Summary
On the afternoon of Monday 25 September 2023, Redi Tlhabi, who had recently moved to the Washington area, started writing a statement for the United States Congress.1 By her own account, she was only asked for it the day before it was due. She finished it that afternoon. On Tuesday it was filed with the Africa subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. On Wednesday she took her seat in room HVC-210 of the Capitol as one of three witnesses at a hearing on relations between Washington and Pretoria.2 On the witness list, the space next to her name where an institution would normally appear was empty.
Her statement is about 1,170 words long. Ninety-six of those words were written by two other people: a researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council and a risk analyst in Cape Town. Neither of them is named. The statement contains only one hard number, a drop in satisfaction with democracy from 59 per cent to 32 per cent. She credited that number to a survey it did not come from, and on the day of the hearing the figure was already seventeen months old. A draft she posted online after the hearing shows an open quotation mark and a note to herself to find the reference. The version in the congressional record has neither. That same week she signed a disclosure form that carries a warning that false statements are a federal offence. The form leaves out a governing board she sat on at the time and still sits on today.
What she left out mattered more than what she said. The three witnesses wrote 4,439 words between them. Russia comes up forty-two times, China twelve times, and Iran not once. Yet Iran is where South Africa’s biggest legal exposure in the United States lie s. MTN owns half of an Iranian mobile network. The other half was held through a subsidiary of Iran’s defence ministry and a state foundation. The day after the hearing, a court in Brooklyn sent that case to discovery. All through those years, MTN was chaired by the man who is now South Africa’s President. Tlhabi brought up the cancelled Russian nuclear deal as proof that democracy was working. She never brought up Irancell.
In the two and a half years since then, she has defended MTN’s chairman in print without telling readers that he chaired MTN. She has argued on television that the dates of the Iranian deal clear the company’s current leaders. She has also published an arg ument against a company that wants to compete with MTN, and she published it on the Substack of MTN’s paid consultant. That consultant, and Anthony Carroll, one of the two witnesses who sat next to her at the hearing, both turn up around The Vogel Group, the Washington firm MTN hired in June 2025. In March 2026 she joined a corporate affairs consultancy that sells advice to governments and companies on turning policy into public messaging. What Tlhabi does is not journalism with a point of view. She deliberately shapes how a target audience thinks, on behalf of parties she does not name. The hearing of 27 September 2023 was one example of this, and the sections below show the same pattern again in her later work.
The hearing
On the afternoon of 27 September 2023, the Africa subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee met to hear evidence on relations between the United States and South Africa. The session opened at 2:08 in room HVC-210 of the Capitol. There were three witnesses. Anthony Carroll was a trade consultant from Washington. Chris Maroleng came from Good Governance Africa. The third was the broadcaster Redi Tlhabi. In the committee’s papers, no institution was listed next to her name. In that entire Congress, she was the only witness to appear before that subcommittee on those terms.3
This was the third hearing in a series. In April the subcommittee had looked at the Chinese Communist Party in Africa, and in July at the Russian Federation and its proxies. Both of those hearings were about a rival power’s reach across the continent. This was the first of the three to focus on one African country and its relationship with the United States.4
Before a congressional hearing, each witness files a written statement. It is printed and kept on the record permanently. Each witness also signs a disclosure form called Truth in Testimony. The form asks whether the witness or their organisation has received money from the federal government or from any foreign government in the past thirty-six months. It also asks whether they hold a position of trust in any body with an interest in the subject of the hearing. The witness signs it under a warning that false statements are a federal offence. Tlhabi’s statement was created on a computer on Monday 25 September and filed the next day. It is roughly 1,170 words long. It has no footnotes and names no sources.
In the hearing room she went further than she had in writing. She told the subcommittee that “there are a lot of politicians who say stupid things,” and that a minister’s recent claim that the CIA was funding non- profit organisations was “a lot of nonsense and it gets called out in South Africa.” Speaking about the wider relationship, she said it was “true that South Africa benefits richly from its relationship with the United States, far more than it does from its relationship with Russia,” that the country “has far more in common with the United States and shares common values and norms,” and that “African states don’t want to seem weak. They do not want to be seen to be doing the bidding of the United States. Their peers and constituencies may punish them for that.”5
Maroleng used part of his statement to offer his organisation’s services to the committee: “May we be so bold as to suggest that our organisation is the perfect intermediary for such interventions, given the antipathy displayed by members of the governing party to certain messages ?”6 On 5 July 2023, eleven weeks before he gave evidence, he had been appointed international chief executive of Good Governance Africa. The main purpose of that job, as the organisation described it, was to secure long- term funding for it.7
What Tlhabi’s statement copied
Around ninety-six of the words in her statement were written by other people.
One stretch of thirty-eight words in a row comes from a column by Joleen Steyn Kotze, a researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council. Another twenty-seven words come from the same column, which The Conversation Africa published on 25 April 2022.8 In the longer stretch, only one letter is different: a verb has been made plural. The original column also has a stray space inside “59 %”. So does the statement filed with Congress. Another fifty-eight words, spread across four passages, come from Ronak Gopaldas, a risk analyst in Cape Town. His paper was published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on 26 April 2023.9 The longest of these passages is twenty-five words. Carnegie had printed that sentence above the author’s name as the main argument of the paper. In Tlhabi’s version, one word has changed: “neglected” became “undermined”.
