Dr Shuaib Manjra argues that the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) erred in finding Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng guilty of unprofessional behaviour – not because she didn’t do it, but because we supposedly don’t “understand” the linguistic context of her remarks. In other words, her words don’t mean what they clearly mean. It’s an argument so circular it could make a pretzel blush.
Manjra, himself a medical specialist registered with the HPCSA and chair of the Health Justice Initiative, should know better than to suggest that professional ethics are negotiable based on “context”.
He writes as though public invective by a doctor, including racist and inflammatory language on social media, can be excused if wrapped in the right ideological packaging. According to him, the HPCSA’s ruling reflects “a misjudgment of language and its power”.
But this isn’t a course in semiotics. It’s a question of professional accountability. The HPCSA’s role is not to interpret tweets like a poetry critic; it’s to protect the integrity of the medical profession.
When a doctor – especially one with an international profile – uses language that is vulgar, inflammatory and discriminatory, it’s not “misunderstood”. It’s misconduct.
Manjra frames the ruling as a suppression of free speech, implying that Mofokeng’s “activism” is being punished. That’s disingenuous. Doctors, lawyers, teachers – every profession – has limits on how one publicly behaves while representing that profession. The issue is not her political stance; it’s her professional decorum. Freedom of expression does not give anyone, least of all a regulated professional, carte blanche to vilify, insult or dehumanise others in public.
If a doctor had publicly used the same tone to attack Palestinians, migrants or women, Manjra would be the first to demand disciplinary action – and rightly so. The principle must be consistent.
Ironically, Manjra accuses the HPCSA of “misjudgment” while displaying little understanding of the process he’s criticising. The council did not act on a whim. It investigated over several months, corresponded with Dr Mofokeng’s legal representatives and assessed her conduct under Regulation 4(9) of the Health Professions Act. The outcome was not provisional. It was a final finding of unprofessional conduct. To dismiss this as “linguistic misunderstanding” is to belittle the institution that governs his own profession. It implies that the HPCSA is incapable of interpreting plain English unless guided by his own ideological lens.
Perhaps most astonishing is that Manjra presents himself as a champion of “health justice”. Yet he defends conduct that corrodes public trust in healthcare. “Health justice” surely includes treating all human beings with respect, upholding dignity and maintaining professionalism – even in political disagreement. Instead, his piece reads like a manifesto for selective accountability: ethics for some, indulgence for others.
If a white, conservative doctor had used similar language about another group, would Manjra be arguing that “linguistic context” should save them from censure? Of course not.
Manjra's claim that disciplining Mofokeng represents a “dangerous precedent” for free thought. In truth, the opposite is true: allowing professionals to spew hatred without consequence would destroy the public’s faith in their institutions. Accountability is not censorship; it’s the foundation of professionalism.
The HPCSA ruling sends a clear message: being a doctor is not merely a credential; it is a public trust. That trust is damaged when professionals use their platforms to promote division and abuse under the guise of “activism”.
Manjra’s article is unconvincing. It confuses freedom of speech with freedom from standards, ethics with ideology, and “linguistic context” with moral relativism.
The HPCSA acted entirely within its mandate. It upheld the principle that medical professionals must behave with dignity – even, and especially, when they disagree politically.
Manjra calls this a “misjudgment”. I call it a victory for professionalism and common sense.
Response by Shuaib Manjra
There are few spectacles more revealing than the South African Zionist Federation (SAZF) mistaking moral hackery for professional principle. For the federation — a cheerleader for genocide in Gaza — attaching the word moral to anything is an obscenity.
Segal, head of the SAZF’s media arm, critiques my article on the HPCSA’s sanctioning of Dr Mofokeng without grasping, let alone engaging, its central argument about language, context and power. It seems her BA degree was more about marketing than meaning.
A key reading in media studies in past years, one I doubt made her syllabus — is Raymond Williams’ Keywords. Williams reminds us that: “This (book) is not a neutral review of meanings. It is an exploration of the vocabulary of a crucial area of social and cultural discussion, inherited within precise historical and social conditions, which must be made at once conscious and critical — subject to change as well as to continuity.”
Devoid of that critical literacy, Segal declares my argument “so circular it could make a pretzel blush”. One is tempted to say the same of her reasoning — except that the pretzel, unlike her argument, retains some structural integrity.
