FILE PICTURE: Ivor Ichikowitz, executive chairman of Paramount Group, extolls the virtues of the Maverick, a police armoured personnel carrier, at the opening of the Africa Aerospace and Defence air show at the Ysterplaat military base in Cape Town in 2008.
Image: AMBROSE PETERS
By Gillian Schutte
The 2025 Africa Together Conference, organised by the African Society of Cambridge University (ASCU), has dominated headlines due to Julius Malema’s UK visa denial. But the deeper scandal is not that the EFF leader was barred from entering Britain—it is that he accepted the invitation in the first place. Refusing visas to Black people on the grounds of race or ideology is an abomination of imperial fascism, yet when self-proclaimed revolutionaries cosy up to the very apparatus that polices Black bodies, the harm radiates across Africa, not just the targeted individual.
Why would the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters, a man who built his reputation on defiance of imperialism and capitalist exploitation, choose to endorse a stage funded by a weapons-manufacturing, arms-dealing billionaire, and Ghanaian fintech firms that monetise African precarity? What does it mean when a self-styled revolutionary aligns with a platform bankrolled by the very forces that entrench underdevelopment and inequality across the continent? This is not just a story about denied visas—it is also a story about political credibility.
The event in question is the 11th Annual Africa Together Conference, themed “The Making of Africa’s Future Presidents.” Though it sounds legitimate, it is, horrifyingly, funded by the Ichikowitz Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Ivor Ichikowitz, founder of Paramount Group, Africa’s largest privately-owned arms dealer, headquartered in South Africa but operating globally. Ichikowitz’s wealth is rooted in weapons production and military contracting—industries that thrive on war, surveillance, and the securitisation of poverty. He has also been associated with the United Nations Oil-for-Food scandal, a programme originally intended to allow Iraq to sell oil for humanitarian needs under sanctions but which became one of the most infamous cases of global corruption, with private actors extracting illicit profit through bribes, smuggling, and opaque dealings.
More recently, Ichikowitz publicly condemned the South African government’s submission to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza—positioning himself against a historic Pan-African stand for Palestinian liberation and aligning instead with the global architecture of settler-colonial impunity. His foundation’s funding of an event focused on African youth leadership is clearly not about his generosity—it is about narrative control. His youth initiatives, including the African Youth Survey, promote neoliberal ideals under the banner of empowerment. They sanitise his image while ensuring that revolutionary energy is redirected into manageable, market-friendly discourse.
The other sponsors offer no real alternative. Zeepay is a fintech company facilitating mobile financial services in underserved markets—its profits rely on transactional economies that thrive in the absence of structural redistribution. Golden Palm Investments is a venture-capital firm that identifies scalable start-ups in Africa and converts community needs into profitable products. Bantaba, a tech-investment platform, builds pipelines between African developers and diaspora capital, embedding extractive logics into the very architecture of so-called innovation. All three are Ghanaian firms operating with Western-aligned business models that convert economic desperation into opportunity.
These entities are hardly about funding African empowerment. Rather they are about investing in Africa’s vulnerability. They convert systemic poverty into business opportunity and disguise it in the language of upliftment. Conferences like Africa Together are their public-relations vehicles. They legitimise capital accumulation under the slippery guise of transformation.
The monetisation of poverty has become the moral camouflage of our time. Venture funds and fintechs speak of “solutions” while avoiding the root causes of dispossession: land theft, colonial debt, and structural adjustment. By reframing suffering as a market gap, they erase political struggle and install corporate fixes. The result is a generation of youth trained not to demand justice but to pitch start-ups.
Malema’s participation in this neoliberal spectacle is indefensible. For over a decade, he has positioned himself as a radical voice—against the ANC’s capitulation to global capital, against the mining houses that extract and displace, against the white elite who continue to hoard land and power. His decision to stand on a stage funded by these very interests is not just ironic—it is a failure of revolutionary commitment.
Even the setting of the conference—the University of Cambridge—is telling. Cambridge remains a cornerstone of British intellectual imperialism. To host a Pan-African gathering here, with funding from billionaires and private-equity firms, is to re-enact the very dynamics of subjugation that African revolutions sought to undo. The venue signals who is truly in control of the narrative.
That Malema was the only major political figure invited is no accident. His global profile allows the conference to posture as radical while remaining ideologically safe. He becomes the brand ambassador of a curated resistance—one that gestures left but lives comfortably within the frameworks of elite endorsement.
Africa Together is not about African sovereignty—it is about African compliance. It is a containment zone for radical energy, where revolution is rebranded as entrepreneurship and militancy is repackaged as motivational speaking. It is a simulation of liberation, built by those who fear its realisation.
As someone who has robustly defended Malema’s voice in the past, it is difficult to write this. But solidarity must not become sycophancy. We must ask—when revolutionaries begin taking their cues from capital, what revolution is left?Africa does not need another conference. It needs clarity. And the courage to say no to invitations that ask Africans to perform freedom inside structures designed to prevent it.
Who funds our leaders? Who scripts their speeches? Who benefits from their applause? These are not rhetorical questions. They are the foundation of real revolutionary thought.
There is no future in elite-funded emancipation. Anyone serious about reclaiming African autonomy, must reject the idea that justice can be sponsored. Malema’s potential presence on that stage would not have challenged power—it would have authenticated it.
Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and critical-race scholar known for her radical critiques of neoliberalism, whiteness, and donor-driven media. Her work centres African liberation, social justice, and revolutionary thought.