Neither writer is credited. The Conversation Africa allows anyone to republish its articles for free, as long as they do two things: name the author and credit the publication. The statement filed with Congress does neither.10 The column even includes its own funding statement: “Joleen Steyn Kotze receives funding from the National Research Foundation.”11
Carnegie published the Gopaldas paper in two versions, and the difference between them shows which one she used. On the web page, the headline sentence appears sixty- two words in, just above the author’s name. The other three borrowed passages sit between words 176 and 244 of the first paragraph. Anyone reading down that page would come across all four passages in exactly the order they appear in her statement. The printed working paper is different. It has no headline sentence at the top, and those words appear only once, almost six thousand words in, in the conclusion.12
The figures
The main statistic in her statement is part of the borrowed material. Tlhabi told the subcommittee that satisfaction with democracy in South Africa had dropped from 59 per cent in 2004 to 32 per cent now. She said both figures came from the Human Sciences Research Council and its South African Social Attitudes Survey.
Those figures cannot be matched to that survey, because they did not come from it. They came from the column, which was writing about the survey. In other words, her citation skipped the source she actually used and pointed to the one behind it.13 The statement filed with Congress has a link on the name of the survey. That link goes to a departmental web page that has never shown either percentage.
When the column came out in April 2022, “now” meant April 2022. Seventeen months later, the same sentence was put in front of American lawmakers as if it described South African opinion at that moment, which it clearly did not.
The draft
On 1 October 2023, four days after the hearing, Tlhabi posted pictures of her opening statement online. What she posted is not the version filed with Congress. It is an earlier draft, and it contains four notes she wrote to herself that the filed version does not have. Two of them say “reference”, and one of those is misspelt. Another, written in capital letters, tells her to reference recent American cooperation with the coup leaders in Niger. The fourth is a list of three countries to use as examples.
The most important difference between the two versions is one punctuation mark. In the draft, the passage taken from the Steyn Kotze column opens with a quotation mark that is never closed, and it carries one of the notes asking for a reference. In the filed version, the quotation mark is gone, the note is gone, and the passage reads as if she wrote it herself. The Carnegie passage, which is the longest piece of borrowed text in the statement, is not marked in either version.
Tlhabi holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Westminster, and she was studying there, full time in 2022.14 That means she had recently spent time working to academic citation standards. By her own account, the committee invited her to speak rather than to file a statement, and only asked for a written statement the day before it was due. The document’s metadata does show that it was created on the Monday afternoon. According to that same metadata, the author of the document is listed as “Brian”.15 Brian is the name of Tlhabi’s husband, Dr. Brian Tlhabi.16 (She may have used his computer)
The disclosure form
On her form, Tlhabi gives her position as “Journalist” and says she is representing herself. She names no organisation. Where the form asks about positions of trust, she wrote a paragraph about her career instead of naming any body.17
On the day she signed the form, Tlhabi sat on the governing board of the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity. This is a ten-year fellowship worth sixty million dollars, funded by the Atlantic Philanthropies. It is hosted at Columbia University in New York and anchored in Johannesburg by the Nelson Mandela Foundation.18 She had held that seat since at least 17 August 2019, which is well inside the period the form covers, and she still holds it.19 The form does not mention it, even though her own United Nations biography lists the role as running from 2019 to the present.20
Two other roles from the same period are also missing. Between 5 and 9 September 2022, she moderated three sessions at an agricultural summit in Kigali.21 She was also a director of SECTION27, the South African health and education rights organisation.22 Her United Nations biography says she sat on its board from 2017 to 2021,23 but SECTION27’s own annual review lists her among the board members who resigned in 2019.24 That biography overstates her time there by about two years.
She says nobody paid for her to be there. By her own account, she had recently moved to the Washington area on permanent residence approved in 2019, and her family covered the cost.25 The committee’s spending records show no witness travel costs at all.
Carroll and Maroleng
The other two witnesses deserve a paragraph each, because two of the three disclosure forms fell short in the same way.
On his form, Carroll described himself as an “adjunct professor (retired)”. He left the organisation box empty and answered “None” to both funding questions.26 In fact, on that day he was a registered lobbyist. Through Rosewood Global Advisors he was working for Roche Diagnostics, for forty-four thousand dollars that quarter, lobbying both houses of Congress to renew and fund PEPFAR. The legal authority for PEPFAR ran out three days later.27 During the hearing, Tlhabi was asked to make an appeal for PEPFAR.28 She is reported to have said that she had not planned to do this.29 Carroll was also chairing the ethics committee of a counter-extremism fund in Geneva, where Qatar is a founding donor with a seat on the board.30 He had also founded a private equity firm in Hong Kong. Its Chinese-language material calls it the leading African fund dedicated to developing Chinese businesses in Africa. None of this appears in the biography Congress published for him.31 The one question on his form that would have made him list it is missing from the copy that was filed.
Maroleng gave evidence as international chief executive of Good Governance Africa while also serving as a director of the organisation’s British charitable company.32 He answered “None” to both funding questions on its behalf.33 Good Governance Africa says that one body has paid for everything it has done since it started: the Rodor Charitable Foundation of Vaduz. That foundation was set up on 11 December 2023, three months after the hearing.34
Iran
Together, the three witnesses wrote 4,439 words about what was wrong between Washington and Pretoria. Russia is mentioned forty-two times in those statements, and China twelve times. Iran is not mentioned at all.35
This gap matters, because the largest liability any South African company faces in the United States is an Iranian one. At that stage Iran had not yet become a country under close global scrutiny. In 2005 MTN took a 49 per cent share of Iran’s second mobile licence. The other 51 per cent was held through a company owned jointly by the Bonyad Mostazafen and by Iran Electronics Industries, which an inquiry commissioned by MTN itself describes as a subsidiary of the Ministry of Defence.36 A United States federal court has since ruled that the people suing had plausibly claimed that both of those shareholders were fronts for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.37 American service members, people who were injured, and Gold Star families are suing the company under the Anti-Terrorism Act,38 and a Department of Justice grand jury is looking into the group.39 On 28 September 2023, the day after the hearing, the district court in Brooklyn refused to throw out those claims and sent the case to discovery.40
There is also older material on how MTN got the licence. In 2012 Turkcell sued MTN in Washington. It claimed that MTN had promised to deliver South Africa’s vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency, had promised Iran banned defence equipment, and had bribed officials in Tehran and in Pretoria, including South Africa’s ambassador to Iran.41 Turkcell dropped the American case in 2013. The South African case is still going, and in April 2025 the Supreme Court of Appeal ruled that South African courts have jurisdiction to hear it.42 In early September, 2026 a hearing was held in South Africa and is pending.
