![\"\"](\"https:\/\/amabhungane.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Richard-Pithouse-Editor-In-Chief.jpg\")
New Frame sat within a global network of media, thinktanks, unions and political parties tied to Singham as funder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In South Africa the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) \u2014 the largest single union in the country with a reputation among the international left for its militancy \u2014 became the centre point of Singham\u2019s network, around which the various other entities hovered, including New Frame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Circumstantial evidence suggests that the Singham network became an increasingly coherent political project intertwined with the propaganda and disinformation machinery of certain state actors, most importantly the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the process Singham\u2019s role in NUMSA and his relationship with its General Secretary Irvin Jim also became controversial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pithouse has responded to public criticism and questions from media, including amaBhungane, in a series of lengthy letters and an op-ed<\/a> in the Daily Maverick, alleging that New Frame\u2019s management and funder are the victims of conspiracies and political point scoring from the \u201csectarian left, a space well-known for being riven with paranoia and bitter enmity\u201d. (His full response to amaBhungane\u2019s questions<\/a> can be found here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet it is hard to conceive of a more paranoid response than the intensely personal attacks launched on one of the authors of this article \u2014 Reddy \u2014 following the delivery of questions from amaBhungane about Singham, New Frame and NUMSA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In one of his letters Pithouse says, \u201cReddy is widely perceived, across the fractious South African left, to be embedded in one faction of the left, a faction involved in intense contestation over the future of the trade union movement, and therefore, not as an independent journalist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As this article was being edited NUMSA\u2019s Jim issued a rambling six page attack<\/a> on Reddy and amaBhungane \u2013 while failing to answer any of the questions posed about Singham and his network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, Pithouse paints much of the criticism against New Frame and its funder as \u201cmalicious slander\u201d and \u201cracist\u201d attacks from a \u201csmall but vociferous faction\u201d of embittered ex-staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On Singham, Pithouse says they first met in 2017 and \u201ctalked about a possible media project that would be broadly pro-working class and Pan-African. I haven\u2019t met him in person for years and he has never sought to discuss specific articles or more specific details of editorial policy with me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, his unwillingness or inability to answer key questions around Singham\u2019s decision to withdraw funding, and explain the channels and contractual arrangements of New Frame\u2019s opaque funding model, leaves important questions lingering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why did the funder so quickly fall out of love with the publication that had been his darling? Could New Frame\u2019s demise have been because it was no longer politically useful?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Attempting to answer these questions has led to a worldwide tour of entities and individuals seemingly built around Singham\u2019s funding, New Frame among them. This dense network seems to have taken on its funder\u2019s pro-China political bent, although here New Frame appears to have been the odd one out \u2014 never entirely falling into line with the ideological boundaries that came to define the network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Singham did not respond to detailed written questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Singham\u2019s network <\/strong>\u2014 from the US to SA <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Singham is a 68-year-old American tech tycoon and the son of a prominent intellectual. He made a fortune through Thoughtworks \u2014 a software design and IT consulting company which he founded in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2017, Singham sold his company to UK-based Apax for an undisclosed sum. At the time, Thoughtworks had 4 500 staff spread across 45 offices in 15 countries. It was taken public late last year and has a market cap today of about $4.6-billion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thoughtworks in South Africa provided Singham with his entry point into NUMSA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The union, and later its political party offshoot, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers\u2019 Party (SRWP), became central nodes in Singham\u2019s network of moneyed influence, around which a number of Singham-linked entities began to orbit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2016, Thoughtworks began doing pro-bono work for NUMSA, conducting a membership survey and updating the union\u2019s IT systems for managing membership and subscriptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thoughtworks employees were effectively seconded to the union, among them Vashna Jagarnath, Pithouse\u2019s former partner and a close confidante of NUMSA general secretary Jim, who is also the chair of the SRWP. This arrangement, according to one former Thoughtworks source, gave Singham his \u201cin\u201d to NUMSA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2017, the year Singham sold Thoughtworks, marked a turning point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a blog post about the sale from August that year, Thoughtworks\u2019 chief scientist, Martin Fowler, cited Singham\u2019s increasing involvement in his activist work as one of the reasons for the sale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c[As] I saw [Singham] spend more energy on his activist work, it was apparent it would be appealing to him to accelerate that activism with the money that selling Thoughtworks would bring.