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The African National Congress (ANC) has, for three decades, presented its foreign policy as a moral project, a liberation movement guided by the values that liberated it: human rights, dignity, solidarity with the oppressed. Its chosen vehicle has been non-alignment, the Cold War doctrine of refusing to choose sides. However, when you track the ANC's actual foreign policy decisions, you will not find a party guided by moral principle. You will find a set of contradictory positions motivated by its need for funding.

The ANC has always needed foreign money and has spent three decades trading on its global moral reputation to raise it from a remarkable range of sponsors, many of whose human rights records make the party's stated principles unintelligible. The diplomatic positions the ANC has justified as moral courage, in case after case, depended entirely on who was paying.

Through the long years of exile, the ANC was funded mostly from abroad. The Soviet bloc paid for Umkhonto weSizwe, the ANC's armed wing. When the Soviet Union fell in the early 1990s, the Eastern bloc funding dried up immediately, and Nelson Mandela went looking for replacements.

This meant approaching many states from both sides of the Cold War divide, in both the developed and developing world.

In January 1992, Mandela travelled to Tripoli to meet Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan dictator whose agents had bombed Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, killing 270 people. This was but one example of state-sponsored Libyan terror that resulted in widespread sanctions against Tripoli. The arrangement between Libya and the ANC was simple: Mandela would lobby Western leaders against United Nations (UN) sanctions on Libya, and Libyan money would flow to the liberation movement.

Taipei, fighting to stop South Africa switching diplomatic recognition to Beijing, channelled at least ten million dollars to the ANC in 1993 and a further tranche after the 1994 election. Taiwanese officials would later say openly that the payments bought them two extra years of recognition.

Indonesia's Suharto, the dictator whose army had killed an estimated half a million suspected communists in purges during the 1960s, contributed too. The ANC set aside whatever ideological affinity it had once felt for the Indonesian Communist Party that Suharto had destroyed, in return for $60 million from Suharto.

In Iraq, this arrangement ran through oil. Aziz Pahad, a long-serving deputy minister of foreign affairs under both Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, led a delegation of ANC-linked businesspeople to Baghdad in 1999 to meet Saddam Hussein, the dictator who had gassed Kurdish villages and invaded Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. The ANC came away with allocations under the UN Oil-for-Food programme, which they on-sold to international oil traders at a premium, with proceeds flowing back to ANC-connected structures. South Africa, in turn, became one of Iraq's most vocal diplomatic defenders and opposed the 2003 American-led invasion.

Iran, the regime that had oppressed its own communist movements in the 1980s and butchered their members, allegedly paid through MTN. In 2005, the South African telecoms group, then chaired by Cyril Ramaphosa, was granted a 49% stake in Irancell, a large telecoms company in Iran. The deal was struck at the precise moment Tehran most needed friends at the UN over its nuclear programme, and South Africa duly obstructed Western efforts to tighten sanctions on Iran throughout the period that followed.

Few of these countries had a human rights record the ANC, on its stated principles, should have defended for any price. On their own, some of these regimes were pariahs, shut out of every Western capital. Through the ANC, they gained something vastly different: access. Such was the saintly reputation Mandela and his movement enjoyed that the party could win a hearing for leaders the West would never otherwise humour.

The West paid in too, through procurement. The 1999 arms deal was the template. South Africa, a country at peace, spent roughly R30 billion, later ballooning to over R70 billion, on submarines, frigates, and fighter jets from Western suppliers, with a portion of the inflated proceeds flowing back to ANC-linked trusts.

Under Jacob Zuma the model went industrial. The American management consultancies McKinsey and Bain, the German enterprise software giant SAP, the Swiss-Swedish engineering multinational ABB, and the British public relations firm Bell Pottinger all discovered, too late, that they had bought into a faction rather than a state.

Under Ramaphosa, the same pattern appears to have continued with actors such as Russia and Iran. For example, the Lady R, a sanctioned Russian cargo ship, docked under cover of darkness at Simonstown in 2022. The American ambassador alleged weapons had been loaded onto it. A year later, South Africa filed a case at the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Palestine. It is widely alleged that Iran helped fund the case.

Which brings the story to a game farm in Limpopo. On 9 February 2020, at least $580 000 was stolen from a couch at President Ramaphosa's Phala Phala property. An investigative committee found the president has a prima facie case to answer. Ramaphosa denies wrongdoing.

The pressing question is where the money came from. Ramaphosa's account is that it came from the sale of buffalo to a Sudanese businessman who paid in cash. Arthur Fraser, a former state security director-general who unveiled the incident, has a different account: that the funds were collected by a courier close to the president on trips around the world, including to the Middle East. On either version, the money was foreign currency moved by a figure with Middle Eastern connections into the private possession of the most senior ANC politician in the country, off the books of any institution.

With the ANC, when a stated principle does not match an identifiable interest, the place to look is the sponsorship. It always has been.