Cyril Ramaphosa joined the MTN board on 1 October 2001 and was its chairman until the annual general meeting on 28 May 2013. That covers the whole period in which MTN won the Iranian licence and ran the Irancell relationship.43 In December 2011, China Investment Corporation bought 25 per cent of his Shanduka Group for two billion rand.44 In November 2012, Shanduka agreed to buy a minority stake in MTN Nigeria from MTN itself for 335 million dollars. Shanduka’s chief executive said Ramaphosa was not involved.45 At the end of that year he held 9.4 million MTN Zakhele shares, more than all the other MTN directors and officers put together.46 Yet his name does not appear even once in the 154 pages of the inquiry his own board commissioned into how the licence was obtained.47
Mcebisi Jonas has been MTN’s chairman since 2019.48 On 14 April 2025, Ramaphosa appointed him Special Envoy to the United States49 while he was still chairman of the company. The following month, according to the Democratic Alliance, Washington refused him a diplomatic visa and rejected his credentials. The Presidency disputed this account.50 No public record explains why Washington took this position. One account links it to Jonas turning down a meeting with Elon Musk about Starlink, but this report has not been able to confirm it.
All three witnesses had their own link to the company. Chris Maroleng was MTN’s group executive for corporate affairs from 2014 until the end of December 2017. He was the company’s public voice through the Nigerian fine and the resignation of a chief executive,51 although he never sat on the group executive committee.52 He had left the company five years and nine months before he gave evidence.
Anthony Carroll’s link says a great deal. On 1 August 2025, eight weeks after MTN Dubai hired The Vogel Group, he registered as a subcontracted senior adviser to that same firm. The witness and the company ended up inside the same small Washington practice. A third person also belongs in this picture: Phillip van Niekerk, managing partner and president of the Washington consultancy Calabar Africa and a paid adviser to MTN, who reportedly helped bring the company to that firm.53 Redi Tlhabi’s link runs through the same man, and hers can be seen in public. There were three interventions in thirteen months, each one going the company’s way, and then a corporate affairs job in Washington from March 2026.54
Only one of the three statements names MTN, and only once. Carroll mentions it in a list of national success stories: “Since the end of apartheid, South African companies such as MTN, Shoprite, Standard Bank, ABSA and Aspen have become omnipresent in Africa.”55 Twenty-one months later, MTN Dubai hired The Vogel Group,56 and eight weeks after that Carroll registered inside it.57 His short form lists his title as senior adviser, his principal as the Embassy of the Republic of Sudan, and his terms as part-time at twenty thousand dollars a month. That engagement ended on 31 October 2025.58
The one-time Tlhabi came near this subject, she went in the opposite direction. To show the subcommittee that South African democracy works, she said that “civil society pushed back against the state’s nuclear deal with Russia and it was eventually cancelled”.59 She presented the Russian nuclear deal as something the public had successfully fought off. She did not mention the Iranian mobile licence at all.
Her involvement with the company came later, and it came through Phillip van Niekerk, whom she has known for a long time. On 16 April 2025, two days after Mcebisi Jonas was made the President’s special envoy to Washington while still chairing MTN, she published a 5,932- word column calling him “a deeply principled man and a good choice as envoy to the US”. The column does not mention that he chaired MTN.60 On 26 August 2025 she objected to television coverage of the grand jury investigation. She argued that the dates cleared the company’s current leaders: “How is it not relevant that the MTN/Iran deal happened in 2005? The Afghanistan operations in 2007. Jonas became chairman in 2019. Ralph, CEO in 2020. I’m not opining.”61 Four days later, the first report came out about van Niekerk’s paid consulting work for MTN. Van Niekerk has said, “I am not an employee of MTN. It is one of several companies for which I have done consulting work, and I am proud to be associated with it.” He appears on her programme, introduced as a veteran journalist.62 His own firm, Calabar Africa, also trades as Calabar Consulting.63 The same reporting places him at the Washington end of MTN’s account. On 25 July 2025, National Security News wrote that MTN Dubai had hired The Vogel Group “with the assistance of its longstanding Washington-based consultant, Philip van Niekerk”. On 31 August it reported, based on one unnamed Washington source, that he had played a key part in the appointment. Van Niekerk himself is not registered anywhere. He is not on The Vogel Group’s filings for MTN, not among the short -form registrants listed under its FARA number, and not anywhere in the federal lobbying disclosure database.64
The connection goes beyond a guest spot on her show. On 26 May 2026, Tlhabi published a column arguing that Starlink is a national security issue for South Africa and that the country should not hand part of its communications network to Elon Musk. It ran on Africa Unscrambled, the Substack published under van Niekerk’s name, and she shared it on X the same day as her piece on why Starlink is a national security issue. It did not disclose that the publisher consults for MTN, the established operator whose market Starlink would be entering.65
MTN in Washington
MTN had no registered lobbying presence in the United States until 4 April 2024, when MTN Dubai hired The Madison Group.66 A month after that registration took effect, MTN’s chairman Mcebisi Jonas and its chief executive Ralph Mupita were in Washington. They met senior officials from the Department of Commerce and the Department of State, as well as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation and the International Monetary Fund. MTN said the talks covered matters of shared interest, including geopolitical developments, and called the meetings constructive, but gave no details.67 The Madison Group contract ended in 2025 after a final quarter worth a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. On 6 June that year, MTN Dubai’s Washington work moved to The Vogel Group. According to the registration, the job was to educate policymakers about MTN’s investments and about how MTN’s business operations line up with US and international trade laws.68 This is the same firm Carroll registered with eight weeks later. By May 2025, legal experts were describing the lawsuits in plainer terms. Jeffrey Breinholt of George Washington University, who spent more than twenty years at the Department of Justice working on counterterrorism and national security law, said he believed MTN Group may have committed securities fraud. He added that now that the district court’s order was public, multinational companies doing business with MTN “can’t very well say that they didn’t know about” the risk. John Katsos of the American Universi ty of Sharjah said the sensible approach would have been to treat the lawsuits as a real possibility rather than a remote one, and to disclose the possible financial and operational effects. He warned that the company’s accounts could “later be deemed misl eading to investors.” Michael Santoro of Santa Clara University said a parent company is ethically and legally responsible for its subsidiaries and affiliates, and that this is “not a close or complicated case in this regard.”69
