Tehran and Arak under chemical siege:
Iranian media reported on 8 April that US-Israeli strikes hit the Iran Aluminium Company in Arak, the country’s largest aluminium producer, along with the Amirkabir petrochemical complex in Mahshahr. A strike on a plant of that scale is the ultimate act of terrorism. Aluminium fires generate dense aluminium oxide smoke and release a cocktail of corrosive and toxic gases.
Health guidance warns that inhaling aluminium fumes can trigger metal fume fever, chest tightness and coughing, while fire runoff can contaminate the surrounding environment. Workers know all too well what a furnace does when it explodes and now families living downwind know it too.
That strike belongs to the same barbaric campaign that set Tehran’s fuel depots alight in March. Since then, sunrise in the capital has arrived with dread. Mothers bend over children whose wracking coughs have ricocheted off soot-stained walls since the night the sky burned. Older people die choking on congestion. Black grit gathers on the sill, on the leaves in the courtyard, on the chair left out in the rain. Domestic animals lie dead in the streets.
Weeks have passed, yet the aftermath has seeped into everyday life, a poltergeist that lives in the walls, in the ceilings and in the laboured breathing of a newborn child.
On the night of 7 March, Israeli jets hit oil reservoirs at Shahran, Shahr-e-Rey and Kuhak, reservoirs holding roughly 215 million litres of fuel. Fire rose over a city of 13 million people. Thick black smoke hung over Tehran for hours as the heat at the source proved too fierce for firefighters to penetrate. The acrid stench of burning moved through neighbourhoods. Chemical absorption into condensation then unleashed the toxic load in rain beating down over homes, streets, gardens and drains.
Iranian authorities placed medical centres on high alert and urged people, especially children, older people and those with respiratory or cardiovascular illness, to remain indoors. The World Health Organization backed that warning. This was no abstract strike on infrastructure. The city inhaled a planned assault on daily life.
It is the residue chemistry that tells the story better than any news report can. Akshay Deoras said the strikes released soot, smoke, oil particles, sulphur compounds and likely heavy metals from damaged structures. Experts compared the event to a very severe industrial accident involving an exploding refinery. Anna Hansell warned of immediate lung injury and longer-term disease, including cancer. Gabriel da Silva identified hydrocarbons, particulates and heavy metals in the plume. The UN Environment Programme (Unep) then warned that people in Iran, including young children, were directly inhaling hazardous smoke from burning oil and that pollution from uncontrolled fires may enter soil and water, leach into groundwater and pass into crops. While these findings describe contamination, they also establish a chain of injury planned well before the first bomb fell.
Israel chose targets at the heart of domestic survival because its planners know that fuel in a capital powers ambulances, clinics, refrigeration, generators, pumping systems, buses, food distribution and the hidden routines through which a city keeps people alive. Aluminium and petrochemical plants sit inside another layer of social life. They employ workers, anchor towns, shape the air and store hazards that can spread across whole districts once fire takes hold. A state that chooses such targets has long chosen impunity as a method. It deploys mass bodily harm as a strategy. It initiates stealth terror that enters the house by way of smoke, residue, contaminated rain and poisoned trust in air and water. This is terrorism in one of its most modern forms.
The damage does not stop at city life. In Tehran, the fallout reached the Rey plain, where soil and water feed the capital. Petroleum compounds and heavy metals entered the ground and poisoned crops, fodder, livestock and the aquifers below. The same poisoned rain and soot laid waste to the city’s old quarters, its museums, gardens, tilework, stucco, marble and stone. More than four hundred cultural-historical monuments, more than 150 museums and the wider historical fabric of Tehran came under chemical assault. A child’s feverish cries, a mother’s desperate tears, an elder’s failing heart and a city’s ruined archive now share the same source. The strike targeted the collective body and memory in a single movement.
International humanitarian law has finally named this attack for what it is. Volker Türk has stated that the foreseeable impacts on civilians and the environment from the oil fires in Iran raise serious questions about proportionality and precaution.
The Geneva Conventions prohibit attacks on objects indispensable to civilian survival, including food supplies, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and irrigation works. Attacks on oil facilities, electricity production sites and other civilian-serving infrastructure may amount to war crimes when those rules are breached. But these laws apparently do not matter to Israel and the US. They rip through international law with demonic indifference and strike sovereign countries in their vital organs with maximum force and psychopathic indifference. No amount of international pressure seems able to stop their depraved approach to war.
This approach has been long in the making. The International Court of Justice had already imposed provisional measures on Israel in South Africa’s genocide case in January 2024. The International Criminal Court had already issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant in November 2024. Reuters reported that ICC judges found reasonable grounds to believe they bore criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a weapon of war. Washington then moved against the court itself and sanctioned ICC judges over the court’s work on Israel, while earlier vetoing a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution that every other member supported. Law spoke. Power trumped law and Israel heard, loud and clear, that imperial protection gave it the go-ahead to continue killing babies and children in Gaza.
