JOHANNESBURG - There is a particular arrogance and ignorance in the lie told from a podium. Not the desperate lie of a cornered person, but the slow, unhurried lie of someone who knows the microphone is on, the cameras are rolling, and the consequences for them are negligible.
We are living through a global epidemic of exactly that kind of lie. And while those who tell them sleep soundly, the rest of us are left to pick through the rubble they leave behind.
Across the world, leaders in the highest offices of government have made a disturbing habit of speaking things into existence.
Not policy. Not vision. Not hope. Simply convenient fictions, clothed in the language of authority, and fired into already anxious societies like flares into dry grass.
The ripple effects are real, and ordinary people bear them alone.
South Africans know this intimately. The ambush of President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House in May 2025 was a masterclass in how fabrication works as foreign policy.
Donald Trump confronted our president with a pile of printed articles and a video, asserting that a "white genocide" was unfolding in this country.
The claims had, by that point, been debunked repeatedly by credible journalists and independent fact-checkers.
Our Ministry of International Relations had already put the world on notice, warning of "a campaign of misinformation and propaganda aimed at misrepresenting our great nation."
None of that mattered. The claim had already done its work. It reshaped international perception, strained bilateral relations, and provided political cover for cancelling PEPFAR funding.
Real South Africans, living with HIV in clinics across Limpopo, the Eastern Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal, were earmarked to pay the price for a conspiracy theory repeated at a press conference.
That is the true cost of a lie told from power.
But we would be deeply dishonest if we only looked outward. South Africa has its own reckoning to face, and it arrived with alarming freshness just days ago.
In early July 2026, Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi publicly suggested that Israel may have played a role in instigating the recent "March and March" anti-immigration protests.
She linked the demonstrations to South Africa's high-profile genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, saying it would be "naive" to assume that powerful global interests would not seek to undermine South Africa's credibility on human rights.
When pressed for evidence, the minister replied: "I can't discuss that in public. Let me be generic."
Those are chilling words from a person who holds the portfolio of justice in a constitutional democracy.
International Relations Minister Ronald Lamola had made similar insinuations weeks earlier, pointing to unnamed "state and non-state actors" without producing a shred of proof.
Two senior ministers. The same insinuation. And between them, not a single piece of verifiable evidence.
To be clear: South Africa's ICJ case against Israel is a legitimate legal process and a matter of serious international moral consequence.
But accusing a foreign state of orchestrating domestic xenophobic violence, on the basis of nothing one is willing to state publicly, is not a defense of that case.
It is propaganda. It is, in fact, the same weapon we rightly condemn when it is turned against us.
The founder of the March and March movement, Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, says she only knows about Israel from the Bible, and that claims of foreign funding were built on racist assumptions about what motivates black South Africans.
The South African Zionist Federation called on the ministers to either produce their evidence or retract the insinuation, saying clearly: "There is no third path that is truthful." They are right. A conspiracy theory, no matter how politically convenient, protects no one. Certainly not the foreign nationals who were attacked in the streets.
That is the thing about political propaganda that its architects never seem to account for, or perhaps they do and simply do not care. Words uttered by those in power do not stay in the room where they are spoken. They travel. They mutate. They land on the phones and in the WhatsApp groups of people who are already afraid, already angry, already looking for someone to blame.
Research published in peer-reviewed journals confirms that authoritarian and populist leaders use conspiracy theories deliberately: to attack opponents, to galvanise their base, to shift blame, and to undermine the very institutions such as courts, regulators, and a free press that might hold them accountable. When a minister says, "I have evidence but cannot show you," she is not being cautious. She is priming a public to believe something without any mechanism to test whether it is true.
The consequences in South Africa are particularly dire because we are a society that cannot afford additional fractures.
We are already rated the most propagandised nation in the world, according to the Ipsos Perils of Perception Index 2026. Most propagandised. In the world.
In a country still carrying the wounds of apartheid, battling unemployment and profound inequality, that is not a statistic to cite in passing. It is an indictment of every leader who has treated the public as an audience to be managed rather than citizens to be respected.
Studies show that people who are merely exposed to a conspiracy theory, even alongside a credible rebuttal, show significantly lower levels of trust in institutions than those who never encountered the claim at all.
You do not have to believe the lie for the lie to damage you. Multiply that by the daily scroll through X, Facebook, and community WhatsApp groups, and it becomes clear why distrust has become the defining feature of our public life. When communities cannot agree on basic facts, they cannot organise around shared solutions. When people stop trusting courts, elections, and the media, they stop participating in the very systems that protect them.
There is a cost to all this that never appears on any government accounting sheet. It is the cost of the family in Soweto or Mitchells Plain that stops accessing public services because a rumour convinced them the state is the enemy.
The cost of the foreign national sleeping in a church shelter tonight because a politician needed a scapegoat ahead of local elections. The cost of the young South African who switches off entirely, convinced that all leaders, politicians in particular, lie and all news is fake, and quietly opts out of democracy because no one ever gave them a reason to stay in.
South Africa is at a genuinely consequential moment.
We have a case before the highest court in the world. We face real domestic pressures around immigration, inequality, and unemployment. These are serious conversations that require honest information and courageous leadership. What they do not require is convenient shadow-casting, where every domestic failure is reframed as foreign sabotage and every inconvenient protest is explained away as someone else's conspiracy.
The antidote to propaganda is not more propaganda, even ours. It is accountability. If ministers have evidence of foreign interference in South African politics, they must place it before Parliament, before the courts, before the public. That is what living in a constitutional democracy means. And if they do not have that evidence, then they must muster the courage to stay quiet, because the alternative, a country where the highest officials speak recklessly and leave ordinary people to absorb the consequences, is a country we cannot afford to become.
- by Nkateko Muloiwa