The same analysis draws a line at the date of the Brooklyn ruling. Katsos argued that companies that went into partnership with MTN after 28 September 2023 carry more risk, because the ruling makes it much clearer what they should have seen coming, and a partner who signed on after September 2023 would struggle to claim it did not know. The analysis also points out that Ramaphosa chaired the MTN board during part of the period in which the aiding and abetting claims are said to have arisen. It adds that Jonas was chairman, with the fiduciary duty that goes with that role, when the annual financial statements that called the risk “remote” were approved.70
After the hearing
Five days after the hearing, Naledi Pandor, who was foreign minister at the time, said she had been “a little perturbed at this hearing in the House of Congress where they invited two South Africans to comment not just on South Africa’s government but on the ANC as well”.71 Her spokesman narrowed the complaint to the mixing of party and state. Separately, he said that coaching a witness would have defeated the purpose of the exercise. Since then, no government department and no one in the governing party has said anything more about her.
The harshest published response came from African Times on 7 December 2023. Its headline said that Tlhabi and Maroleng “are the faces of unpatriotic Africans who are willing to sell their countries for comfort in the West.” The editor -in-chief, Mahasha Rampedi, wrote that their appearance showed a growing willingness among Africans to sell out their countries in return for a comfortable life in the West. He said that going around DIRCO showed the United States was not acting in good faith, and that the real aim of the submissions was to limit South Africa’s foreign policy choices where China and Russia are concerned. He argued that the CIA funds South African non-profits indirectly, through the National Endowment for Democracy, rather than directly. He also argued that AGOA has helped large, mostly white-owned listed companies rather than ordinary South Africans, and that the United States once listed Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and has never supported South Africa’s bid f or a permanent seat on the Security Council. The article calls the hearing a Senate committee and says the chairman’s opening statement was given by Senator James Risch. In fact, it was a House subcommittee, and the chairman was Congressman John James.72 African Times has kept writing about her since then.73
Her links to these institutions have carried on. On 27 June 2024, nine months after the Carnegie sentence made its way into her statement, Tlhabi was master of ceremonies at the Carnegie Africa Forum in Washington, where Jonathan Oppenheimer took part in the closing conversation.74 Carnegie’s annual report says its Africa programme was launched “through the generosity of Carnegie trustee Jonathan Oppenheimer and the Oppenheimer family”.75 On 1 October 2024, Pandor became chairman of the Nelson Mandela Foundation,76 the body that anchors the fellowship board seat Tlhabi did not declare.77 On 25 October 2025, Tlhabi chaired the Foundation’s annual lecture. It was given by Francesca Albanese, three months after the United States had placed sanctions on her, and Pandor joined her on stage for a conversation.78 South African Jewish community bodies and the Israeli embassy criticised the Foundation for hosting it.79
Propaganda
K. J. Holsti’s International Politics: A Framework for Analysis is a standard undergraduate textbook in international relations, the same subject Tlhabi studied for her master’s degree. One of its chapters is called “The Instruments of Policy: Propaganda.”80 It helps to read her record alongside that chapter.
Holsti takes his definition from Terence Qualter, and it has four parts. There is a communicator who sets out to change the attitudes and behaviour of other people. There are the symbols that communicator uses, written or spoken. There is the medium. And there is the target. What separates propaganda from other kinds of speech is that it is a deliberate attempt. Holsti writes that a propagandist cares about being as persuasive as possible, not about meeting any standard of scholarship. The content is seldom completely false. Instead, it depends on picking certain facts, giving partial explanations and offering answers that were decided in advance.81
Now put Redi Tlhabi’ s statement next to that definition. The communicator was a witness with a clear goal: to tell American lawmakers that South Africa shares their values and gets far more from Washington than from Moscow. The medium was the permanent record of Congress. The target was a subcommittee whose hearing title already named a single country, the kind of audience Holsti would recognise straight away. He writes that propaganda works best on people who already partly agree with the communicator, and on subjects where the audience has not yet made up its mind.82 American lawmakers know little about South African survey data, and they had no reason to doubt a drop from 59 to 32 that was credited to a national research council. The symbols were borrowed: a Carnegie headline sentence with one word changed, research findings lifted from a newspaper column, and a survey cited as the source of numbers it never produced. Holsti calls that last move testimonial. It is an appeal to authority, where the audience is asked to believe something because an institution is said to have said it.83
Then there is selection, which Holsti says nearly all propaganda relies on. The three statements mention Russia forty-two times and Iran never. Tlhabi held up the cancelled Russian nuclear deal as proof that South African civil society holds the state to account. She said nothing about the Iranian licence still held by her country’s largest company, a licence that was before an American court that very week. Choosing which national embarrassment to talk about and which one to leave out is this technique in its clearest form. Holsti also sees credibility as the thing a propagandist has least of and needs most. His model is the BBC External Service, which builds a name for fairness so that its message gets through.84 Tlhabi appeared as a “Journalist”, representing herself, with no institution attached. The committee’s biography described her as a current presenter on a BBC World Service programme.85 Her own later biographies describe Newsday as a past role, one she held only “until recently”.86 By the time of the hearing she was based in the Washington area and working as a freelance moderator.87 No one corrected the committee’s biography.