Much of the Western press still sanitises these acts through the stale language of escalation and exchange. That language cleans the shameful stain from the scene. It removes the worker who knows what a burning aluminium plant means for the people living nearby. It removes psychopathic strategy from the target list and replaces it with procedure. Iran’s own accounting of the Tehran attack cuts through that evasion. The strikes poisoned air, damaged health, threatened food security and scarred the city’s cultural inheritance. The recent strike on the aluminium plant extends the same brutal logic. The US-Israeli regime has targeted industry, fuel and the ordinary conditions of life as a field of punishment.
Tehran still breathes what Israel unleashed into its sky. Arak now faces the danger of metal-oxide smoke and industrial fire. The victims do not need another lesson in the rules of war. They already know what barbarity looks like. It looks like an infant shuddering its last laboured breath before dawn while powerful men discuss pauses, deadlines and leverage. The United States and Israel have methodically placed terror into the intimate world of homes, bodies, food, labour and memory. History will record the legal arguments, and they will show that Israel has surpassed the cruel megalomania of Hitler’s regime. This is the unbridled gassing of 13 million people in one location. The tally of impact from the aluminium plant in Arak is yet to be factored. Both are gross violations of international law. The people of Iran are already living the verdict.
Gillian Schutte is editor-in-chief of The Counterhegemon. She has an academic background in African politics, postmodern literature and semiotics. She is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker.
Prosperity agenda: What SA needs to reach top 10:
South Africa’s future prosperity will not be determined by chance. It will be shaped by the quality of our leadership, the strength of our institutions and the belief we place in our ability to compete with the best in the world.
Today, the Legatum Institute’s Global Prosperity Index provides one of the most comprehensive measures of how nations perform across economic opportunity, governance, education, health, social capital and personal freedom. The rankings tell a story not only about wealth but about the overall well-being and opportunity available to citizens.
For South Africa, the message is clear: our country has enormous potential but unlocking it requires deliberate action.
My belief — and the mission behind the Nation of Champions initiative — is that South Africa can propel itself into the top 10 most prosperous nations in the world. That may sound ambitious but history shows that when South Africans unite behind a shared national mission, extraordinary outcomes become possible.
I witnessed this first-hand during the build-up to the 2010 World Cup, hosted by South Africa. At the time, the world was watching us with a mixture of curiosity and scepticism. Could an African nation deliver a tournament of this magnitude? Could we create an experience that would inspire the world?
The answer, as we know today, was a resounding yes. One of the initiatives I had the privilege of leading during that period was the national Brand Ambassador Programme, which formed part of the broader Cultural Intelligence Programme for the hospitality sector. The objective was simple but powerful: transform the everyday interaction between visitors and South Africans into a world-class experience.
We trained and inspired more than 500 000 hospitality employees — from hotel staff and taxi drivers to tour guides, restaurant workers and airport personnel — to become ambassadors for the nation. The individuals were not merely providing a service; they were telling the story of South Africa through warmth, professionalism and pride.
The results were remarkable. During and after the World Cup, South Africa rose into the top 10 countries globally that people most wanted to visit.
More importantly, we demonstrated that national reputation and economic opportunity can be shaped deliberately through leadership, training and shared purpose.
As a result, South Africa earned the highest Net Promoter Score of all World Cups — a resounding 92% from visitors, which stands as the best to date. Fifa rated our project management and service delivery 9/10. Major infrastructure upgrades — including airports, roads, hotels and the Gautrain — showcased South Africa’s engineering prowess.
Visitors experienced zero major crime in 31 days. Leisure tourism increased by 31% year on year, while business tourism rose by 47% for the City of Cape Town.
Business confidence reached its highest level since 1995 and about 500 000 new jobs were created each year from 2004 to 2010 — more than three million in total — as stakeholders worked towards a common goal. The exchange rate strengthened to R7/$ in July 2011.
The experience taught me that prosperity is not an accident. It is built through systems that empower people to perform at their best.
Today, the same principle applies if South Africa wants to climb the Global Prosperity Index rankings.
Prosperity is not solely about GDP growth. It is about whether a nation creates the conditions where innovation flourishes, businesses grow, institutions function effectively and citizens feel hopeful about the future.
Nations that perform well in the prosperity rankings share several characteristics: strong leadership cultures, trusted institutions, high-quality education systems and vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems.
South Africa possesses many of the raw ingredients required for prosperity. Our entrepreneurs are among the most innovative in emerging markets. Our financial sector is globally respected. Our creative industries — from film to music to sport — continue to shape global culture. And our young population is filled with ambition and talent.
What we need is a national agenda that connects these strengths into a coherent strategy for prosperity. This is where the idea of champions becomes critical.
Every nation that has risen rapidly in global prosperity rankings has done so by cultivating leaders who act as catalysts within their sectors — entrepreneurs who build new industries, educators who transform learning systems, public servants who strengthen governance and innovators who create breakthrough technologies.
In 2010, the mission of the Nation of Champions campaign was simple yet profound: to deliver president Thabo Mbeki’s brand promise of “Hosting the Best World Cup Ever”.