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n As an article<\/a> in the online magazine New Lines described, several Thoughtworks employees \u201cbegan jumping ship\u201d and turning up at various US-based charitable organisations linked to Singham. These began funnelling money to his various causes across the world, including New Frame and others in South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key among the US donor foundations is an organisation that received tax exempt status in the US in 2017 \u2013 the People\u2019s Support Foundation (PSF).<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to US tax filings, PSF\u2019s president is Singham\u2019s partner, Jodie Evans, who, according to the New Lines article, established the entity \u201cwith the help of Chad Wathington, Thoughtworks\u2019 chief strategy officer\u201d. Thoughtworks\u2019 former general counsel, Jason Pfetcher, is listed as a director and treasurer of the organisation, and its secretary is one Jo Anderson-Figueroa.<\/p>\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n The PSF provides grants from tax-deductible donations it receives and from revenue from corporate stocks it holds. The donations it receives come via the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund, a \u201cdonor-advised charity\u201d that conceals the original source of the funds from the public record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The PSF\u2019s tax filings for 2019 show it had assets of $156,393,895 and distributed $12,218,487 in charitable disbursements that year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over 2018 and 2019 it channelled US$1.87-million (nearly R32-million at the current exchange rate) to the Centre for Pan-African Media (CPAM), the non-profit that houses New Frame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A letter from CPAM announcing the retrenchments of staff shows how reliant the organisation was on a single source of funds. It stated that over the last six months it had \u201creceived 99.9 percent of its funding requirements from one foundation\u201d, and that it could not secure funding beyond the end of September.<\/p>\n\n\n\n CPAM has three directors \u2014 Pithouse, Tariro Takuva, a former senior Thoughworks employee, and Neo Bodibe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bodibe is a longtime NUMSA staffer who sat on the boards of the NUMSA Investment Company and chaired one of its subsidiaries until November 2021. She is currently the General Manager: Employee Relations at Transnet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bodibe told amaBhungane: \u201cMy role as a member of the board of CPAM was to provide advice and oversight on financial, governance and HR matters… The mandate of the board did not extend to editorial decisions and the board did not at any point influence the editorial direction of New Frame.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The New Lines article detailed a complex string of other funding vehicles run out of the US by people connected to Singham. Their tax filings do not provide details on the organisations they fund outside the US, though notably, the New York-based United Community Fund (UCF) contributed a total of $22.9-million to various unspecified entities and causes in sub-Saharan Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another major recipient of Singham\u2019s largesse in South Africa is Pan-Africa Today (PAT), which received over $2.5-million from the PSF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The non-profit, founded in 2016, has been involved in running NUMSA\u2019s political school in Limpopo and providing political education to NUMSA members.<\/p>\n\n\n\n PAT\u2019s directors are Takuva, Jonis Alasow, a former student of Pithouse at Rhodes University, NUMSA regional leader and senior SRWP treasurer Andile Zitho, and Ngenda Mwikisa, second vice-president of the Zambian Socialist Party, which Singham is understood to back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pan Africa Today appears to play an important role in bringing together various Singham-linked entities and initiatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A 2021 SRWP report by Jagarnath, who serves as the deputy general secretary of the party, notes that PAT \u201cworks with various organisations across the continent but its fundamental relationship is with the NUMSA, Socialist Party of Zambia and SRWP\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The report notes PAT\u2019s involvement in \u201cover 16 international schools and 4 international conferences\u201d, and the non-profit\u2019s role in \u201cbuilding of a Pan African Network of socialist organisations across the African continent\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The report also mentions that the SRWP is part of the \u201cleadership core\u201d of an organisation called the International People\u2019s Assembly (IPA), which bills itself as a sort of umbrella organisation for trade unions, political parties and social movements. Its affiliates in Africa are the SRWP, NUMSA, the Socialist Party of Zambia, and the Socialist Movement of Ghana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Singham is directly involved in the IPA, and it appears to play an important coordinating role in his network of influence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On 23 June 2018, a group of activists met in South Africa to \u201cexamine possibilities of using the experiences from the GDR for today’s international struggles.