Johannesburg, South Africa – The South African Government is currently hosting a naval military exercise with Iran, China, and Russia in its own waters off Cape Town from 9 to 16 January 2026. This choice is a damning indictment, laying bare the ANC’s true allegiances and exposing the utter hollowness of their rhetoric on human rights.
Iran’s regime is a merciless oppressor that executes protesters, imprisons women for daring to defy compulsory veiling, muzzles journalists, and unleashes brutality on minorities. Right now, one of the largest anti-oppression uprisings in years is raging across more than 100 cities in Iran. Women, students, and workers are flooding the streets, braving the certainty of arrest, torture, or death. As of early January 2026, security forces have killed at least 45 protesters, including eight children, and arrested over 2,000 people in the brutal crackdown. In a further act of repression, the regime has now imposed a near-total nationwide internet blackout to silence dissent and conceal its atrocities from the world. While these brave souls risk everything for freedom, the South African government is hosting joint naval drills, dubbed “Will for Peace 2026”, with the very tyrants crushing them underfoot, providing the venue, logistics, and support in its territorial waters.
The hypocrisy is grotesque and unforgivable. A governing party that forged its identity in the crucible of resistance against apartheid’s tyranny now collaborates with a theocratic dictatorship that governs through terror and bloodshed. DIRCO pontificates on international law while cozying up to a regime whose human rights atrocities, shooting women for unveiling their hair, hanging dissenters from cranes, are indefensible by any moral compass. To invoke Nelson Mandela’s legacy while partnering with such monsters is not just betrayal, it is moral desecration.
South African media must rise to the occasion and subject this government to far more rigorous scrutiny and criticism over its alignment with such regimes at a time when the Iranian people are paying with their lives for demanding basic freedoms.
Where are the other partners in the Government of National Unity on this issue? The Democratic Alliance has rightly condemned the exercise as undermining South Africa’s non-alignment and risking vital relations with democratic nations. Yet the GNU partners have dangerously allowed the ANC to determine South Africa’s foreign policy unchecked. How can parties committed to constitutionalism, human rights, and pragmatic foreign policy tolerate this alignment with tyrants? They must speak out forcefully and demand accountability, or risk complicity in this moral failure.
Once, South Africa championed human rights as a universal imperative, indivisible and absolute. Today, they are weaponised selectively: trumpeted when expedient, buried when they threaten prized alliances. By hosting military cooperation with Iran amid the slaughter of its citizens, the South African government aligns squarely with the regime, not the people, just as it has done with other dictatorships. Even in Venezuela, where the ANC propped up Maduro’s brutal rule for years through unwavering support, the pattern endures, notwithstanding his eventual removal. This obsession with propping up autocrats and indulging in anti-Western theatrics is steering our nation toward a perilous collision with the United States and its allies. Our economy, our security, and our people’s livelihoods hang in the balance, condemned to suffer the fallout of these reckless choices.
History will judge harshly those who choose solidarity with tyrants over solidarity with those yearning for freedom. South Africa must decide: stand with the Iranian people in their courageous struggle for justice and dignity, or be remembered as an accomplice to their repression. The world is watching, and so are we.
