Sooliman’s soft power influence over the media, politics and the state

Dr Imtiaz Sooliman of Gift of the Givers has mastered a form of influence that South Africans have not yet properly named.

It is not the crude politics of office, elections, party caucuses and formal mandates. It is the politics of access, moral authority and institutional usefulness. Over three decades, Sooliman has built Gift of the Givers into South Africa’s most recognisable humanitarian organisation, and with that recognition has come a level of proximity to the media, the governing party, senior officials and state institutions that no ordinary NGO could ever hope to command.

The humanitarian work is not in dispute. Gift of the Givers has responded to droughts, floods, fires, water shortages, humanitarian crises, kidnappings, stranded South Africans and disasters inside and outside the country. The difficulty is that this work has also made the organisation politically indispensable. In a weak state, an organisation that repeatedly fills the gap left by government failure does not remain merely charitable. It becomes useful to power. It becomes publicly trusted where government is distrusted. It becomes the body ministers want to be photographed with, journalists want to praise, and officials want to appear aligned with when the state itself has failed.

Tim Flack’s recent examination of Sooliman’s public relationships with the media and the state is important for that reason. His work lays out the visible architecture of influence. In part one, he shows how Gift of the Givers has cultivated and publicly displayed relationships with editors, journalists and media platforms. These are not merely ordinary media engagements. They are photographed, captioned and presented as relationships of warmth, partnership and shared purpose. The effect is to blur the distance between the organisation being covered and the media institutions that should be able to scrutinise it without fear, favour or emotional attachment.

In part two, Flack extends the same pattern to the state. Gift of the Givers’ own public record shows Sooliman in proximity to police leadership, the Hawks, intelligence-linked figures, SARS officials, constitutional watchdogs, cabinet ministers and the President. A single meeting with one official would not matter. The cumulative pattern does. The institutions involved are not social clubs. They are organs of power, oversight, investigation, enforcement and regulation. For a humanitarian organisation to have that level of publicly displayed access is already unusual. For that access to exist alongside an almost untouchable public image is politically significant.

Sooliman has not merely built a favourable reputation. He has built a position from which his organisation can shape how government, the media and the public respond to politically charged events. The Gaza flight incident at OR Tambo International Airport showed this clearly.

In November 2025, a group of Palestinians arrived in South Africa on a chartered flight routed through Nairobi. The Border Management Authority indicated that the travellers did not have the expected exit stamps, could not state how long they intended to remain in the country, and had not provided local addresses. They were initially refused entry. On the ordinary facts, this should have remained an immigration matter. Border officials had applied the requirements and found that the travellers did not satisfy them.

But the matter quickly moved beyond ordinary border control. Home Affairs became involved. Gift of the Givers offered to accommodate the travellers. President Cyril Ramaphosa himself publicly said South Africa could not turn them back, even while acknowledging that they did not have the necessary documents and papers. The initial refusal was overtaken by a humanitarian framing, and the state’s posture changed.

This is the practical meaning of soft power. Gift of the Givers did not need to hold a statutory power over immigration. It did not need to run Home Affairs. It did not need to command the Border Management Authority. Its influence operated through access, urgency, public sympathy, ideological alignment and the moral pressure created by its reputation. A private organisation’s undertaking to care for foreign travellers appeared to carry weight in a decision that should have turned strictly on law, documentation, admissibility and sovereign border control.

The unanswered questions remain serious. Who organised the charter flight? Who paid for it? Who coordinated the movement of the passengers? What did South African authorities know before the flight arrived? Why were travellers who reportedly failed ordinary entry requirements admitted after intervention? Why did Gift of the Givers’ involvement appear to matter so heavily? Why did the President adopt the humanitarian frame so quickly? These are the basic questions any functioning state should answer when a chartered flight of foreign nationals arrives and the initial refusal of entry is reversed.

Instead, the public was fed the claim that the arrival of the travellers was some kind of ruse by Israel. That claim served a political purpose. It moved attention away from the mechanics of the flight, the organisers, the documentation failures, the immigration process and the reversal of the BMA’s decision. It placed Israel at the centre of the story and allowed the incident to be absorbed into the familiar language of Palestine solidarity. The media, already accustomed to treating Sooliman as a humanitarian figure beyond ordinary suspicion, did not interrogate the matter with the seriousness it required.

