Tim Flack: Science behind Sooliman's press, pt. 2 — the badge, the bench, and the cabinet

Key topics:Gift of the Givers' ties with SA power structures scrutinisedFacebook posts show repeated meetings with police, Hawks, SARSArticle questions impact of publicised institutional relationships.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Tim Flack.All claims in this article are sourced from posts on the verified Gift of the Givers Facebook page, from published reporting by South African outlets, and from publicly available records. The analysis constitutes fair comment on matters of public interest. The author welcomes correction of any factual inaccuracy..This article concerns the publicly documented pattern of engagement between Gift of the Givers and the South African state, as recorded on the organisation's own verified Facebook page. It does not question Gift of the Givers' humanitarian work or the personal integrity of Dr Imtiaz Sooliman. All factual claims can be verified by visiting the page or the sources cited. The analysis is the author's own.In Part 1, I described what happens when an NGO photographs and posts its meetings with newsroom editors. The complaint, fairly summarised, was that this is a curious thing for a charity to do. The pattern was the meeting, the photograph, the warm caption, the verified page, the quarter of a million followers. Part 2 concerns a different audience for the same approach.The same organisation, using the same Facebook page, has documented Dr Sooliman in personal meetings with the Minister of Police, two Deputy Ministers of Police, the National Head of the Hawks, his Deputy, the Head of the Special Investigating Unit, the current and immediately previous Inspectors General of Intelligence, a senior figure in Crime Intelligence, the South African Military Health Services, a five-person delegation from the South African Revenue Service, the retired Chief Justice of South Africa, the current and former Public Protectors, the Auditor General, two members of South Africa's International Court of Justice team, four cabinet ministers in their official capacity, and the President of the Republic. That is the start of the list, not the end..Read more:.Tim Flack: Science behind Sooliman's press - partnering for impact.The pattern is consistent. A meeting takes place. A book is gifted, or a certificate is exchanged. A photograph is taken. The image is posted to the page with a caption emphasising warmth, partnership, and shared purpose. The audience is 257,000 followers and anyone with a search engine. These are not the candid group photographs of public conferences, where everybody is photographed with everybody else. They are curated, captioned, one-on-one encounters, posted to a verified page by an organisation that controls every element of the framing. The professional question is what such a documentation strategy is designed to achieve.Take the police. In April 2026, Sooliman met the Minister of Police, Firoz Cachalia, alongside Deputy Ministers Polly Boshielo and Cassel Mathale. The post was titled "Strengthening Partnerships for Safer Communities." His predecessor, Senzo Mchunu, who was placed on special leave by President Ramaphosa in July 2025 amid serious allegations of misconduct and a judicial commission of inquiry, had publicly defended Gift of the Givers operations during the Mthatha water crisis and authorised armed SAPS escorts for the organisation's trucks. Sooliman has stood beside Lieutenant General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, the KwaZulu-Natal commissioner whose own allegations against Mchunu triggered that inquiry, and used the page to call on the President to support him. He has been photographed with the Free State, Eastern Cape, and Western Cape provincial commissioners, with the Deputy National Commissioner, and has addressed serving officers at the Western Cape SAPS Excellence Awards. During the 2025 Eastern Cape floods, the Acting Provincial Commissioner allocated a dedicated SAPS escort and personal security team to accompany Gift of the Givers water trucks. The escort was photographed.The Hawks are similarly accounted for. Sooliman has been photographed with the then-National Head, Lieutenant General Godfrey Lebeya, now retired, accepting a gift at Hawks headquarters in Pretoria in August 2023, alongside his Deputy, Lieutenant General Siphesihle Nkosi. He has been photographed with the head of the Gauteng Hawks, Major General Ebrahim Kadwa, when the two were jointly invited to address Standard Bank's fraud division in November 2024. Advocate Andy Mothibi, then Head of the Special Investigating Unit and now appointed by Ramaphosa as National Director of Public Prosecutions, appeared in a December 2024 post alongside Sooliman..The intelligence side is where the page's habit of documentation produces its most striking captions. In December 2022, the Facebook page recorded a meeting