SAFM ordered to apologise for allowing March and March leader to lie on air.
A strange thing happens to a claim when it moves from a WhatsApp group or a Facebook post into a radio studio. It changes its clothes.
What begins as a rumour on social media can sound very different once it enters a national broadcaster’s studio. The familiar presenter, the recognised station, the rituals of a professional interview, and the authority of being on air all lend the claim credibility it didn’t have before. The listener is no longer hearing merely what someone said online; they are hearing it through an institution they have been taught to trust, and it is easy to assume that if it has reached the microphone, someone must have checked whether it is true.
That is why the recent Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA) ruling against SAFM matters. It is also why some of the criticism of the ruling misses the point.
After SAFM broadcast the apology ordered by the BCCSA, some people asked whether organisations such as Macua (Mining Affected Communities United in Action) were now deciding what could and could not be said in the media. Others suggested that this amounted to controlling the narrative or restricting free speech.
It sounds like a reasonable concern. Nobody should want civil society, government, business or any political organisation to decide which opinions South Africans are permitted to hear.
But that is not what happened here.
We did not ask SAFM to stop interviewing Jacinta Ngobese-Zuma, nor did we ask the broadcaster to ban March and March, nor did we ask that controversial views about immigration be removed from the public conversation.
What we were asking was fairly basic: if a claim is presented as fact, particularly on a national broadcaster, the audience is entitled to know what it rests on and whether it can be verified.
The lie about immigrants and crime
Ngobese-Zuma told SAFM listeners that foreign nationals were responsible for 60% of serious crime in Gauteng… Read that sentence again. Not that she believed migrants were contributing to crime. Not that immigration was, in her view, badly managed. She gave a figure: 60%.
A number sounds precise; it sounds researched and official. Once such a number is repeated on national radio, it begins to circulate.
People repeat it at work. Someone forwards it to a WhatsApp family group. A politician quotes it. A Facebook post appears, saying, ‘Even the radio said foreigners commit 60% of crime’.
Soon, nobody remembers where the figure began. They only remember the figure.
However, when the claim was examined, the evidence failed to support it.
GroundUp and the Institute for Security Studies investigated the broader claims about migrants and serious crime and found no evidence that foreign nationals account for anything approaching such a share of serious crime. Even the prison statistics commonly invoked in these debates do not tell the story people imagine: a significant proportion of foreign nationals in prison are there for immigration-related offences, not the violent crimes usually implied.
And this is the crucial point: saying that a police officer mentioned a figure does not magically make it a reliable statistic, especially since it has been debunked numerous times.
The BCCSA found that SAFM failed to inquire about the claim’s origins. The commissioner noted that the presenter neither endorsed the 60% claim nor challenged it, leaving listeners to accept it.
That is the distinction between censorship and journalism. Censorship says: you may not say that. Journalism says: you have said it; now show us why we should believe you.
The lie about foreign military bases
The distinction matters because the 60% claim was not the only one. Listeners were also told about foreign military bases allegedly operating in South Africa. They heard allegations that NGOs receiving foreign funding were buying weapons. There were claims that explosives were entering the country and that foreigners were paying police officers.
Again, these are not vague political opinions. Either the military bases exist or they do not. Either particular NGOs are buying weapons or they are not. Either there is evidence of a widespread system in which migrants bribe police officers or there is not.
When GroundUp examined some of these claims, the picture began to unravel. The allegation that foreign-funded NGOs were buying weapons had no evidence to support it.
The story about alleged military camps was more complicated than the version being repeated publicly. There had been allegations that Basotho nationals were receiving military training in South Africa, but preliminary South African police investigations did not establish the existence of the camps as claimed.
Fake news
And this is how misinformation so often works. It rarely arrives wearing a sign that says: This is false!
We saw it on GroundUp when Ngobese-Zuma circulated footage purporting to show foreign nationals attacking South Africans in Mayfair, Johannesburg. Police later identified the footage as originating from a looting incident in 2021.
Think about what that means. A frightening image from a moment in our history can be pulled out years later, given a new explanation, and then sent into a society already anxious about immigration. If enough people believe the caption before the facts are checked, the damage has already begun. That is not a harmless ‘difference of opinion’.
News to distract and manipulate
South Africa has real problems. People are not imagining unemployment. They are not imagining overcrowded clinics, crime, housing shortages or failing municipalities.
The anger is real, but real anger can be directed at the wrong people.
Take schools. We repeatedly hear that foreign children are overwhelming South African classrooms. Yet figures cited by GroundUp indicate that foreign learners make up only about 1.8% of learners in South African schools. Our education crisis is real. But migrant children did not create it.
The same is true of unemployment. South Africa did not arrive at mass unemployment because migrants crossed the border. Our unemployment crisis has been built up over decades through economic stagnation, deindustrialisation, inequality, governance failures, and an economy that simply does not create enough decent work.
Removing migrants cannot magically repair that political economy. This does not mean there should be no debate about immigration. South Africans have every right to demand competent border management. The government has a responsibility to enforce immigration law. We should debate work permits, asylum systems, documentation and the capacity of public services.
Those are legitimate political questions, but they should be argued with evidence.
There is a line between saying, “I believe immigration policy is failing”, and saying, “foreigners commit 60% of serious crime”. This becomes even more important because of the way information now flows.
If you make a claim, show us the evidence
A claim may begin on a podcast, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube or WhatsApp. These spaces are messy, open and largely unregulated. We should be careful not to respond to that messiness with censorship. Progressive movements themselves depend on spaces where people can speak without first being approved by powerful gatekeepers.
But something different happens when those claims enter mainstream broadcasting. Claims should be free to move from the noisy public square into journalism and to do so unchanged, but they must be supported by verifiable facts.
The BCCSA ruling matters because it recognised this responsibility. It found five breaches involving serious allegations about foreign nationals and concluded that these assertions could expose migrants to “contempt, discrimination and even displacement”.
The Commissioner did not simply reprimand the SABC and leave the matter there. SAFM was ordered to return to the airwaves, tell its listeners what had gone wrong, and apologise. Because the truth cannot whisper after the lie has been given a microphone.
And perhaps that is the simplest way to understand this case. It was never about deciding who may speak; rather, it was about making claims that are supported by facts.
Nobody should control the media, not the government, not corporations, not political movements, not Macua, and not March and March. The best protection against anyone controlling the narrative is not to abandon scrutiny. It is to deepen it.
Free speech means that everybody gets to speak, but it does not mean that every claim must be believed.
Christopher Rutledge is the executive director of Macua
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