Gift of the Givers had access to the state and influence over the public narrative. Government responded in the language of humanitarian necessity. Much of the media accepted the frame. The legal questions were left behind.

Sooliman’s defenders often insist that his work is purely humanitarian. That is no longer a convincing explanation for his public role. His activism around Palestine is openly political. His rhetoric has gone far beyond neutral humanitarian concern. He has spoken in charged terms about Zionists, Israel, fear, money and accusations of antisemitism. He has also said, in a recorded interview, that he follows Islamic law and that Islamic law overrides any other law. These statements are not incidental when the same person enjoys access to the highest levels of the South African state and is treated by much of the media as a national moral authority.

His political history also deserves closer scrutiny. In 1994, Sooliman stood as the presidential candidate of the Africa Muslim Party. That fact does not, on its own, prove that Gift of the Givers is a political project. But it does make it legitimate to question the clean separation between Sooliman the humanitarian and Sooliman the political actor. What could not be achieved through a small religious party in electoral politics may have been achieved more effectively through humanitarian indispensability: access to government, proximity to power, legitimacy in the media, and influence without the burdens of elected office.

The Jewish community’s concerns also enter the picture. Those concerns have too often been reframed as Zionist hostility, smear campaigns or attacks on humanitarian work. The controversy around UCT’s honorary doctorate for Sooliman showed how easily this happens. Serious objections to his rhetoric and activism were treated by many not as legitimate civic concerns, but as attacks on a man whose humanitarian record was expected to settle the matter. The humanitarian image became a shield. Criticism was made to look improper before the substance was properly heard.

This is not a small matter in South African politics. The ANC and its allies have for years allowed anti-Israel activism to occupy a privileged place in the country’s foreign policy imagination. The Palestinian cause has been folded into South Africa’s liberation language, often in a way that leaves little room for complexity, Jewish communal concerns, or the practical interests of the South African state. Sooliman’s influence operates within that environment. His humanitarian authority strengthens a political position that already has deep roots inside the governing party and its activist networks.

The result is a form of influence that is difficult to challenge because it does not look like ordinary power. It does not present itself as a party manifesto or a cabinet memorandum. It is presented as compassion, emergency relief, moral urgency and public admiration. It uses the failures of the state as its opening, then becomes so useful to the state that the state begins to defer to it. Officials appear beside it. Ministers echo its framing. Journalists soften around it. Critics are treated as people attacking charity rather than people raising legitimate questions about power.

That is why the Gaza flight incident matters. It exposed the extent to which a private organisation can become entangled with state action. The BMA initially refused entry. Home Affairs intervened. The Presidency adopted the humanitarian framing. Gift of the Givers offered accommodation. The media largely followed the moral script. The law, the process and the unanswered logistical questions became secondary.

South Africans are familiar with the language of state capture, but they tend to think of it only in the crude form associated with the Gupta years: money, tenders, cabinet appointments and state-owned enterprises. There are other forms of capture. Some operate through ideology. Some operate through expertise. Some operate through moral authority. In this case, the power lies in humanitarian indispensability. Gift of the Givers has become so useful, so admired and so embedded that scrutiny of its influence is treated almost as an offence against compassion itself.

The danger is not simply that Sooliman has opinions about Israel, Palestine, Islam or South African foreign policy. The danger is that those opinions are carried by a man whose organisation has accumulated unusual access to media platforms, political leaders and state institutions. When that access is activated in a moment such as the Gaza flight incident, the public can see how quickly humanitarian authority becomes political power.

Good works do not cancel the need for scrutiny. If anything, the more powerful a humanitarian organisation becomes, the more necessary scrutiny becomes. South Africa cannot allow unelected actors to shape immigration decisions, foreign policy narratives and public morality simply because they arrive wrapped in the language of charity. Nor can the media continue treating Sooliman as a figure whose humanitarian work places his politics beyond examination.

Gift of the Givers may continue to do relief work. Sooliman may continue to be praised for that work. But the country must be honest about the influence that has been built alongside it. This is access and influence with a purpose. At its most generous, it gives Gift of the Givers informal control over the narrative and over the state’s response posture in moments of crisis. At its most troubling, it begins to resemble capture.