Carl Gerhardus Niehaus (born 25 December 1959) is a South African politician who represents the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in the National Assembly of South Africa. A former national spokesperson of the African National Congress (ANC), he was expelled from that party for misconduct in December 2022. He joined the EFF in December 2023 and was elected to the National Assembly in May 2024.
Born to an Afrikaner family in the Western Transvaal, Niehaus became involved in anti-apartheid activism as a student, joining the ANC underground in 1980. Between November 1983 and March 1991, he was imprisoned on treason charges related to his activism, particularly an ANC plot to sabotage the Johannesburg Gas Works.
Upon his release from prison, he became an influential figure in the ANC: after a stint as the party's spokesperson during the post-apartheid transition, he served as a Member of the National Assembly from 1994 to 1996, as South African Ambassador to the Netherlands from 1996 to 2000, and as a member of the ANC National Executive Committee from 1994 to 1997. He returned to the ANC media office as the party's national spokesperson in November 2008. However, in February 2009, he resigned from that office and confessed to a string of improprieties that he had committed due to his personal financial problems.
He returned to frontline politics in 2017 as the national spokesperson of the UMkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans' Association. From 2019, he was also employed at Luthuli House as a staffer in the office of ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule. During this period, he frequently clashed with the ANC leadership over his outspoken support of former President Jacob Zuma and the Zuma-aligned programme of radical economic transformation (RET). His pro-Zuma public statements resulted in the suspension of his ANC membership in July 2021 and, ultimately, his expulsion from the party in December 2022. In the aftermath, he established his own short-lived political platforms – the Radical Economic Transformation Movement (RETMO) and African Radical Economic Transformation Alliance (ARETA) – before joining the EFF in December 2023.
Early life and activism Niehaus was born on 25 December 1959 in Zeerust, a small town in the former Western Transvaal (now part of the North West Province). His parents, Carl and Magrieta Niehaus, were working-class Afrikaners; his father was a railroad clerk. In his account, they later supported the far-right Conservative Party, and they raised him Christian in the Dutch Reformed Church. Indeed, for a time he intended to become a dominee.
After his family moved in Johannesburg, he took church volunteering trips to Soweto, where, as a teenager, he was disturbed by the black residents' living conditions; he later said that he came to believe that apartheid was heresy. He became active in anti-apartheid activism as a student at the Rand Afrikaans University, where he studied theology. During his final year as a student, in 1980, he left the Dutch Reformed Church in protest of their stance on apartheid; he joined the African Dutch Reformed Church instead, serving as a deacon in the black township of Alexandra. In July 1980, he joined the underground of the African National Congress (ANC), which at the time was a banned organisation. He was later described as having been "terribly radical, almost Stalinist" in his political style.
Shortly before his final exams in 1980, Niehaus was expelled from Rand Afrikaans University for his political activities, including putting up Free Mandela posters on campus. Thereafter he enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand to continue his degree.
Treason conviction and detention
In August 1983, Niehaus and his girlfriend, Jansie Lourens, were arrested and charged with high treason and related political charges. Because of the defendants' backgrounds, the case attracted "hostility, puzzlement, and considerable interest" among white audiences.
During their trial in the Supreme Court, the main state's witness was Robert Whitecross, Niehaus and Lourens's housemate. During his testimony, he revealed that he had been recruited to the Security Branch by Craig Williamson in 1980 and was in fact a police warrant officer. Among other things, Whitecross was able to provide extensive evidence that Niehaus had been involved in reconnaissance of the Johannesburg Gas Works, apparently as part of an ANC plot to commit sabotage there. Whitecross had accompanied Niehaus on a reconnaissance trip which had been photographed by other police officers; Niehaus had also given Whitecross the photographs he had taken of the site.
Niehaus pled not guilty to treason, but in court he openly declared his support for the ANC and was otherwise unrepentant. The court found that, in addition to reconnaissance at the gasworks, Niehaus had distributed political pamphlets, helped ANC members to escape the country illegally, and carried coded messages between ANC members. On 25 November 1983, he was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. According to reporter Allister Sparks, who was in the courtroom, Niehaus called out Amandla! before being led into custody. Incarcerated in Pretoria Central Prison, he served over seven of his sentence before he was released on 20 March 1991.
In 2008, LitNet published a blog by Niehaus – written in the form of an open letter to his young daughter – in which he described having been gang-raped by other detainees on the night before the Supreme Court convicted him in 1983. Journalists have since disputed this account for a lack of corroborating evidence. In February 2021, Niehaus testified at the inquest into Neil Aggett's death in detention; he was cross-examined on the contents of an affidavit he had submitted about his experience of torture in detention.
Education While he was imprisoned, Niehaus studied theology by correspondence through the University of South Africa, completing both a bachelor's and an honours. He was reportedly the best student in his honours class.