\u201d The GDR, or German Democratic Republic, is the former East Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The meeting included \u201cEast German dignitaries and politically organized youth\u201d, a NUMSA delegation, and a contingent of representatives from various organisations linked to Singham, including PAT\u2019s Alasow, and one Franziska Kleiner, who was listed as a PAT representative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kleiner is a former lead for social and economic justice at Thoughtworks in Germany, and is listed as the president of the UCF \u2013 the Singham-linked New York entity that made large donations to sub-Saharan Africa. Jagarnath participated in the meeting as the strategy advisor for the SRWP and coordinator for the Tricontinental Institute \u2013 of which more later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also in attendance was Singham, who was listed as representing the People\u2019s Support Foundation and the \u201cInternational Assembly\u201d. He introduced the meeting to the rather loftily termed \u201cInternational Assembly of Organizations and Movements of Peoples Working to Rebuild an International Movement to Fight Against Capitalism and Imperialism\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tellingly, in the footnotes of the meeting report under the heading \u201cfurther projects\u201d is point \u201ce\u201d, which states: \u201cRoy’s invitation to the next Chinese Communist Party Congress\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The picture that begins to emerge is of a tightly-woven network linked to Singham and his money, in which a coterie of activists, academics and politicians close to him hold overlapping positions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Further evidence of this is seen in a South African non-profit called Common Ground, another cog in the Singham machine which a New Frame source believed was one of the funding vehicles for the publication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Common Ground counts Takuva as a director, alongside two others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One is Kayla Jacobs, a former Rhodes student whose LinkedIn profile describes her as the \u201chead of operations\u201d for \u201cvarious companies\u201d. Jacobs works for another company called Gspan which, which appears to be linked to Singham.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Common Ground\u2019s third director is Anderson-Figueroa, the secretary of the PSF, who appears to be embedded in the wider Singham network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2009 she was the recipient of a Chinese government scholarship to complete her master\u2019s degree at Jilin, a leading university under the direct jurisdiction of China’s Ministry of Education. Her thesis was titled, \u201cThe win-win partnership between China and the Caribbean after the cold war.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n From the outside, the boundaries between these organisations appear rather permeable, with the same group people linked to Singham circulating between them, seemingly as a conduit for Singham\u2019s activism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pithouse, however, stressed that New Frame was insulated from the whims of its funder, who he says has never made a direct donation to New Frame, but instead \u201csupported foundations from which New Frame has received funding\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have never reported to Singham or any other individual. I report, as is standard in donor-funded organisations, to a board that in turn sends proposals and reports to foundation boards. Singham does not sit on the boards of any of the foundations that he has supported.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n However Singham\u2019s influence, and the role of Chinese propaganda in his network, become a little clearer when one looks more closely at the role of the Tricontinental Institute, an organisation which received $12.5-million from the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund and $700 000 from the UCF.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The China connection<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Tricontinental is a research institute, headed by prominent Indian Marxist academic Vijay Prashad, focusing on the global South. According to its website, it has offices in Latin America, India and South Africa and is a partner member of the International People\u2019s Assembly.<\/p>\n\n\n It appears to play an important ideological role in Singham\u2019s network as a \u201cbridge\u201d between \u201cacademic production\u201d and \u201cpolitical and social movements\u201d. The research it generates is disseminated throughout the network, informing the political positions and talking points of the various other organisations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is also the crucial link between Singham\u2019s network and the Chinese Communist Party\u2019s public relations infrastructure. In Tricontinental, the party seemingly has a willing ally in China\u2019s communication operations and a means of implanting the party\u2019s official message within the international left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The South African leg of the outfit, a non-profit company called The Tricontinental Pan Africa, includes Takuva and Bodibe as directors. So too is Phakamile Hlubi. She is NUMSA\u2019s spokesperson and was an electoral candidate for the SRWP in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kate Janse van Rensburg resigned as a director in 2019. She was also a SRWP candidate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mikaela Erskog also resigned as a director in 2019. Her twitter profile describes her as researcher at Tricontinental, and a member of two other organisations associated with people in the Singham network \u2013 No Cold War and Dongsheng News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She