President Thabo Mbeki has accused an unnamed foreign donor of paying South African non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to attack the ruling African National Congress before the 2004 general elections.
Mbeki said the donor had offered NGOs "quite a lot of money" to pursue "civil advocacy - which meant they must challenge the ANC on this and that matter".
Mbeki was addressing The African Editors' Forum conference in Kempton Park on Saturday. This was his second recent attack on foreigners for allegedly using their funding to manipulate the agendas of local NGOs.
At the launch of the African Peer Review Mechanism governing council for South Africa, he named the United States and Sweden among donors which he said were doing this.
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But at the editors' conference Mbeki was more specific about what the donors were doing. He raised the issue in a defence of the South Africa government's approach to its peer review which has just begun.
Many NGOs and civil society organisations (CSOs) have criticised the government for taking control of the governing council, raising fears that this will jeopardise the impartiality of the review of South Africa's governance.
But Mbeki countered that the peer review would not only cover the performance of the government but that of other elements of South African society including the NGOs and CSOs.
He said the peer review would need to include also the issue of whether foreign donors were manipulating civil society, not only in South Africa but elsewhere in Africa. This had raised the question of whether one could really talk of an African civil society, Mbeki said.
"The peer review must challenge that and ask: 'Is there an African civil society and what is the influence of foreign funding?'" He also pointed out that the majority of members of the South African peer review governing council were from civil society.
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