‘We are South African’: Imtiaz Sooliman urges citizens to take ownership of their country

The calls from Daily Maverick journalist Estelle Ellis were rarely casual.

When a crisis was unfolding in Nelson Mandela Bay or elsewhere in the Eastern Cape, Ellis would call Gift of the Givers founder Dr Imtiaz Sooliman with the kind of information that demanded a response: day zero was approaching; people were hungry; a fire had broken out; help was needed.

Sooliman knew what to do when the phone rang. “She did the research thoroughly,” he recalled. “When Estelle would phone, I wouldn’t think twice because I knew she’d done the research. She studied it properly.”

That relationship — between a journalist who sought out the stories of people too often unseen by the country’s leaders and a humanitarian organisation able to respond to what she found — became one of the quiet threads running through their work together.

Remembering a fierce journalist

It was a fitting way to remember Ellis at The Gathering in Cape Town on Friday, where Daily Maverick editor-in-chief Jillian Green spoke to Sooliman about her colleague, his decades of humanitarian work and the state of the country they both cared about deeply.

Ellis, one of South Africa’s most persistent investigative reporters, died suddenly on Wednesday evening, 5 August 2026, at the age of 51.

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Sooliman’s first meeting with Ellis was at a Wimpy in Makhanda in February 2019. He remembers being struck immediately not only by her professional reputation, but by something he sensed in her.

“The moment I saw her, there was a spiritual connection. I fell in love with her, immediately, in the face, in the eyes, and in the soul,” he said, adding that what he saw was a compassionate journalist, but above all a true patriot.

Over the years, Ellis travelled with Gift of the Givers teams and followed crises across the Eastern Cape and beyond. She reported on drought, farmers and livestock, Covid-19 and the province’s hunger crisis. Sometimes her journalism did more than expose a problem.

Ellis told Sooliman that there were 5,000 wheelchairs outstanding in the province. Gift of the Givers launched a project to address the need.

Telling people’s stories, with respect

Green said one of the qualities that distinguished Ellis’s reporting was that she could tell the stories of people whose voices were seldom heard while preserving their dignity.

“She gave people dignity in that, despite the conditions that they were finding themselves in. And the way she told their stories was to give them dignity,” Green said.

Ellis, Sooliman said, went into places where others would not go and wrote about “the human condition”.

“She wasn’t malicious. She was very frank, outspoken, but she gave the other side an opportunity to correct what was not done properly.”

Through her writing, Ellis sought solutions and held people to account, but never, not once, did she allow herself to become bigger than the story she was there to tell, he said.

“She was always under the radar.”

Her research was “unmatched, unparalleled”, he said. She understood the need before making the call.

Don’t wait for a saviour

It was Ellis who drew Sooliman’s attention to the Eastern Cape hunger crisis after a mother killed herself and her children because they had no food. “In a country with gold and diamonds and platinum, why should people be dying like this?

“We’ve got our own bubbles and we're quite happy where we are,” he said. “But until you go there and see the suffering of the people.

“There’s been no uprising. There’s been no anger,” he said. “There’s been people who are patient, pre-94 and patient post-94 because they haven't got their delivery. But they still stand patient, waiting for somebody to make some kind of miracle.”

His answer to South Africa's problems is not to wait for a saviour — political, institutional or otherwise. It is to take ownership.

“We need to be true patriots,” he said. “We need to stand together, take the damn banners off, take the logos off, take the titles off. We are South African. It’s our country. The country does not belong to the government.”

Change is a-coming

After 34 years of working with the government, Sooliman said he could see change.

“There are a lot of changes taking place within the system,” he said. “Where the good guys are now coming to the fore, where they’re speaking, where they want to make a difference.”

Those people, he said, needed to be encouraged.

His message to the government was equally clear: listen to journalists rather than fight them.

“Instead of fighting with journalists, use them as an ally,” he said. “Instead of getting angry, fix the damn system. Listen to them.”

Sooliman himself resisted the idea that Gift of the Givers began as a grand personal plan.

“It’s not my organisation,” he said. He had been running three private practices and had not woken up one morning deciding he needed something else to occupy his time.

“I never planned anything. I don't plan. There’s no forward planning,” he said. Instead, he described an instinct to respond when the need appears — a “spiritual feeling”, as he put it. DM