The same pattern carried on after the hearing. The column calling Mcebisi Jonas “a deeply principled man and a good choice as envoy” is testimonial again. It leaves out the one fact readers needed: that he chaired the company whose legal trouble in Washington the envoy would have to manage. The television argument about dates is selection. The Starlink column is what Holsti calls transfer. You tie the thing you are against to a person the audience already dislikes, in this case Elon Musk, and let that dislike rub off. The column ran on a Substack owned by MTN’s consultant and disclosed nothing. Holsti’s note on this is short. One of the usual tricks of propagandists speaking to a wary audience is to keep their own identity and interests hidden.88
In March 2026 the business side came out into the open. Tlhabi joined The War Room as its presence in North America. The War Room is a corporate affairs consultancy that was launched that year. It sits within Keri- Ann Stanton’s KAMuses group, and Phumzile Van Damme is one of its founders. The announcement calls Tlhabi a “policy strategist” who advises “governments and private sector leaders on how to translate complex policy into actionable communication and public engagement strategies”.89 That is a fair description of a propagandist’s job as Holsti explains it, and there is nothing wrong with doing that work for a fee under a company name. Holsti counts more than four hundred agencies in the United States doing exactly that for foreign governments.90 The problem begins when the same person appears before Congress, on television and in print as an independent journalist, and never says whose interests are at stake.
Holsti ends with a warning, and this record shows he was right. When there is a big gap between what a communicator says and what the communicator does, the propagandist loses credibility and the audience grows suspicious.91 Here there is a statement about shared democratic values whose central passage is borrowed without credit. There is a disclosure form that leaves out a board seat. There is a column about a chairman that leaves out his chairmanship. And there is an essay about national security that leaves out the publisher’s client. In each case, what she says and what she does are far apart. Put together, they look less like four separate slips and more like one way of working. Every time, the fact a reader would need in order to judge the claim is the very fact that is missing.
Conclusion
Three findings about Tlhabi’s part in the hearing are documented and hard to argue with. First, ninety-six words of her 1,170-word statement were taken from two sources without credit. Second, the figures at the heart of her argument were credited to a survey they did not come from, and by the time she used them they no longer meant what she told Congress they meant. Third, a board seat she held on the day she signed her disclosure form is missing from a form that exists to record exactly that.
The clearest of the three is also the smallest. In the draft she posted herself, the borrowed passage opens with a quotation mark and a note to find the reference. In the version that entered the permanent record of the United States Congress, both are gone. Nothing here proves who, if anyone, asked her to do any of this, and this report makes no claim about that. It does not need to. Holsti’s definition depends on the deliberate attempt, not on who asked for it. Think about what the record shows. A communicator removes a quotation mark so that someone else’s words read as her own. She picks the Russian story and drops the Iranian one. She vouches for a chairman without naming his company, and she argues that company’s case on its consultant’s platform. She now sells the same skill to governments and companies as a business. That is exactly what the chapter describes. She came before Congress as a journalist. The record shows a propagandist at work, and that record is the only evidence this report has relied on.
Notes
- Redi Tlhabi, LinkedIn profile, listing her location as Washington, https://www.linkedin.com/in/redi-tlhabi-1125a1177/.
- Redi Tlhabi (@RediTlhabi), post on X announcing her arrival on Capitol Hill to address the committee, 27 September 2023, https://x.com/RediTlhabi/status/1707080258682327295.
- Subcommittee on Africa, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, “Hearing Notice and Witness List,” 27 September 2023, https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans- foreignaffairs.house.gov/files/migrated/uploads/2023/09/Hearing-Notice-Updated- Final-9.27.pdf; House Committee on Foreign Affairs, “Subcommittee Hearing Announcement: Examining the Current U.S.- South Africa Bilateral Relationship,” press release, 20 September 2023, https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/news/press-releases/subcommittee-hearing-announcement-examining-the-current-u-s-south- africa-bilateral-relationship; Examining the Current U.S.-South Africa Bilateral Relationship: Hearing before the Subcommittee on Africa of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 118th Cong. (2023), Serial No. 118-49, https://www.congress.gov/118/chrg/CHRG-118hhrg53674/CHRG-118hhrg53674.pdf.
- Subcommittee on Africa, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Great Power Competition in Africa: The Chinese Communist Party, hearing, 18 April 2023, Serial No. 118-19, https://www.congress.gov/event/118th-congress/house-event/115666/text; Subcommittee on Africa, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Great Power Competition Implications in Africa: The Russian Federation and Its Proxies, hearing, 18 July 2023, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-118hhrg53291/html/CHRG-118hhrg53291.htm.
- Examining the Current U.S.-South Africa Bilateral Relationship, https://www.congress.gov/118/chrg/CHRG-118hhrg53674/CHRG-118hhrg53674.pdf; Medialternatives, “What Redi Tlhabi, Chris Maroleng, and Anthony Carroll Had to Tell the U.S. Congress about South Africa,” 3 October 2023, https://www.medialternatives.com/what-redi-tlhabi-chris-maroleng-and-anthony-carroll-had-to-tell-the-u-s-congress-about-south-africa.