is also quoted as a spokesperson for SRWP and has fronted for a number of pro-China initiatives, such as an event titled \u201cTowards A Multipolar World: An International Peace Forum\u201d in 2021, and, this year, an event called \u201cChina Is Not Our Enemy Webinar: A Closer Look At China In Africa\u201d. Both were promoted by Codepink, a women\u2019s anti-war activist organisations founded by Evans, Singham\u2019s partner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other sponsors of this year\u2019s event include the Qiao Collective and The People\u2019s Forum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The former describes itself as \u201ca diaspora Chinese media collective challenging US aggression on China\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to Qiao Collective\u2019s website, the organisation aims to \u201cto foster critical consideration of the role of China and socialism with Chinese characteristics in contemporary geopolitics\u201d. Its routinely publishes articles that promote the Chinese official narrative on issues from Hong Kong, Tiananmen Square, and the persecution of ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The People\u2019s Forum is a cultural centre in Manhattan which received $12 million from the PSF in 2019. It shares an office with Breakthrough News, which the New Lines article describes as a project \u201cspearheaded by Rania Khalek, an apologist for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Khalek was previously a producer and host for Maffick, a media site which sued Facebook after the social media giant posted an advisory comment on the Maffick pages identifying them as \u201cRussia state-controlled media.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maffick filed an application for a temporary retraining order requiring Facebook to take down the label. A California court denied the application based on unrebutted evidence establishing that Maffick had multiple ties to the Russian government and known Russian propaganda outlets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Again, Evans crops up as one of The People\u2019s Forum\u2019s directors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As the New Lines article shows, and amaBhungane has independently verified, The People\u2019s Forum sits within a web of US-based activist organisation and funding entities including the PSF and UCF, that are linked via money flows, shared addresses, and a familiar cast of characters connected to Singham.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The media component of this network includes organisations like the People\u2019s Dispatch, the Qiao Collective, Breakthrough News and Dongsheng News.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of these media organisations share a similar editorial line, consistently repeating official narratives of the Chinese state and communist party by, for instance, legitimising China\u2019s persecution of ethnic Uighurs as a fight against \u201cterrorism\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prashad, the head of Tricontinental, looms large in this media ecosystem \u2014 his widely syndicated articles faithfully toeing the Chinese party line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n New Frame also regularly carried Prashad\u2019s pieces \u2014 something that several former New Frame journalists said led to some unease among staff who objected to his partisan politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prashad did not respond to questions sent to him for this article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, Pithouse described him as \u201ca highly regarded writer, held in high esteem by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis. He is published all over the world, often in prestigious publications.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAs with any writer one does not have to agree with everything that Prashad writes to recognise that he is a major figure whose work often adds real value to public disputation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The overlap between New Frame and Prashad\u2019s Tricontinental ran deeper because Pithouse wore two hats \u2013 one as New Frame\u2019s editor-in-chief and the other as an employee of Tricontinental. Various websites to which he has contributed describe Pithouse as a \u201ccoordinator\u201d for the Tricontinental in South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Tricontinental has an office housed within New Frame offices \u2014 a \u201cglassed-in cube\u201d as one New Frame source put it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Commenting on the organisational overlap and the suggestion that New Frame may not have been sufficiently insulated from the Singham political network, Pithouse wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNew Frame has always operated independently \u2014 legally, practically and editorially \u2014 from the organisations that are mentioned in the list of allegations. Of course, we did publish excerpts from some research by the Tricontinental research institute, but we did the same from a wide variety of sources including other research organisations, new books from various publishers, etc, etc. We did not publish excerpts from all the institute\u2019s research and there was no expectation that we would do so.