Legacy Media Running Fake News Stories on Iran-South Africa Ties

Several media companies this week started running completely fake news stories claiming South Africa expelled Iran from naval exercises taking place at Simonstown this week and that Iran decided to withdraw from those exercises.

When it became clear that the Iranians were still present, something this newspaper managed to verify in minutes, and was later corroborated by defence officials themselves, the story shifted. The new version suggested that South African defence officials had defied the government and instructed the Iranians to stay. Then it shifted again, with claims that the government never wanted the exercises to go ahead at all and had once more been defied by defence officials.

If any of that were true, it would amount to something close to a coup d’etat. A handful of officials would have hijacked the entire operational capacity of the South African National Defence Force to arrange and host a hostile power for a week of naval exercises at a strategic naval base, in direct opposition to the instructions of the government and the president.

That is as preposterous as it is at odds with the government and President Cyril Ramaphosa’s established pattern of foreign policy support for Iran. The record, taken in full, does not describe a government trying to distance itself from Tehran. It describes a governing party and state that have repeatedly signalled fraternity and alignment.

From the foreign ministry visiting Iran shortly after the 7 October attacks on Israel, to the African National Congress (ANC) hosting Iran’s Hamas proxy in South Africa, including at the conference that saw Cyril Ramaphosa elected as ANC leader, to South Africa and Ramaphosa leading the charge to have Iran admitted to BRICS, to scathing comments by the government and Ramaphosa about America’s policy towards Iran, the direction of travel has been unwavering.

What is on display is fake news, and it stinks. It raises new questions about whether parts of the media are running narratives that serve state security interests by creating deliberate confusion, deflecting scrutiny, and offering a story of internal defiance that lets political leadership escape accountability for choices it has long supported.