Until 2009, Niehaus's résumé and official profile additionally claimed that he had completed his first bachelor's degree at the University of the Witwatersrand before his arrest, and that he later completed a masters and doctorate in theology at Utrecht University. Journalists discovered that he did not complete any of these degrees.
Career in the African National Congress
Democratic transition: 1991–1994 Upon his release from prison, Niehaus became active in the African National Congress (ANC), which had recently been unbanned by the apartheid government during the negotiations to end apartheid. According to his official biography, he was appointed to the ANC's Provincial Executive Committee in PWV, to its Negotiations Commission, and to the head of its national media liaison unit, where he served as spokesperson to Nelson Mandela.
Early democratic period: 1994–2009 In South Africa's first democratic elections in April 1994, Niehaus was elected to represent the ANC in the National Assembly, the lower house of the new South African Parliament. He chaired Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Correctional Services during the First Parliament. In addition, in December 1994, he attended the ANC's 49th National Conference, at which he was elected to a three-year term on the party's National Executive Committee; by number of votes received, he was ranked 20th of the 60 candidates elected to the committee.
In late 1996, before the parliamentary term had ended, President Mandela appointed Niehaus to succeed Zach de Beer as South African Ambassador to the Netherlands. While in the Netherlands, he was the head of the South African delegation to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons at the Hague. At the conclusion of his diplomatic service in mid-2000, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands knighted him in the Grand Cross in the Order of Oranje-Nassau. He also received Utrecht University's International Medal.
Upon his return to South Africa, Niehaus became executive director of the National Institute for Crime Prevention and Re-integration of Offenders (Nicro) with effect from 1 June 2000. On Reconciliation Day, 2000, during a gathering at St George's Cathedral, Niehaus and Mary Burton launched the Home For All initiative, which called on white South Africans to contribute to national reconciliation by publicly acknowledging and redressing the harm of apartheid. Niehaus and Burton co-authored a "Declaration of Commitment by White South Africans" in this vein. Although it was signed by over 900 prominent white South Africans, Alt URL it was fiercely denigrated by others. Niehaus later said that the initiative's reception – "rejection and a lot of ridicule" – had been instrumental in "hardening my views on the issue of white racism".
In 2001, Niehaus left NICRO to become a partner at professional services firm Deloitte & Touche, which at the time was launching a Dutch desk. He resigned from that position in 2003, and thereafter held a series of short-lived positions: the South African Presidency contracted him to work on its Decade of Democracy celebrations in 2004; he was CEO and spokesperson of Ray McCauley's Rhema Church from 2004 until his resignation in 2005; and, finally, he was CEO of the Gauteng Economic Development Agency (GEDA), a department of the Gauteng Provincial Government, for the last seven months of 2005.
In November 2008, during the ANC's 2009 general election campaign, Niehaus returned to the ANC's communications department when he was appointed as the party's second national spokesperson, working alongside Jessie Duarte. He was reportedly headhunted for the role by ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe. The Daily Maverick said that he was "by almost all accounts, very good" at the job. However, he was in the position for just over three months: on 13 February 2009, the press broke the story of Niehaus's financial difficulties and related fraud , and Mantashe announced that the party had accepted Niehaus's resignation as spokesperson.
Support for RET: 2017–2022 Niehaus spent much of the next decade away from frontline politics; in his account he was doing consulting work and managing his remaining debt. In 2017, he resurfaced as national spokesperson for the ANC-affiliated UMkhonto we Sizwe Military Veterans' Association (MKMVA) and as a frequent commentator on ANN7. He also became a key lobbyist in Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma's campaign to be elected as ANC president. It was during this time that Niehaus was referred to as "a massive poes, and an embarrassment to the human race."Carl Niehaus Wikipedia page edited to call him an 'embarrassment to the human race' https://www.news24.com/news24/carl-niehaus-wikipedia-page-edited-to-call-him-an-embarrassment-to-the-human-race-20171213 Dlamini-Zuma lost to Cyril Ramaphosa at the ANC's 54th National Conference in December 2017, but Niehaus nonetheless was given a role in Ramaphosa's new administration: from January 2019, he worked at Luthuli House in the office of ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule.
Over the next three years, MKMVA and Niehaus himself increasingly came into conflict with the Ramaphosa-led National Executive Committee. Niehaus was the voice of MKMVA's battle to resist amalgamation into a new and more formalised structure for veterans. He also used his personal and MKMVA platforms to defend corruption-accused former President Jacob Zuma, to attack the ANC's leadership, and to promote an ideological programme of so-called radical economic transformation. In 2018, MKMVA distanced itself from remarks that Niehaus made about the land question and management of the Ingonyama Trust.