- Chris Maroleng, written statement to the Subcommittee on Africa, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 27 September 2023, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20230927/116405/HHRG-118-FA16-Wstate-MarolengC-20230927.pdf.
- Good Governance Africa, “Maroleng to Head Up GGA Expansion,” 5 July 2023, https://gga.org/maroleng-to-head-up-gga-expansion/.
- Joleen Steyn Kotze, “Democracy Loses Its Glow for South Africans amid Persistent Inequality,” The Conversation Africa, 25 April 2022, https://theconversation.com/democracy-loses-its-glow-for-south-africans-amid-persistent-inequality-181489.
- Ronak Gopaldas, “Will the Invasion of Ukraine Change Russia - Africa Relations?,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 26 April 2023, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/04/will-the-invasion-of-ukraine-change-russia-africa-relations.
- The Conversation Africa, “Republishing Guidelines,” https://theconversation.com/africa/republishing-guidelines.
- Steyn Kotze, “Democracy Loses Its Glow,” disclosure statement.
- Gopaldas, “Will the Invasion of Ukraine Change Russia - Africa Relations?,” Carnegie working paper (PDF), https://assets.carnegieendowment.org/static/files/Gopaldas_Russia_Africa_1.pdf.
- Human Sciences Research Council, “South African Social Attitudes Survey,” https://hsrc.ac.za/special-projects/sasas/.
- United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on Africa (OSAA), “Redi Tlhabi,” biography, 2024, https://www.un.org/osaa/en/ads2024/hlpd/bio/redi-tlhabi; “Redi Tlhabi Relocates to UK, Joins BBC Newsday,” Kaya 959, 6 April 2022, quoting Tlhabi’s post on X of 4 April 2022, https://www.kaya959.co.za/entertainment/redi-tlhabi-relocates-to-uk-joins-bbc-newsday/.
- Redi Tlhabi, written statement to the Subcommittee on Africa, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 27 September 2023, document properties (Author field), https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20230927/116405/HHRG-118-FA16-Wstate-TlhabiR-20230927.pdf.
- Gillian Schutte, “Understanding the Emissary Syndrome: Redi Tlhabi and Fanon’s Warning,” IOL, 19 August 2025, https://iol.co.za/news/opinion/2025-08-19-understanding-the-emissary-syndrome-redi-tlhabi-and-fanons-warning/; “Wedding Bells for Redi Direko,” IOL, 19 February 2010, https://www.iol.co.za/entertainment/tv/wedding-bells-for-redi-direko-978690; “Lesego Tlhabi,” Wikipedia, which names her father as Dr. Brian Tlhabi and Redi Tlhabi as her stepmother from 2010, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesego_Tlhabi.
- Redi Tlhabi, Truth in Testimony disclosure form, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 26 September 2023, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20230927/116405/HHRG-118-FA16-TTF-TlhabiR-20230927.pdf.
- Atlantic Philanthropies, “Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity FAQ,” https://www.atlanticphilanthropies.org/news/atlantic-fellows-for-racial-equity-faq.
- Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity, “Our Team,” accessed 10 September 2026, https://racialequity.atlanticfellows.org/our-team.
- United Nations OSAA, “Redi Tlhabi”.
- Africa Food Systems Forum, AGRF 2022 Summit programme, Kigali, Rwanda, 5 to 9 September 2022, https://afs-forum.org/summit/2022/. The programme lists “Ms. Redi Tlhabi, Anchor, UN Global Journalists Corps” as moderator of three panels: the roundtable of First Ladies and experts on healthy diets, and the “Women -Led Businesses” and “Supporting SME Growth” panels in the VALUE4HER sessi on. See also AGRF, AGRF 2022 Summit Program, https://agrf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/AGRF-2022-SUMMIT_Program-5-Sep-v2.pdf.
- SECTION27, submission to the Competition Commission Health Market Inquiry on its provisional report, letterhead listing “Ms R Tlhabi” on the Board of Directors, http://www.compcom.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/SECTION27.pdf; Ninety One, For Tomorrow Award, judge profile of Redi Tlhabi, listing SECTION27 among her board roles, https://fortomorrowaward.ninetyone.com/.
- United Nations OSAA, “Redi Tlhabi”, which lists her as a Section27 board member from 2017 to 2021.
- SECTION27, Annual Review 2019, https://section27.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Section27-AR19_20201002-1.pdf.
- Tlhabi, LinkedIn profile.
- Anthony Carroll, Truth in Testimony disclosure form, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 22 September 2023, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20230927/116405/HHRG-118-FA16-TTF-CarrollA-20230927.pdf.
- KFF, “An Update on PEPFAR Reauthorization,” https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/an-update-on-pepfar-reauthorization/.
- Examining the Current U.S.-South Africa Bilateral Relationship, https://www.congress.gov/118/chrg/CHRG-118hhrg53674/CHRG-118hhrg53674.pdf; amfAR, “Redi Tlhabi Speaks on the Importance of PEPFAR,” video, Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/amfarthefoundationforaidsresearch/videos/redi-tlhabi-speaks-on-the-importance-of-pepfar/132270463282958/; video of Tlhabi’s PEPFAR remarks, Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/reel/CxvwCRyOflZ/; IOL News, Facebook post on criticism of Tlhabi’s appearance before Congress, https://www.facebook.com/IOLnews/posts/award-winning-journalist-redi-tlhabi-has-come-under-fire-for-her-recent-appearan/703170501842001/.
