“You may find this article interesting. Rebecca Davis talks about the leader of the March on March campaign linking her to nuclear energy and Russia.” A friend sent me this email a few days ago. I blinked with amazement, thinking she must have got the wrong end of the stick. I opened the ten-minute podcast by Rebecca Davis, an investigative journalist at the Daily Maverick.
When I began watching, I was bewildered that Davis linked, on the one hand, the abominable demonstrations against black foreigners and a campaign to change the Constitution with, on the other hand, nuclear power and Russia. I have some personal interests here: I am strongly in favour of nuclear power and I have been to Moscow to help support it, and I have lovely black foreign neighbours and workers here in Kleinmond where I live.
I was horrified at the violent threats made against them by local blacks and feared for 30 June, which thank goodness proceeded with a minimum of death and destruction. Only a few black Afrophobic mobs broke into households they believed to be harbouring black foreigners; only a few were looted; only a few black foreigners lost all their possessions; only a few Africans, some with infant children born in South Africa, were warned to get out of the country or else.
After I had watched Davis’s podcast, I began thinking about it, and the fog of bewilderment cleared to a new understanding. I thank Davis for this.
I call March and March and Operation Dudula “racist” because essentially that is what they are. “Xenophobia”, “tribalism” and “racism” are variations of the same thing, and this thing has afflicted all human societies, black, white and brown, in every continent throughout history. Harsh economic conditions exacerbate the problem and give ammunition to racist organisations.
In England in 1381, in the Peasants’ Revolt, because of severe economic problems, local workers fell upon productive Flemish textile workers. In South Africa in 2026, because of our sinking economy, local black workers fall upon productive Malawian workers. They don’t care whether they are legal or illegal, they just hate them because they are Malawian. The problem is worst in Africa simply because black Africans are by far the oldest peoples in the world and have had a much longer time to differentiate into different races – or “tribes” if you wish, but it is the same thing.
The key figure in Davis’s podcast is a woman called Princy Mthombeni. She is the founder and chair of a campaign group called South Africans for Constitutional Reform (SACR). This is described as “a civic campaign group advocating for constitutional amendments prioritizing citizens’ rights, with a focus on immigration, resource allocation, and NGO [non-government organisation] oversight.”
The “focus on immigration” seems to mean in practice a violent war against black African foreigners living in South Africa. Mthombeni is not the leader of March and March – that is Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma – but she seems to work closely with it and supports its racist views. “NGO oversight” is as sinister. What it seems to call for is the banning of all NGOs that campaign for things she disagrees with, something that even the National Party and the ANC could never quite succeed in doing, or indeed even tried much to do.
A disastrous speech
But I was most concerned to hear that “Princy is a Zulu nuclear communications specialist and founder of Africa4Nuclear.” As a profound believer in nuclear power, the last thing I want is to be associated with racist sentiments purporting to support nuclear. My aged brain began to resurrect a vague memory that I might have shared a platform with her where she gave a disastrous speech in favour of nuclear.
I support nuclear power because it is the safest, cleanest source of grid electricity we know and because it is affordable, reliable, sustainable and with the least waste problem of any energy technology. I can back all of this up with a mountain of data, science and history. Nuclear is by far the best source of future grid electricity for South Africa. Solar and wind are by far the worst, and by far the most expensive, as experience around the world shows. In Germany, the decision to shut down nuclear, her cheapest source of electricity, and try to replace it with hundreds of billions of Euros’ worth of colossal wind turbines and gigantic solar arrays has resulted in economic devastation, deindustrialisation, poverty and environmental degradation. England is following her to ruin along the same green path
Davis says that Mthombeni was strongly in favour of the much-misunderstood Russian nuclear deal between Zuma and Putin, which was struck down by a Western Cape Court in 2017, and says she had many visits to Russia, sponsored by Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear power company.
I had better describe my own interests here.
In 2016, I gave a speech at a nuclear conference in Pretoria. Several top managers of Rosatom heard me and for some reason were impressed. (I can’t stand the sound of my own voice but they didn’t seem to mind.) They asked if I should like to go to Moscow to repeat the speech. I jumped at the chance. They paid for my economy class flights and put me up in a Moscow hotel for a few days. They also flew me to Voronezh (near Kursk) to see the commissioning of the new 1200 VVER reactor – a wonderful machine. In the event I didn’t speak at their energy conference and only had a few TV interviews where I was happy to support nuclear power and VVERs. After this, I stayed on in Moscow for a few days at my own expense in a cheap hotel there. (Yes, you can find cheap hotels in central Moscow.) I received no fee but I did have the most marvellous holiday of my life.
I found Moscow wonderful. Everything worked, the streets were spotlessly clean, the people were polite and friendly, there were capitalist shops and restaurants all over the place (I’m a vegetarian and had one of the best salads I’ve ever had at a MacDonald’s in Moscow), and it was extremely safe, much safer than London or New York.
My Russian guide told me she walks alone in central Moscow at any time of day or night with complete safety. It was bursting with interest and surprises, perhaps the biggest for me being the huge number of churches, again far more than in any Western city I’ve visited, all with gleaming cupolas.
I’m making no political comment here: I’m just saying what I saw. Moscow almost certainly is not representative of Russia at large. The local people said Putin was responsible for turning Moscow from filthy chaos into a fine and successful city. But this is the same Putin who ordered the atrocious and bloody invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. No provocation comes even close to justifying this wicked act, which has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and destroyed much of the Ukrainian economy. I am delighted although surprised that Ukraine is fighting back with such ingenuity and courage that the Russians now almost seem on the defensive. I pray that Russia now just asks for peace.
