The cops charged her with defeating the ends of justice, fraud and forgery.
A woman who claimed deputy president DD Mabuza was planning to assassinate Badplaas businessman Fred Daniel has now been arrested.
She was arrested Wednesday this week (13 Mar) in Mbombela and was due to appear in court.
She had claimed that she was Mabuza’s niece residing with him in his Johannesburg house.
She said one day in November 2018 she was cleaning the Mpumalanga politician’s study room in Johannesburg and found a diary lying on the table which detailed his plans moving forward.
Part of this plan was the “assassination” of Daniel, she said in an affidavit she wrote on 8 November 2018.
She was calling herself a ‘Thandeka Mabuza’ but the media soon exposed her as 31-year-old Nomfundo Sambo who once worked as an admin clerk at the Mpunzana Primary School in Ka-Shabalala Trust near Hazyview and was now facing the Hawks over the affidavit she wrote.
News24 reports that said the woman is due to appear at the Mbombela Magistrates Court on Friday.
The woman had gone to a DA provincial office in Mbombela after ‘finding’ the ‘affidavit’. Hawks spokesman Brigadier Hangwani Mulaudzi said an “identification parade” was held on Thursday and the DA official identified her “positively”.
The affidavit was going to be used by Daniel, the owner of the Cradle of Life nature reserve in Badplaas in his failed bid to obtain a protection order against Mabuza.
On 27 August 2018, the Carolina Magistrates Court described Daniel as a very dishonest person after he failed to provide the proper evidence why he wanted to be granted a protection order against Mabuza.
Daniel had approached the court in February 2018 to apply for a temporary protection order against Mabuza, accusing him of using his position as then Mpumalanga Premier to harass and sabotage his Badplaas business. He also accused Mabuza of supporting land claimants to this tourist area and is currently in the Tshwane high court, suing Mabuza R1,2bn for profits lost while being harassed and sabotaged by Mabuza, including allegedly withholding permits for him to run the game reserve business.
Magistrate Sarel Grabe in August 2018 said Daniel was manufacturing the allegations against Mabuza and dismissed his application to have the temporary protection order made permanent.
Mulaudzi said the search for the “systematic truth” continues.
“The suspect has further made a confession before the magistrate. She is currently in custody,” he told News24.
The shrewd Mpumalanga politician had in the past weathered storms.
Badplaas businessman Fred Daniel has made an about-turn, now believing an affidavit written by a ‘Thandeka Mabuza’ was a plot by the country’s deputy president to ‘discredit’ him.
Daniel, who was labelled as dishonest by the Carolina Magistrates Court in August 2018 during his bid to obtain a protection order against DD Mabuza, tried to reach out to the Tshwane high court in November 2018 to apply for another protection order after an ‘affidavit’ surfaced that Mabuza had allegedly hired ‘hitmen’ to gun him down.
Mabuza is not new to bizarre claims involving affidavits – which portray him as a ruthless murderer.
The latest affidavit is dated 8 November 2018 and is written by a bogus ‘Thandeka Mabuza’ who claims is the deputy president’s niece and lives with him in his Johannesburg house.
The ’32-year-old Thandeka’, who has now been exposed as 31-year-old Nomfundo Sambo and who once worked as an admin clerk at the Mpunzana Primary School in Shabalala Trust near Hazyview, is now facing an investigation by the Hawks over the affidavit she wrote.
In the affidavit, which prompted Daniel to approach the Tshwane high court to apply for yet another protection order as well as laying a criminal charge against Mabuza with cops, the Thandeka claimed that she bumped into Mabuza’s diary while she was cleaning his study room and the diary was stating that Daniel was going to be killed on 7 November 2018 by Mabuza’s hired men.
The Thandeka went to the DA offices in Mbombela a day after writing the affidavit to tell the opposition party about the issue of Mabuza allegedly planning to kill Daniel and is also seen in CCTV cameras. But the person seen on the CCTV has now been exposed as Nomfundo Sambo.
Businessman Fred Daniel, a friend of Mabuza’s arch-rival Mathews Phosa, seen here at his Craddle of Life Nature Reserve in Badplaas
At the time Daniel said: “We’re taking this matter very seriously. I’m happy that the court has accepted the urgency of the matter. Had Thandeka not warned me, I don’t know what would have happened”.
But then it soon came to light that Mabuza was in Russia and not in Johannesburg as the Thandeka claimed.