- For her own later account of the appeal, see Tlhabi, post sharing her congressional presentation, LinkedIn.
- GCERF, “Our Financial Partners,” https://www.gcerf.org/our-financial-partners/; Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “Qatar Doubles Contribution to Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund,” 30 May 2018, https://mofa.gov.qa/en/qatar/latest-articles/latest-news/details/2018/05/30/qatar-doubles-contribution-to-global- community-engagement-resilience-fund.
- Anthony Carroll, biography filed with the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 27 September 2023, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20230927/116405/HHRG-118-FA16-Bio-CarrollA-20230927.pdf.
- Companies House, “Good Governance Africa (04904129): Officers,” https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/04904129/officers.
- Chris Maroleng, Truth in Testimony disclosure form, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 25 September 2023, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20230927/116405/HHRG-118-FA16-TTF-MarolengC-20230927.pdf.
- Fundraiso, “Rodor Charitable Foundation,” https://www.fundraiso.com/en/organisations/rodor-charitable-foundation.
- Anthony Carroll, written statement to the Subcommittee on Africa, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 27 September 2023, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20230927/116405/HHRG-118-FA16-Wstate-CarrollA-20230927.pdf; Maroleng, written statement; Tlhabi, written statement.
- Hoffmann Committee, Final Report, commissioned by the board of MTN Group, 1 February 2013, https://www.mtn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Final-Report-Hoffmann-Committee-FINAL.pdf.
- Zobay v. MTN Grp. Ltd., 695 F. Supp. 3d 301 (E.D.N.Y. 2023), https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-ed-new-yor/115186232.html.
- MTN Group, Annual Financial Statements FY2025, Directors’ Report, 13 March 2026, https://www.mtn.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/MTN-Group-FY-25-Annual-Financial-Statements.pdf.
- MTN Group, “MTN Group Statement,” 24 August 2025, https://www.mtn.com/mtn-group-statement/.
- Zobay, 695 F. Supp. 3d 301 (memorandum and order of 28 September 2023, denying MTN Group’s motion to dismiss); Zobay v. MTN Group Ltd., No. 1:21-cv-03503 (E.D.N.Y.), docket, CourtListener, https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/60005661/zobay-v-mtn-group-limited/.
- Complaint, Turkcell v. MTN Group, No. 1:12-cv-00479 (D.D.C. filed 28 March 2012), https://www.mtn.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/usa-district-court.pdf.
- MTN Group, “Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) Judgment on Turkcell Appeal,” JSE SENS announcement, 30 April 2025, https://sharenet.co.za/v3/sens_display.php?scode=&seq=2&tdate=20250430071800; “SCA Clears Turkcell’s Bribery Brawl with MTN to Be Staged Locally,” Daily Maverick, 7 May 2025, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-05-07-sca-clears-turkcells-bribery-brawl-with-mtn-to-be-staged-locally/.
- MTN Group, Integrated Report 2012, “Board of Directors,” https://www.mtn.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Integrated-business-report-2012.pdf.
- “Chinese Group Buys 25% of Shanduka,” Business Report, 22 December 2011, https://businessreport.co.za/international/2011-12-22-chinese-group-buys-25-of-shanduka/.
- “Shanduka Buys Stake in MTN Nigeria,” Bizcommunity, 28 November 2012, https://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/543/86236.html.
- MTN Group, Integrated Report 2012, remuneration report.
- Hoffmann Committee, Final Report. Ramaphosa is not named in the report.
- MTN Group, “Board of Directors: Mcebisi Jonas,” https://www.mtn.com/boardofdirectors/mh-jonas/.
- “Ramaphosa Appoints Mcebisi Jonas as Special Envoy to US,” Polity, 14 April 2025, https://www.polity.org.za/article/ramaphosa-appoints-mcebisi-jonas-as-special-envoy-to-us-2025-04-14.
- Democratic Alliance, “United States Denies Jonas Visa, Rejects Credentials,” press statement, July 2025, https://www.da.org.za/2025/07/united-states-denies-jonas-visa-rejects-credentials; Presidency response, The Citizen, 16 July 2025, https://www.citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/politics/right-wing-nexus-presidency-slams-da-claims-jonas-denied-us-visa/.
- “MTN CEO Exit ‘Not an Admission of Guilt,’” TechCentral, 9 November 2015, https://techcentral.co.za/mtn-ceo-exit-not-an-admission-of-guilt/193715/.
- MTN Group, Integrated Report 2017, “Group Executive Committee,” https://www.mtn-investor.com/mtn_ar2017/ebook/files/assets/common/downloads/publication.pdf.
- “Phillip van Niekerk: MTN’s Man in Washington DC,” National Security News, 31 August 2025, https://nationalsecuritynews.com/2025/08/phillip-van-niekerk-mtns-man-in-washington-dc/.
- “Media Moves: Redi Tlhabi Joins the War Room,” The Media Online, 12 March 2026, https://themediaonline.co.za/2026/03/media-moves-redi-tlhabi-joins-the-war-room-volvo-chooses-retroviral-yazi-raises-funding-to-reinvent-market-research-on- whatsapp/.
- Carroll, written statement.
- The Vogel Group, Lobbying Disclosure Act registration for MTN (Dubai), 28 June 2025, https://lda.gov/filings/public/filing/b19a3624-d187-47e3-b043-35bdcb237327/print/.
- Anthony Carroll, FARA short-form registration statement, registrant no. 7332 (The Vogel Group LLC), 1 August 2025, https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7332-Short-Form-20250801-12.pdf.
- Carroll, FARA short-form registration statement; The Vogel Group, FARA amendment recording termination of the Sudan engagement, 28 May 2026, https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7332-Amendment-20260528-1.pdf.
- Tlhabi, written statement.