Central claim
Her central claim — that I defend misconduct through “ideological packaging” — misses the obscene irony: the SAZF’s complaint against Mofokeng is itself ideological weaponisation, aimed at silencing a critic of Israel. If the SAZF had even an iota of genuine concern for medical ethics, it was invisible during the dark nights of apartheid and is utterly absent amid the genocide in Gaza.
If ethics and professionalism were truly their compass, they might have raised their voice against the systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system — the deliberate targeting, abduction, torture and murder of doctors, nurses and paramedics, and the complicity of Israeli medical professionals in sustaining a machinery of dehumanisation, torture and rape. Yet from the SAZF: only silence. Or worse, complicity, dressed in moral pretence.
Segal insists that I defend Mofokeng on the grounds of “free speech”. I do not. Nor do I argue that “her words don’t mean what they clearly mean”. The pretzel, again, crumbles.
The problem is her profound misreading — not just of my text, but of the ethical and linguistic traditions it draws from. My argument is not that context erases professional responsibility, but that context defines meaning. Words do not float in a vacuum; they acquire force through history, power and intent. To ignore this is to practice ethics by algorithm — mechanical, literalist and blind to what makes moral judgement human, relevant and fair.
Our moral pretzel insists that vulgar words are, by definition, unethical. One wonders whether she would express the same outrage had Mofokeng said, “f**k apartheid” or, for that matter, “f**k Hitler”.
An old colonial reflex
Her critique collapses ethics into etiquette — as though morality were a matter of tone, not justice. It is an old colonial reflex: mistaking politeness for virtue and rebellion for impropriety. She accuses me of confusing ethics with ideology; in truth, ethics stripped of ideology — stripped of history, power, and justice — is not ethics at all. It is manners masquerading as morality.
The apartheid doctors who participated in or observed torture and kept silent were, by her standards, paragons of professionalism. Their language was measured, their demeanour civil, their “ethics” immaculate. Evil is often most banal when polite.
Professionalism, in its ethical sense, is not the art of pleasing the powerful. It is the duty to act independently of political intimidation and economic coercion. The HPCSA’s task is to safeguard medical integrity — not to serve as an instrument for Zionist retribution or to sanitise dissent. Dr Mofokeng’s comments, made as a public intellectual and human rights advocate, neither endangered patients, the public, nor breached clinical ethics. The complaint, lodged by a political lobby with no locus standi, appears ultra vires — beyond the council’s legal authority — but is for future legal processes to confirm.
To call this a “victory for professionalism” is like calling censorship a triumph of literacy. The logic is inverted: the HPCSA did not uphold ethics; it surrendered them to political convenience or an unthinking “ethical” algorithm.
Segal performs a predictable sleight of hand, which is neither clever nor original, conjuring a “white conservative doctor” who might have said something similar, and demands to know whether I would defend him. But ethics is not a mirror game of symmetry. Context and power are everything. To condemn oppression from below is not equivalent to abusing the powerless from above. “Punching up” is not “punching down”.
Dr Mofokeng’s words were aimed at an active genocidaire, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his propagandist Hillel Neuer — not at a vulnerable or marginalised group. False equivalence may make good talk radio, but is ignorance, intellectually dishonest and bad ethics.
Hollow
Segal’s appeal to “public trust in healthcare” is equally hollow. Trust is not built by punishing conscience. It is earned through moral courage and intellectual honesty. The HPCSA’s decision achieved neither: it signalled that a doctor may be sanctioned for condemning war crimes if she uses the wrong adjective. If that is the new ethical horizon we are meant to celebrate, professionalism has degenerated into cowardice.
Dr Mofokeng’s language was neither gratuitous nor obscene; it was morally expressive. “F**k Netanyahu” is not an obscenity or a lapse of decorum — it is an act of moral refusal. A refusal to sanitise genocide. From Audre Lorde’s “uses of anger” to Fanon’s “speech of revolt”, language has always been the instrument of resistance. To police such language while ignoring the violence that provokes it is to confuse tone with truth.
If anything corrodes public trust, it is the spectacle of institutions enforcing discipline on behalf of power — and of commentators who confuse obedience with integrity. Civility in the face of atrocity is not virtue; it is complicity.
Segal’s arguments crumble faster than her chosen metaphor. The task of the ethical physician, and indeed of every moral being, is not to preserve decorum in times of crisis, but to speak truth — even when the truth is impolite. DM