Reliable vendor
South Africa needs a lot more nuclear power, and it needs to procure it with a reliable vendor. One of the nonsensical refrains of the anti-nuclear lobby is that nuclear power plants are never built on time and budget. In fact, reactors of a proven design built by a vendor with a continuous construction programme will be on time and budget. Such vendors now are South Korea, Russia, China and Japan (despite recent blunders with her regulator). The French used to be very good, building Koeberg for example, but have lost their way. The Americans floundered some years ago, although they used to have successful nuclear power and still have a superb design, the AP1000. Russia, meaning Rosatom, is definitely one of the front-runners for South Africa.
In 2017, the anti-nuclear lobby claimed that they had won a great victory in the Western Cape High Court by striking down a corrupt trillion-rand deal that was just about to happen between Russia (Putin) and South Africa (Zuma) for 9.6 Gigawatts of new nuclear power plant. This was nonsense. What happened was that in 2015 the Department of Energy gazetted its intention to procure new nuclear capacity. The first step was to explore Intergovernmental Agreements (IGAs), where possible vendor countries were invited to express interest. This was to be followed by “Requests for Proposals” (RFPs) and then bids by suitable vendors.
In 2017, we never got beyond IGAs. Various countries showed interest but Russia, which is very clumsy commercially, got over-excited in its IGA, thinking wrongly that this was an actual procurement step. Two anti-nuke NGOs, Earthlife Africa and the Southern African Faith Communities, challenged the process in the Western Cape. The judge, Mr Justice Bozalek, agreed the procedures had not been properly followed, and ruled against the Department of Energy, thus halting the procurement process. His arguments looked pretty flimsy to me but I have no competence in these matters and so would have had to accept his decision. This scuppered nuclear power expansion for a good while.
Such a nuclear deal between Putin and Zuma would have been corrupt of course, but there are international safeguards that limit nuclear corruption, unlike coal corruption which happened in large scale with Medupi and Kusile. The figure of R1 trillion was pure thumb suck but in fact that amount of money for the enormous amounts of safe, clean electricity that these reactors would have provided for a very long time (modern reactors last 60 years or more) would have been very cheap.
Princy Mthombeni thinks, correctly, that nuclear procurement was temporarily scuppered in 2017 because of action by anti-nuclear NGOs. Therefore, she wants such NGOs banned. I couldn’t disagree more. I think NGOs are vital for democracy and all should be tolerated whatever their views, even if they receive some foreign funding. I belong to the oldest and noblest of all, the South African Institute of Race Relations (IRR), founded in 1929. No institution has done more useful work in exposing the sins of both apartheid and the ANC, and recommending remedies. The best single campaign NGO was the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) which did wonderful work in combating the madness of President Mbeki, who denied that HIV caused AIDS. I don’t agree with some NGOs, such as Earthlife Africa and Greenpeace, but would not dream of trying to ban them.
She did harm
In November 2025, I spoke at a Libertarian Seminar in Milnerton, Cape Town. I spoke against “the anti-science madness of climate alarm”, pointing out that above 150 ppm CO2 has never been seen to have any effect on global temperatures. After me, a woman spoke in favour of nuclear power. She was awful. She didn’t seem to know the first thing about nuclear science and technology, or about nuclear costing. She spoke only about the political reasons we should support nuclear power. During question time, an anti-nuke member of the audience made the usual comment on why nuclear was unaffordable. I could have explained why he was wrong in a minute. She couldn’t. She floundered and blustered. She did harm to the nuclear cause. It was only this week that I looked again at the LibSem programme and saw that she was Princy Mthombeni.
It seems she has been promoting nuclear power for decades, and yet has never bothered to learn anything about nuclear technology. But apparently she has been highly successful in winning converts to nuclear power. She is something I had never met before, a pro-nuclear mirror image of the anti-nuclear activists.
Most of them, too, have never bothered to learn anything about nuclear science but have been successful in attacking it. They just keep repeating ignorant nonsense such as “There is no safe level of radiation”. Actually, all living things have always been bathed in natural radiation far higher than anything they would get from nuclear power today, causing no harm at all. Or they suggest that the longer the half-life of a radioactive material the more radioactive it is – the precise inverse of the truth. A radioactive substance with a half-life of five minutes is extremely dangerous, one with a half-life of five billion years harmless. The same with the climate alarm brigade. They have been highly successful in raising hysteria about CO2 by screaming “Denialist!” or, worse, speaking drivel about “97% of scientists”.
So perhaps we should support Mthombeni’s successful but ignorant campaign for nuclear. But I can’t.
Mthombeni is right in suggesting that some of the green groups from Europe are racists who want to stop black Africa from developing. I was at an energy conference some years ago when the subject of black Africa came up. I said, “I want all Africans to have the same high level of prosperity as the people of Germany”. There was a gasp of shock around the table. The white greens were horrified. Greenpeace, which began with noble ideals, has degenerated into a European green group whose main aim seems to be to stop black Africa from getting modern technology, such as nuclear power. I’m completely on Mthombeni’s side here.
I can’t help noting that both Princy Mthombeni and Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma are Zulu, and so is Jacob Zuma, who has given support to them. I also can’t help noticing that Julius Malema, who to his great credit has denounced this Afrophobia, is Pedi. This is sinister. I know what the IRR would say about it: get economic growth and achieve prosperity for all, and any latent tribalism will fade into a harmless background. I agree. But in the meantime, I wish Princy Mthombeni would learn nuclear science and support nuclear for the right reasons, and I wish she would want to help all Africans, not just her own group.
In her podcast, Rebecca Davis says Mthombeni will not accept calls from the Daily Maverick. I am happy to accept calls from the Daily Maverick, Rebecca Davis or anybody else on any topic.
[Image: Screengrab from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxzQ4Uk-Gj4]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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