- Redi Tlhabi, “Mcebisi Jonas Is a Deeply Principled Man and a Good Choice as Envoy to the US,” Daily Maverick, 16 April 2025, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2025-04-16-mcebisi-jonas-is-a-deeply-principled-man-and-a-good-choice-as-envoy-to-the-us/.
- Redi Tlhabi (@RediTlhabi), post on X, 26 August 2025, https://x.com/RediTlhabi/status/1960455112926564775.
- Phillip van Niekerk, “Right of Reply,” BizNews, 3 September 2025, https://www.biznews.com/mailbox/right-of-reply-phillip-v-niekerk.
- “Phillip van Niekerk,” author page, Daily Maverick, https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/phillipvanniekerk/.
- “Bipartisan Momentum Builds in US Congress to Sanction South Africa’s ANC Government,” National Security News, 25 July 2025, https://nationalsecuritynews.com/2025/07/bipartisan-momentum-builds-in-us-congress-to-sanction-south-africas-anc-government/; Lobbying Disclosure Act lobbyist search, and FARA short-form registrants recorded under registration no. 7332, both searched 12 September 2026, https://efile.fara.gov/ords/fara/f?p=API.
- Redi Tlhabi, “Don’t Hand South Africa’s Democracy to Elon Musk for Thirty Pieces of Silver,” Africa Unscrambled (Substack), 26 May 2026, https://africaunscrambled.substack.com/p/dont-hand-south-africas-democracy; Redi Tlhabi (@RediTlhabi), post on X sharing the column, 26 May 2026, https://x.com/RediTlhabi/status/2059348663059554359.
- The Madison Group, Lobbying Disclosure Act registration for MTN (Dubai), 4 April 2024, https://lda.gov/filings/public/filing/d34f35f5-834a-43ae-a9bf-a9f3db93a9d0/print/.
- Admire Moyo, “MTN Concludes ‘Constructive’ Washington DC Meetings,” ITWeb, 6 May 2024, https://www.itweb.co.za/article/mtn-concludes-constructive-washington-dc-meetings/wbrpOMg2Eg37DLZn.
- The Madison Group, Lobbying Disclosure Act registration termination for MTN (Dubai) Limited, 2025, https://lda.senate.gov/filings/public/filing/4db5c73c-1dc1-41cf-ac96-d73bc757915b/print; The Vogel Group, Lobbying Disclosure Act registration for MTN (Dubai) Limited, effective 6 June 2025, https://lda.senate.gov/filings/public/filing/b19a3624-d187-47e3-b043-35bdcb237327/print.
- Michael Walsh, “US Anti -Terrorism Cases Against MTN Group Put Multinationals in Peril,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, 15 May 2025, https://www.fpri.org/article/2025/05/us-anti-terrorism-cases-against-mtn-group-put-multinationals-in-peril/.
- Walsh, “US Anti-Terrorism Cases.”
- “No Issues between Us and SA, Says Minister Naledi Pandor’s Spokesman,” Daily Sun, 2 October 2023, https://www.snl24.com/dailysun/news/no-issues-between-us-and-sa-says-minister-naledi-pandors-spokesman-20231002.
- Mahasha Rampedi, “US Congress Submissions: Tlhabi and Maroleng Are the Faces of Unpatriotic Africans Who Are Willing to Sell Their Countries for Comfort in the West,” African Times, 7 December 2023, https://www.atnews.co.za/us-congress-submissions-tlhabi-and-maroleng-are-the-faces-of-unpatriotic-africans-who-are- willing-to-sell-their-countries-for-comfort-in-the-west/.
- African Times, articles tagged “Redi Tlhabi,” https://www.atnews.co.za/tag/redi-thlabi/.
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “2024 Carnegie Africa Forum,” 27 June 2024, https://carnegieendowment.org/events/2024/05/2024-carnegie-africa-forum.
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2021 Annual Report, https://ceipfiles.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/2021_AnnualReport_final.pdf.
- Nelson Mandela Foundation, “Foundation Appoints a New Chair of Its Board,” 23 September 2024, https://www.nelsonmandela.org/news/entry/foundation-appoints-a-new-chair-of-its-board.
- Nelson Mandela Foundation, Annual Report 2024-2025, 26-27, https://www.nelsonmandela.org/uploads/files/Nelson-Mandela-Foundation-Annual_Report_2024-2025-Web.pdf.
- Nelson Mandela Foundation, “Annual Lecture 2025,” https://www.nelsonmandela.org/annual-lecture-2025.
- Tali Feinberg, “Foundation Slammed for Platforming Albanese, a Sanctioned Antisemite,” SA Jewish Report, 23 October 2025, https://www.sajr.co.za/foundation-slammed-for-platforming-albanese-a-sanctioned-antisemite/.
- K. J. Holsti, International Politics: A Framework for Analysis, 4th ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1983), chap. 8, 192-213, https://archive.org/details/internationalpol0004hols.
- Holsti, International Politics, 195-96.
- Holsti, International Politics, 197-200.
- Holsti, International Politics, 203-4.
- Holsti, International Politics, 199-200.
- Redi Tlhabi, biography filed with the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 27 September 2023, https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA16/20230927/116405/HHRG-118-FA16-Bio-TlhabiR-20230927.pdf.
- United Nations OSAA, “Redi Tlhabi”; United Nations OSAA, “Ms. Redi Tlhabi,” speaker profile, https://www.un.org/osaa/node/1599.
- Tlhabi, LinkedIn profile; United Nations OSAA, “Redi Tlhabi”.
- Holsti, International Politics, 199n9.
- “Media Moves,” The Media Online.
- Holsti, International Politics, 193.
- Holsti, International Politics, 201-2.
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