Ramaphosa, MTN and the Middle East: A silence that speaks volumes - Patrick McLaughlin

Key topics:

• Ramaphosa’s silence on Gaza stems from calculated political caution

• MTN’s Iran ties link Ramaphosa to ongoing U.S. legal scrutiny

• Pretoria’s stance reflects legacy networks and rising U.S. tensions

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By Patrick McLaughlin*

As leaders from the Arab world gathered in Sharm el-Sheikh to witness the historic Gaza peace accord, Pretoria’s absence was conspicuous. Commentators have been quick to label South Africa’s silence as confusion, even incompetence — another sign, they say, of a disjointed foreign policy under President Cyril Ramaphosa.

But that reading is too shallow.
Ramaphosa’s silence was not the product of bewilderment. It was the silence of calculation.

The long shadow of MTN

To understand Pretoria’s posture today, one must go back to Ramaphosa’s time as chairman of MTN — the telecoms giant that built its Middle East footprint through the Irancell joint venture. That venture, born during years of Western sanctions, was haunted from the start by allegations that political influence in Pretoria smoothed MTN’s way into Tehran.

In 2012, Turkish competitor Turkcell accused MTN of corruption in the awarding of Iran’s mobile licence. The case faded but was never disproved. More recently, the United States has revived its scrutiny of MTN’s Iran dealings. Civil suits under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act — such as Zobay v. MTN Group — remain live, with fresh evidence now before a U.S. grand jury. The Foreign Policy Research Institute recently described these as cases that could “place multinationals in peril.”

Ramaphosa’s name may not be on any docket, but history has not changed: the chair who oversaw MTN’s expansion into Iran now occupies the Union Buildings. The echoes are impossible to ignore in Washington.

The network endures

MTN’s old political networks never entirely dissolved. Zane Dangor, Ramaphosa’s trusted ally and now Director-General of International Relations, sits at the centre of South Africa’s G20 presidency as its “Sherpa.” It was Dangor who recently assured journalists that Pretoria was unconcerned about U.S. pressure ahead of the G20 summit — a statement more defiant than diplomatic.

In the same period, U.S.–South African relations have chilled sharply: new tariff reviews, reduced diplomatic contact, and open concern in Washington about Pretoria’s alignment with Moscow and Tehran.

Far from being “out of the loop,” Ramaphosa is chairing the loop.

A dossier that writes itself

Anyone assembling the public record would find the pieces easily: MTN’s 2006–2013 annual reports, the Turkcell affidavits, the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act filings, and the Department of International Relations’ correspondence with MTN during the Iran licence years. It is a dossier that almost compiles itself — a story of how commercial ambition blurred into foreign policy, and how that legacy still shapes Pretoria’s stance today.

When the U.S. Justice Department re-opens a file on MTN, the tremor runs straight to the Presidency.

Misread by the media

It is tempting for analysts to portray Ramaphosa’s foreign policy as amateurish — as one journalist wrote this week, “South Africa’s amateurish grasp of foreign policy has once more been exposed.”
But perhaps what appears to be amateurism is strategy: to lie low while the legal and diplomatic crossfire intensifies.

Pretoria’s quiet may not be ignorance — it may be insulation. And that distinction matters. And once again, Ramaphosa and the ANC is poking at the US, not necessarily just President Trump, but the West, the dollar and undermining the GNU   

A provocation Washington cannot ignore

The Gaza accord, brokered by Washington and the very Middle Eastern states once hostile to Israel, has redefined the geopolitical landscape overnight. Yet South Africa clings to an older narrative, one that now places it to the left of Hamas itself.

For the U.S., this is more than ideological friction. It touches on the legal, financial, and personal legacy of the man at South Africa’s helm — a legacy that could soon find itself under renewed American scrutiny.

The real story

Pretoria’s silence in Sharm el-Sheikh was not absence.
It was the quiet of a President who knows precisely what’s at stake — and who may be more personally entangled in the Middle East than the public has yet been told.

*Patrick McLaughlin is a parliamentary affairs analyst and publisher of ParlyReportSA.com. He writes regularly on legislative developments affecting South African business and economic governance.