at Cape Town International Airport with Imtiaz Ahmed Fazel, the Inspector General of Intelligence. Fazel was subsequently suspended by President Ramaphosa in October 2025 after recommending criminal charges against senior police officials. His predecessor, Setlhomamaru Dintwe, had been photographed with Sooliman at a post-budget breakfast in February 2022. In January 2022, Major General Firoze Khan of Crime Intelligence, a figure who was acquitted in March 2025 of internal SAPS disciplinary charges and has since faced fresh public calls for his suspension, paid what the page called a "courtesy visit" to Gift of the Givers. There are also documented meetings with Major-General Ebrahim Kadwa also from Crime Intelligence. As of writing this opinion, both Khan and Kadwa were arrested following investigations into allegations of illicit precious metals transactions, corruption and related offences by the Gauteng Counter Intelligence Operations unit. The former Minister of Intelligence Services, Ronnie Kasrils, has also appeared in the wider intelligence-adjacent circle..The Inspector General of Intelligence is the constitutional officer responsible for overseeing the country's intelligence services. The post exists to watch the watchers. That two consecutive holders of the office have been publicly photographed in the company of an NGO founder, captioned and circulated by that founder's organisation, is an unusual entry in the public record.Then there is SARS. In April 2023, Sooliman was photographed with five named officials including the Director of the High Net Worth segment, the unit that scrutinises the financial affairs of wealthy individuals. SARS is the institution that registers, audits, taxes, and, where necessary, examines non-profit organisations. The meeting itself is uncontroversial. The choice to photograph and publish it, to a quarter of a million followers, is the matter for the communications professional to consider..A pause, here, for the professional point. The Gift of the Givers Facebook page does, of course, post the ordinary content of a humanitarian charity. Water deliveries, disaster scenes, school handovers, beneficiaries at clinics, donor acknowledgements, faith community partnerships. That is the bulk of the feed, and it is what one would expect. The professional concern is not the on-brand content. It is the off-brand content sitting inside it. The Hawks, the Inspector General of Intelligence, the SARS High Net Worth unit, the Chief Justice, the Public Protector, the Auditor General, the National Head of Crime Intelligence. These are not the natural counterparties of a humanitarian organisation. They are the regulators, investigators, auditors, prosecutors, and intelligence overseers of the South African state. There are charities that engage with these offices in the ordinary course of compliance. There are charities that occasionally appear alongside a minister at a disaster site. Neither describes what the page documents. What the page documents, alongside the ordinary humanitarian content, is a sustained programme of personal access, photographed and captioned, to the offices that hold investigative and oversight power over the non-profit sector and over the wider public life of the country. As a piece of communications work, it is unusual. As an element of the public-facing record of a humanitarian charity, it is, professionally speaking, off. The reader is entitled to ask what such a programme is for, and the organisation, having posted the evidence, has invited the question..Read more:.R1m Yach family foundation donation to Gift of the Givers creates rift in SA's Jewish community.There is then a category of office whose holders are constitutionally independent watchdogs. In December 2024, a single Gift of the Givers Facebook post featured the retired Chief Justice Raymond Zondo, the retired Public Protector Professor Thuli Madonsela, and the current Public Protector Advocate Kholeka Gcaleka. The same series carried images of two members of South Africa's ICJ team. The Auditor General, Tsakani Maluleke, was photographed with Sooliman at two separate awards ceremonies in 2023. The Chief Justice presides over the courts that try the state. The Public Protector investigates state misconduct. The Auditor General audits the state's books. None of these functions involves issuing photo opportunities to the founders of charities, and yet the photo opportunities exist, on a verified page, with captions written by Gift of the Givers.Part 1 noted that the language of the media posts dissolved the tension between subject and scrutineer by replacing it with the word "partnership." The captions on this side of the operation perform a similar trick. Meetings with police become "Strengthening Partnerships for Safer Communities." Meetings with constitutional officers become acknowledgements of "shared purpose." The institutions are not described as