Daniel then said: “Unbeknown to my advisers and me, the conspiracy to kill me was actually a conspiracy to discredit me as a whistle-blower by having me arrested and charged with treason for fabricating evidence that the deputy president has put me on on his much-feared hit list and intended to have me killed.
“Unfortunately for the conspirators, the conspiracy unravelled when Thandeka’s real identity as Sambo became known,” he said.
On 27 August 2018, the Carolina Magistrates Court labelled Daniel as a very dishonest person after he failed to provide the proper evidence why he wanted to be granted a protection order against Mabuza.
Daniel had approached the court in February 2018 to apply for a temporary protection order against Mabuza, accusing him of using his position to harass and sabotage his Badplaas business. He also accused Mabuza of supporting land claimants to this tourist area and is suing Mabuza R1,2bn for profits lost while being harassed and sabotaged by Mabuza while he was Premier, including allegedly withholding permits for him to run the game reserve business and had wanted this order to be made permanent.
Magistrate Sarel Grabe in August 2018 said Daniel was manufacturing the allegations against Mabuza and dismissed his application
But Daniel’s lawyer Jacques Joubert is appealing Grabe’s judgement and the failed Thandeka affidavit was going to add points to his appeal.
The poison of former Premier DD Mabuza will infect the whole country, doing to South Africa what it did to Mpumalanga.
MMUSI MAIMANE
The DA wants to offer the people of Mpumalanga a new beginning – under a provincial and national leadership that is honest and committed to improving the lives of all the residents of this incredible province.
Our plan for Mpumalanga and South Africa is to fight corruption, to open fair access to long-term jobs, to create an honest and professional police service, to speed up the delivery of services, and to secure our borders so that everyone living in SA is doing so legally.
A DA government in Mpumalanga would be the antidote to David Mabuza’s poison.
Mpumalanga needs a remedy urgently – because the Mabuza poison has spread to every single part of this province, including to eMalahleni municipality here, which has collapsed into bankruptcy under the weight of his corruption.
#Maimane launched the party’s TeamOneSouthAfrica in eMalahleni on 2 November 2018
If we don’t act soon, the whole country will be infected.
Fellow South Africans, we are just one heart attack away from having this man as our president. In fact, we may be just one spiked drink away.
With Mpumalanga’s record of political assassinations, we would be naïve not to consider this as a risk.
In South Africa, the deputy president tends to become president.
So, one way or another, we face the real threat of Mabuza as president.
And then his poison will infect the whole country, doing to South Africa what it did to Mpumalanga.
He will steal the whole country just to buy political power to stay on top.
First, Mpumalanga’s education department got infected, when Mabuza was provincial head.
Everyone knows that he stole millions of rands meant for schools and schoolchildren and used it to buy political loyalty so that he could accumulate enormous political power.
He used that political power as a bargaining chip to become deputy president of South Africa. That’s right.
He stepped on your children’s heads to climb the ladder of power.
Do you know that nearly a quarter of primary schools in Mpumalanga still have pit toilets?
That’s the price your children have paid for his rise to (almost) the top.
As MEC for Agriculture, he infected the land claims process.
Do you know that pretty much all land restitution claims in Mpumalanga while he was MEC were fake? He was pocketing the money meant for poor black farmers.
As Premier he turned a blind eye to the corruption in his administration, to secure political support. He syphoned off money from public services in Mpumalanga, all the time using it to open more and more ANC branches, to “buy” more and more ANC delegates.
The votes of those delegates, bought with money meant for service delivery in Mpumalanga, became his bargaining chip at the ANC’s conference in Nasrec last year.
He gave those votes to Ramaphosa’s faction, in return for the deputy presidency.
He has sacrificed your futures, pushing you down, to get himself to the top.
By stomping on your lives and the lives of your children like stepping stones, he has climbed to a position that allows him to infect the whole country, to steal from the national purse, and to shape South Africa’s future for years to come. Is that what we want for our country? For our children? For ourselves?
Fellow South Africans, Mpumalanga has been cursed with the worst leadership of any province. Of all the thieves operating in South Africa, DD Mabuza is the worst by far.
He even makes neighbouring thief, Ace Magashule, look tame.
He is a cruel, dangerous man who will stop at nothing to get ahead.
Since 2009, we’ve heard of many, many political assassinations of people who have tried to expose corruption or contest for power. We can all put two and two together and get four.
No one and nothing in Mpumalanga has escaped Mabuza’s poison. Mpumalanga has such incredible potential. Its people should be rich from tourism, agriculture and mining.
This province could bless its people with good, prosperous lives.
