Carl Niehaus
Image: Supplied
By Carl Niehaus
I stood with President Nelson Mandela in the blood-soaked streets of Boipatong on 17 June 1992.
Bodies lay hacked with pangas and axes, limbs severed, skulls crushed.
The horror was not the spontaneous eruption of “Black-on-Black violence” that the apartheid regime and its apologists claimed. It was the deliberate work of the third force — a calculated campaign of terror engineered by apartheid securocrats, Vlakplaas operatives like Eugene de Kock, and their Inkatha Freedom Party collaborators, including warlords such as Themba Khoza.
Arms, training, intelligence and incitement flowed through these networks to fracture Black communities along ethnic lines, derail the CODESA negotiations, render the country ungovernable and preserve white monopoly capital and its Western backers. That was more than three decades ago.
Today, in June 2026, as we are confronted with the planned nationwide actions of the March and March movement on 30 June, the same sinister pattern stares us in the face.
Only now the strings are pulled by a more sophisticated alliance: Western intelligence agencies, Zionist financiers deeply angered by South Africa’s landmark case at the International Court of Justice, and local proxies operating along Afrophobic and ethnic fault lines.
This is hybrid warfare updated for the multipolar era — the third force reborn. As I wrote in my recent IOL opinion piece (“Persistent Shadow of the Third Force: From Boipatong to March and March – A Call to Defend our Unity and Democracy” – https://iol.co.za/opinion/2026-06-07-persistent-shadow-of-the-third-force-from-boipatong-to-march-and-march-a-call-to-defend-our-unity-and-democracy/), the shadow of the third force stretches from Boipatong to March and March.
The movement, led by Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, cloaks itself in the language of patriotism, border security and concern for “illegal immigration.” Its rhetoric, however, is unmistakably Afrophobic: fellow Africans from Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia and elsewhere are dehumanised as “rats who breed uncontrollably,” drug dealers and cartel mafias controlling spaza shops.
The hatred is selective — it does not target European or USA expats with the same venom. This is not genuine sovereignty politics; it is divide-and-rule, classic third-force tactics designed to pit Black South African against Black African, revive ethnic mobilisation and shatter the Pan-African unity that remains our greatest weapon against imperialism.
The funding questions are explosive and persistent. Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma has been forced publicly to refute allegations that March and March receive support from Israel or other foreign sources, insisting instead on South African donations. The very fact that such allegations arise and must be denied speaks volumes.
Zionist interests — both domestic and international — have every reason to destabilise a South Africa that dared to take apartheid Israel to the ICJ and secured provisional measures recognising the plausible commission of genocide in Gaza. That ruling was a historic victory for the Global South and a profound humiliation for the Zionist architects of settler-colonial genocide and their Western enablers. Retaliation was inevitable.
What we see in the current crisis is an overall failure of governance, both at the Department of Home Affairs and within our State Security Agency (SSA). It is well known that Home Affairs is deeply corrupt. The control of the legalized movement and registration of those who enter our country and seek refuge is compromised because of this pervasive corruption. Dr Leon Schreiber, as Minister of Home Affairs, cannot escape his dismal failure. This failure lies at the heart of the crisis, the lack of proper knowledge and control of the movement of our fellow brothers and sisters from the continent of Africa into South Africa.
Our South African Police Service and intelligence agencies have furthermore failed dismally in their duty to expose this corruption and to take action against corrupt Home Affairs officials. These agencies have not gathered or provided the necessary intelligence on corruption and its disastrous consequences. Our intelligence agencies have also failed us dismally in not having gathered or provided the necessary intelligence on the nefarious, undermining, and insidious role of Western intelligence agencies in destabilising South Africa.
They have failed to conduct the essential intelligence work required to expose and counter these external threats. Members of the Executive of the Government of National Unity, such as the Minister in the Presidency responsible for intelligence, Khumbudzo Ntshavheni, Dr Leon Schreiber, and ultimately President Ramaphosa, must be held accountable for the dismal failure of governance that we see in South Africa. Enter the United States of America and its Western allies. Their playbook is well-rehearsed. In Ukraine, similar divisive tactics were used to fracture society along ethnic and other lines. Similar techniques — astroturfed movements, amplification of hate, and grooming of local actors — are now visibly at work here in South Africa.Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma’s own trajectory illuminates the pattern. In 2023, she participated in the United States government’s International Visitor Leadership Program, IVLP, and publicly shared her experiences and participation in June 2024 on social media. These developments do not occur in a vacuum. They serve concrete interests.
Apartheid Zionist Israel and its global lobby are furious at South Africa’s principled stand.As Gillian Schutte powerfully demonstrated in her 8 March 2026 IOL analysis “The Afrophobia Accusation and the Struggle Over South Africa’s Universities”, the very invocation of Afrophobia functions as a social construct that serves entrenched power by diverting attention from structural inequalities in employment and governance while shielding neoliberal priorities and obscuring the unfinished tasks of decolonisation. Similarly, in her earlier 2 May 2025 IOL piece “Xenophobia Is a Social Construct”, she exposed how the xenophobia label itself operates as a tool of power that erases neoliberal structural forces and protects elite interests.What is unfolding with March and March is not organic popular anger.
It is the latest iteration of a strategy as old as colonialism: keep the oppressed divided, manufacture enemies within, and punish any nation that dares to stand with the oppressed globally.We defeated the third force in the early 1990s through unity, through the blood of countless martyrs, and through the moral clarity that turned the world against apartheid. We can defeat this new manifestation the same way.
That requires exposing the funding trails and the foreign networks without fear or favour. It requires rejecting Afrophobia as a weapon of the enemy while insisting on orderly, humane and sovereign management of our borders and documentation of all who live among us — as I have argued together with EFF Central Command Team member (CCT), Commissar Sam Matiase, in the opinion piece that we co-authored here on IOL (https://iol.co.za/news/politics/opinion/2026-05-14-pan-african-unity-clarifying-how-registration-and-documentation-are-the-path-to-a-united-state-of-africa/).
It requires strengthening our institutions against infiltration. And it requires unflinching solidarity with Palestine, whose struggle is inseparable from our own. The ICJ case was not an accident of history; it was the logical expression of who we are as a people forged in the crucible of resistance. Those who seek to punish us for it — whether through sanctions, diplomatic isolation or internal destabilisation — reveal their true colours. We will not be divided.
We will not be turned against our African brothers and sisters. We will not be cowed. Voetsek to every deceptive hand, local or foreign, that seeks to resurrect the third force and destroy our hard-won unity.A luta continua!*Ambassador Carl Niehaus is an EFF Member of Parliament.
*Ambassador Carl Niehaus has been part of the liberation struggle in South Africa for over 45 years, and now serves as a Member of Parliament (MP) for the Economic Freedom Fighters.
**The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of IOL or Independent Media.