overseers, regulators, or scrutineers. They are described as collaborators. As innocent as the language is, the cumulative effect of seeing it applied, post after post, to bodies whose constitutional function is precisely the opposite of collaboration is the substance of the professional concern.Above the police, the intelligence services, the revenue collectors, and the constitutional watchdogs sit those who appoint them. In 2025, President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed Sooliman to the National Dialogue Eminent Persons Group. Sooliman has, in turn, used his platform to issue public appeals to the President on the composition of cabinet and on the appointment of senior police commissioners. The traffic in this relationship runs in both directions, and it runs in public.The former Minister of International Relations and Cooperation, Dr Naledi Pandor, was photographed alongside Sooliman at a Palestine solidarity event in Gqeberha in May 2024. The following month, Sooliman publicly appealed to Ramaphosa to retain Pandor in the DIRCO portfolio. The pattern, by this point, will be familiar to the reader. The meeting, the photograph, the caption, the public appeal that follows. The communications cycle is closed. The institutions are inside the frame..The principle is the one Part 1 described, applied to a different audience. The cultivation of personal relationships with the people who hold institutional power, and the public broadcasting of those relationships, is what the communications trade calls stakeholder management. There is nothing improper about it. The professional point is what an impression of cultivated familiarity does, over time, to the working assumptions of the institutions involved and of the public watching them. An official who has posed for a friendly photograph and accepted a copy of the book is not, of course, compromised by the photograph. The photograph is not a transaction. The point is the impression created in the public mind, and in the minds of any critics watching to see which doors remain open to them.Apply the same test that closed Part 1. Search for a critical word from any of the institutions in the photographs. Search for an audit, an inquiry, a referral, a parliamentary question, a public statement of concern. The search yields little. That, in itself, proves nothing. The institutions may simply have nothing to say. The point is that the absence of any audible institutional voice, against the backdrop of so much photographed warmth, is the kind of pattern a communications professional is paid to notice.If a politician were photographed at airports with two consecutive Inspectors General of Intelligence, on the doorstep of Hawks headquarters, in a SARS boardroom, in a single frame with the retired Chief Justice and two Public Protectors, beside a serving Minister at a partisan rally, and accepting a presidential appointment to advise the head of state, the coverage would be discussed openly and at length in the political pages. That, in this instance, the discussion has not occurred is the observation, not the accusation.There is no Part 3. There does not need to be. What I have described is what an unusually well-documented public-facing communications strategy looks like when it is run with discipline over a decade. Not the humanitarian work, which is real and which has saved lives. The relational architecture that has been built alongside it, and that has been posted, photograph by photograph, on a verified page followed by a quarter of a million people..Read more:.Nicholas Woode-Smith – Sooliman must come clean.A final word from the trade. I have worked in public relations for the better part of a decade. What is documented on the Gift of the Givers Facebook page is, in pure communications terms, an achievement of the highest order. The access is total. The relationships are deep. The institutions inside the frame include everybody that might, in another configuration, have produced a difficult headline. There is not a PR practitioner in the country who would not, in private, recognise this as the work of a master operator and quietly wish for a fraction of the same access for their own client. What it says about the institutions inside those photographs, I genuinely do not know. That is a question for somebody other than the communications professional. I am simply noting, from inside the craft, that what has been built here is remarkable, and that the person who built it has, by posting the evidence, made the achievement available to anyone willing to look.Dr Imtiaz Sooliman is not hiding. He is posing for the photograph. The professional question, and it is only a question, is what the cumulative effect of all those photographs is on the institutions standing in them with him.

Tim Flack: Science behind Sooliman's press, pt. 2 — the badge, the bench, and the cabinet

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