But instead, all the news coming out of Mpumalanga is bad news, as if the sun is setting on Mpumalanga.
We hear of collapsing municipalities that together owe Eskom over R4 billion and are about to be thrown into darkness because they cannot pay for electricity.
We hear of communities without water for days on end. We see sewers overflowing.
We hear of youth unemployment that is the highest in South Africa.
We hear that eMalahleni has one of the highest murder rate and is one of the highest areas of criminal activity in South Africa.
We hear of Mpumalanga’s collapsing healthcare system, where the number of health workers has halved in the past eight years and where the department has lost R6 billion rand (that’s six thousand million rand) to irregular expenditure in the past two years.
We see roads here becoming severely dilapidated and filled with potholes. No wonder tourists choose to go elsewhere.
Mpumalanga has been poisoned by Mabuza.
All this devastation we can put on Mabuza’s shoulders. And now that there’s nothing left to steal, he is looking to infect the whole country.
The DA is the antidote to Mabuza’s poison.
Our offer is to fight corruption by giving a 15-year jail sentence to those who are found to be corrupt.
Where the DA governs, public money is spent on delivering to the people. We take a zero-tolerance approach to corruption.
Our brand is synonymous with clean audits and good governance.
Vote DA in 2019 to rid Mpumalanga and SA of the infection of corruption that Mabuza and the ANC have spread. Vote DA to build one SA for All.
*Maimane is the national leader of the Democratic Alliance
The province is currently struggling to hold a PGC that will elect his successor.
ANC deputy president DD Mabuza promised three leaders that they would replace him during the time there was a furore over former President Jacob Zuma’s fate as the country’s president, two insiders have said.
The sources said Mabuza attended his last provincial executive committee meeting of the ANC in the Mpumalanga province early this year and in it he told PEC member Fish Mahlalela that he “will take this thing”.
“It’s yours. Take it,” said one of the sources, referring to the provincial chairmanship position that Mabuza left when he got elected the deputy president on 18 December 2017.
“He told him he wanted somebody who is disciplined and who would be the beacon of hope for the masses of the people and who would maintain stability and keep the unity of the movement,” the source told the 013NEWS reporter.
Fish Mahlalela
Later on, Mabuza told Peter Nyoni, who is co-operative governance head, to “prepare himself” as he was leaving him the position, the source said.
“He basically told Nyoni same thing,” the source said.
Mabuza was elected the deputy president during a national elective congress at the Nasrec Expo Centre in Soweto.
On 27 February 2018, President Cyril Ramaphosa appointed him the country’s deputy president.
Ramaphosa – who was himself the country’s deputy president and who was elected ANC President in the same Nasrec conference – was elected by Parliament on 15 February 2018 to replace Zuma who was forced to resign on the night of 14 February.
The source said it was during this time of the commotion around Zuma’s fate that Mahlalela and Nyoni got to be promised the Mpumalanga ANC chair seat.
“Then a week later Mabuza delivered the state of the province address at the legislature and then told crowds afterwards that Mandla Ndlovu should take the position,” the insider said.
Mahlalela confirmed on Friday midday that he was promised the position and that Mabuza “just said it in passing”.
“I don’t think he really meant it because subsequently to that he publicly endorsed comrade Mandla [Ndlovu]. It was during a PEC meeting in January and he said this thing in front of everybody that he was leaving the position to me but I think he was just saying it in passing,” Mahlalela said over the phone.
Nyoni said there was no way Mabuza would have wanted him to be his successor “because of my struggles in the ANC”.
“That is that an impression created. First of all that is not the proper way of getting a successor. You can’t say to me I will be your successor, only the branches can say that,” nyoni said on Thursday afternoon.
He said the only time he discussed ANC matters with Mabuza was two years ago and they spoke about factionalism, gate-keeping and the need to unite the ANC.
“I’m not his favoured candidate and never was,” Nyoni said.
The province previously had Pat Ngomane, a close friend of Mabuza who hails from his home region of eHlanzeni, poised for the position but a powerful lobby group aligned to the deputy president now wants Ngomane to be the secretary, Ndlovu the chair and Nkangala leader Speedy Mashilo the deputy chair.
Provincial spokeswoman Sasekani Manzini had also been punted amongst those who should succeed Mabuza as well as controversial Mbombela speaker Mandla Msibi, Charles Makola, Mahlalela, Ndlovu, Nyoni and David Dube who are also jostling for the seat.
The league is faced with two important congresses – a provincial and a national one – and jostling for positions has begun.
