By today’s standards, I thought that the following article was balanced, informative, and free of propaganda.
From what I can gather, some serious attempts are being made to undermine the SA government and leverage them out of the BRICS orbit. There is a good supply of Twitter psyop accounts, for example, and many NGOs though, needless to say, they are only there to do good deeds.
For all their faults, the ANC is committed to the BRICS alliance, but their political dominance is probably waning due to nepotism/corruption. Generations of people no longer see them as the country’s liberators and reflex-vote. Since SA is a relatively wealthy country and a significant regional power, there’s a lot to play for in geopolitical terms.
In a recent conversation with my sister Karenetta (not really), she was surprised to learn that there were joint naval exercises held off the SA coast recently. K had heard that a Russian ship had docked in Cape Town and been run out of town. This has some plausibility since Cape Town is the San Francisco of SA (stupendous wealth shoulder-to-shoulder with abject poverty, vocal liberal populace, etc). The ship (named the Gorlov I think) docked there and then sailed on, as planned, to Durban and rendezvoused with the other participants in the naval war games thing.