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Belt and Road<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Singham has a longstanding connection to China and a seemingly genuine ideological affinity for Maoism and the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1971, as a seventeen-year-old, Singham joined the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit, which was heavily influenced by Maoist thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In an email sent in August last year to staff at some of the organisations he funds, Singham said, \u201cI have been following China since I was 14 years old. The Chinese and Cuban revolutions defined my generation’s attraction to liberation and socialism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Singham worked closely with Chinese tech giant Huawei as a consultant, according to the New Lines article, and in 2005 Thoughtworks opened offices in China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometime after selling Thoughtworks, Singham moved from the US to China, and currently owns or part owns a number of companies domiciled there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2021, Indian media reported<\/a> that India’s Enforcement Directorate named Singham in a money laundering case against Indian media portal Newsclick and its People’s Dispatch website, alleging that he was “the key source of Rs 38crore” (approximately US$5 million) it received between 2018 and 2021, allegedly to promote a pro-Chinese narrative in the Indian media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The funds were alleged to have passed through a network of companies and NGOs including US-based Worldwide Media Holdings (allegedly owned by Singham), the Justice and Education Fund (one of the Singham-linked US foundations), Gspan LLC and Tricontinental Ltd in the US, and Centro Popular Demidas, Brazil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n India\u2019s ministry of home affairs went so far as to notify banks to flag NGO donations from these companies in terms of India\u2019s Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act \u2014 though it should be noted that the right-wing Indian government\u2019s blocking of foreign funding for certain NGOs because of \u201canti-national activities\u201d has been widely criticized as muzzling dissent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Responding to the allegations contained in the Indian press, Pithouse said, \u201cI would also caution you to take great care with the claims made by the highly repressive and right-wing Indian state. It\u2019s hostility to donor funded NGOs, independent media and the left in general is well known.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prashad\u2019s own links to the Chinese party-state are significant, given his role as a prominent ideologue within the Singham network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Prashad is a senior non-resident fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, a think tank affiliated with Beijing\u2019s Renmin University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The institute bills itself as a \u201cnew style think tank with Chinese characteristics\u201d, and says it directs \u201cthe Chinese Think Tank Cooperation Alliance for the Belt and Road\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Belt and Road initiative is the centre-piece of China\u2019s foreign policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a sign of just how embedded Chongyang is in Chinese officialdom, the institute and Renmin co-hosted an event last year organised by the People\u2019s Government of Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region and the State Council Information Office of the People\u2019s Republic of China, also known as the Central Propaganda Department, an important organ in the propaganda machinery of the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Notably, two research fellows from the Tricontinental were listed as presenters. One of them, Tings Chak, also served as the secretary of the New York-based UCF and is a regular contributor to the pro-China media platforms in the Singham network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A write-up of the event shows that it was, predictably, a sanitized affair which uncritically promoted the Chinese government line on Xinjiang and entirely elided any mention of the persecution of Uighurs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This sort of staunchly pro-China politics appears to have seeped into the various organisations of the South African sphere of Singham\u2019s network in which New Frame found itself \u2014 and was a source of disquiet to at least some of its staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More than just friends?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Singham\u2019s August 2021 email \u2014 the one in which he explains his interest in China \u2014 shines more light on his connections to the Chinese establishment and the extent to which that influenced his network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In it, he urges recipients to attend an online lecture by Li Bo, who Singham writes is \u201ca very good friend of mine here [in China]\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Li Bo is an academic linked to the Singham network as a representative of Tricontinental in China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He is the executive director of the Shanghai Chunqiu Institute for Development and Strategic Studies, assistant dean at the China Institute of Fudan University, and the academic representative of the Guancha Syndicate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All three organisations appear to be part of the Chinese propaganda machine linked to the party-state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Guancha is a popular and influential Chinese online news portal with a nationalist editorial line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/amabhungane.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/SinghamRoyPhoto.jpg.webp\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/amabhungane.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/final-final.png\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/amabhungane.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Vijay-Prashad.jpg\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/amabhungane.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/irvin_jim_source_governmentza_cc_by-nd_20-scaled.jpg\")