the Center for International Private Enterprise, as one of its core organisations. Its own retrospective on South Africa says CIPE supported a range of Black business and informal-business formations, including the African Council of Hawkers and Informal Business. In other words, even the informal trader and hawker terrain has a documented history of insertion into US democracy-promotion architecture.

This does not require imagining direct orders or coordination from Washington. Power operates more subtly than that. It moves through funding streams, policy language, training circuits, professionalised litigation, donor reporting frameworks, constitutional discourse, media amplification and the authority to decide which forms of suffering are recognised.

This is how the NGO field operates.

When March and March speaks about borders, it is called dangerous, but when a US/EU-backed NGO speaks about migration governance, it becomes policy. When poor Black South Africans name what uncontrolled migration does in clinics, schools, informal trade, housing queues and collapsed municipalities, they are called xenophobic. When donor-funded organisations turn the same crisis into workshops, litigation, social cohesion programmes and human rights reports, they are called civil society.

This is the trick.

The Democracy Development Program openly states that it implemented a Migration, Social Cohesion and Human Rights Programme funded by the European Union from 2020 to 2023. There is the language again: migration, social cohesion, human rights. This is the Euro-Atlantic management vocabulary. It converts the material anger of abandoned Black citizens into a behavioural problem. It treats citizens as needing correction, training, sensitisation and monitoring.

Europe funds this language here while militarising its own borders there.

The United States funds democracy-promotion circuits abroad while treating migration at its own borders as a security crisis.

Yet South Africa’s Black poor are expected to absorb the consequences of continental collapse in the name of human rights, tolerance and Pan-African virtue. They must be borderless in the clinic queue. Borderless in the classroom. Borderless in the shack settlement. Borderless in the township economy. Borderless while unemployed. Borderless while their own state cannot provide housing, work, safety, documentation systems or functioning public services.

Then, when they organise and say enough, the donor-funded conscience industry arrives to diagnose them as the problem.

March and March has exposed this contradiction.

It has forced into the open what the NGO sector prefers to manage quietly: the South African citizen has been written out of the migration script. In that script, the migrant is the rights-bearing subject, the NGO is the translator of morality, the court is the cleansing chamber, the donor vanishes and the poor Black citizen returns only as threat.

That script has to be rejected.

The question is not whether foreign nationals should be harmed. They should not. The question is whether Black South Africans are allowed to speak about borders, sovereignty, labour displacement, clinic access, informal trade, Home Affairs collapse and state failure without being handed over to donor-funded moral police.

The March and March position has been deliberately squeezed into a portrait if irrationality because the donor field cannot tolerate a citizen-led language of sovereignty. It can manage “xenophobia”. It can fund “social cohesion”. It can litigate “access”. It can produce reports on “vulnerable groups”. What it cannot easily absorb is a Black citizenry saying: this country is not a dumping ground for regional collapse, donor experiments, cheap labour systems and elite Pan-African slogans that the poor alone must carry.

That is why the Jacinta smear is useful to them.

It allows them to say: look at her American link.

Meanwhile, the entire NGO bloc standing against March and March is held together by Ford money, Open Society-linked money, EU money, Canadian state-linked money, German and Norwegian funding, transnational philanthropy and NED-connected institutional routes.

If IVLP is a slap in the face, then all of this must be too.

If American proximity is contamination when it touches Jacinta, then American and European donor dependence cannot become purity when it touches the anti-xenophobia NGO sector.

The double standard is the story.

This is a US/EU-backed NGO cluster opposing March and March while pretending to speak from the untouched ground of South African conscience. It is not untouched. It is not neutral. It is not sovereign. It is a donor-funded political field with the power to name one side as hateful and itself as humane.

South Africans should refuse that fraud.

Jacinta’s jaunt with US think tank intelligence is not unproblematic from an anti-imperialism perspective. But deeper systemic problem is a civil-society complex that has normalised foreign money as moral authority, while treating Black citizen anger as pathology.

That is how sovereignty is managed.

That is how discourse is captured.

And that is why this smear campaign must be turned back on itself.