Today, that spirit is being reborn through a new national platform. The Nation of Champions
2.0 brings together South Africa’s future-minded leaders and changemakers across business, sport, academia, media, science and civil society.
The purpose of the Nation of Champions platform is to identify the individuals, connect them across sectors and amplify their impact. When champions collaborate, ideas spread faster, solutions scale more rapidly and progress accelerates.
We have seen how recognition platforms such as the Mail & Guardian’s 200 Young South Africans (YSA) can spotlight emerging leaders who are reshaping industries and communities. But recognition is only the first step. What matters next is building ecosystems where the leaders can collaborate, innovate and multiply their impact.
The question we must ask ourselves as a nation is: What would it take for South Africa to become one of the top 10 most prosperous countries in the world?
The answer lies in three priorities:
- First, we must invest in leadership development at every level of society — from schools and universities to businesses and government institutions.
- Second, we must connect our innovators and entrepreneurs into national networks of collaboration, where knowledge and opportunity flow freely.
- Third, we must celebrate excellence and success stories because belief in national progress is a powerful catalyst for action.
Prosperity begins with belief — but it is sustained by systems that allow talent to thrive.
The story of the 2010 World Cup showed the world what South Africans can achieve when we align behind a shared vision. If we apply that spirit to building a prosperity-driven economy — one that empowers our champions and unlocks our collective potential — there is no reason South Africa cannot rise dramatically in the global rankings.
The Prosperity Agenda is therefore not just about statistics or indices. It is about building a nation where opportunity expands, leadership flourishes and every South African can contribute to the success of the whole.
South Africa has demonstrated — during moments such as the 2010 Fifa World Cup and the G20 Leaders’ Summit — that we can mobilise talent, leadership and belief on a national scale. The question now is whether we can channel that same spirit into a longer-term mission: building one of the most prosperous societies in the world.
Dr Nik Eberl is the chair of the Future of Jobs Summit (an official T20 side event) and author of Nation of Champions: How Team SA Won the World Cup of Destination Branding.
EFF no-return policy tested after former MK Party campaigner elected in Nongoma:
The Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) no-return policy is under scrutiny after a former uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MK Party) activist was elected secretary general of the party’s Nongoma sub-region in northern KwaZulu-Natal.
Sthembiso Zulu returned to the EFF after leaving the party and openly campaigning for the MK Party. This was shortly after the formation of former president Jacob Zuma’s ANC breakaway party, before the 2024 general elections.
His recent election to the sub-regional command team at an elective conference two weeks ago has triggered anger among some party members. They say his appointment violates the EFF’s constitution and reflects deeper organisational problems in the area.
“His election is illegal and flies in the face of party guidelines which say once you resign from the party, you cannot come back,” said Ntuthuko Mayise, a branch member. “We are talking about someone who has been elected to the critical position of secretary.”
Nkazimulo Mncwango, another aggrieved member, said internal jostling and what he described as poor organisational discipline had contributed to the party’s declining support in the region.
“Some people regard positions in the EFF as a gateway out of unemployment and a licence to loot municipalities,” he said. “The recent by-elections, where we failed to get sufficient numbers, have exposed the rot in the party.”
He said some branches in the area were not in good standing and concerns had been raised with national deployee Lens Komane.
The EFF is a key coalition partner in the IFP-governed Nongoma local municipality, where it holds the deputy mayor position.
Under the party’s standing guidelines, a member who resigns from the EFF is barred from rejoining at a later stage — a rule intended to discourage opportunistic defections and maintain internal discipline.
But Zulu rejected claims that he had resigned from the EFF. He said that although he had aligned himself politically with the MK Party, his departure had never been processed through the party’s top structures, meaning he remained eligible to return and contest leadership positions.
“I was a member of the EFF but I had issues with other leaders who were leading the province,” he said. “They made a decision to fire me and cancel my membership. After a year, I was approached by some people in MK to join them. I had no issue with joining because MK and EFF both subscribe to socialist ideas.”
Zulu said he had campaigned for the MK Party but insisted he had never become a member of the party. “If I had been blacklisted in the EFF, my application for new membership wouldn’t have been accepted,” he said.
Speaking to the Mail & Guardian on Tuesday, EFF provincial secretary Vukani Ndlovu declined to respond to the allegations, saying internal party matters should not be ventilated through the media.
“All our members as the EFF are highly disciplined and are learned in terms of how best they should conduct themselves and on how to raise issues,” said Ndlovu.
“No one who calls himself an EFF member would have contacted you to raise grievances unless that person is a chance taker and not our member.”
He added that any internal disputes would be dealt with through party channels rather than in public.
“If there are such issues again I would never attempt to undermine those issues by addressing them through media but internally,” he said. “The EFF I know remains united and coherent and we are focusing on our elections programme as we speak.”
During the past provincial and national elections, the EFF plummeted from 10% of the provincial vote share it had received in the previous elections to 2%, shedding at least 300 000 votes.
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