The factional fights of the ANCYL ahead of two important congresses are the reason ANC deputy president DD Mabuza snubbed the ANCYL’s 74th birthday celebration, this paper has learnt.
Some branches across the Mpumalanga province have started convening BGMs to nominate favoured candidates ahead of a provincial elective conference, a conference important going to the national one where the claws are out between contestants NEC member Ndumiso Mokako and national treasurer Reggie Nkabinde.
Senior ANC sources in the Mpumalanga province said Mabuza was made aware in the 11th hour that the 74th birthday celebration at the Sydney Choma community hall in Middelburg was going to be more of a launch of Nkabinde’s campaign than a birthday celebration.
“He was briefed on Saturday not to come because that was actually gonna be the launch of Reggie’s campaign. Mabuza doesn’t really want to publicly associate with a slate in the ANCYL though Pholoso Mbatsane is his favoured candidate for the position of national secretary,” the source said.
“But Mabuza doesn’t want to do that overtly, so that is why you saw [deputy president Desmond] Moela and [ANC provincial spokeswoman] Sasekani Manzini. Those are one of people who do Mabuza’s work on the ground,” said the source.
Reason national leader Collen ‘Oros’ Maine also snubbed the event was because Maine wants Mokako, who also snubbed the event, to be the President and “wouldn’t want to be overridden by the Nkangala ANCYL that actually organised the event,” the source said.
The event was then addressed by outgoing deputy president Desmond Moela, who called for unity in the league and said if the leaguers didn’t unite now they would just have to “forget” about liberating the youth of this country.
Mpumalanga provincial secretary Pholoso Mbatsane (L) and national treasurer Reggie Nkabinde (R).
Moela wants Nkabinde to be the President on a slate that wants provincial secretary Pholoso Mbatsane as the secretary general.
The Nkabinde camp also wants Nkangala secretary Thabang Mathebula to be Mpumalanga ANCYL chairman when a provincial congress is held soon.
But this is setting them against the Mokako camp which wants Gert Sibande’s Trevor Nkosi to become the chair. Nkosi is current provincial deputy chair.
The source say the reason Mokako, Maine and Mabuza didn’t come “is the issue of association”.
The Mokako campaign is currently experiencing hardships after Sabelo was discovered to be having secret meetings with former President Jacob Zuma allegedly plotting to oust current leader Cyril Ramaphosa.
The Sunday event was chaired by Nkangala regional leader Bobo Mtshweni and saw Nkabinde flanked by Mathebula, Moela, Mbatsane, provincial leader Tim Mashele, Manzini, Nkangala ANC chair Speedy Mashilo and secretary Leah Khoza.
Mpumalanga ANCYL leader Tim Mashele. 013NEWS/ZK.
“Collen, there was no way he was gonna come. It’s the issue of association my brother like I’m telling you,” said the source.
Moela and Manzini are accused by a disgruntled faction aligned to Mokako in the Bohlabela region of having delivered a league regional leadership through unfairness and alleged use of “bogus delegates”.
Asked why he did not attend Sunday’s celebration, Mokako said he could not make it to the event because he “did not have money”.
“Remember you need petrol to get to a place,” he said while laughing over the phone.
Provincial acting chairman Mandla Ndlovu, who also snubbed the event, said the reason he did not come despite being put on the program was because he had “flu”.
“I’m sick you won’t believe. I have flu,” he said over the phone.
“I don’t know that I was on the program,” said Ndlovu.
Manzini asked that all queries be directed to the ANCYL as that was an ANCYL event.
Provincial spokesman Bheki Sithole said the event was not a launch of Nkabinde’s campaign but a birthday celebration but can’t say those who say so are lying.
“Look it’s no secret that the ANCYL is due for a congress and during such time it happens that comrades lobby each other, so I won’t say whether those who say that was a campaign are lying or not but what I know is that it was a celebration,” Sithole said.
“All I know is that it was a 74th birthday celebration of the ANCYL and was organised nationally,” he said.
Nkabinde himself denied the stage was set for him to launch his campaign.
“You can’t say a celebration of the ANCYL is a launch of a campaign. That is so incorrect,” he said.
He added that an apology was sent by Mabuza to national secretary Njabulo Nzuza because Mabuza “had an emergency”.
National spokesman Mlondolozi Mkhize didn’t answer repeated calls on Sunday night and Monday morning.
The ANC in the Gert Sibande region of Mpumalanga this week said the 87% victory in the Mpuluzi by-election is nothing but the receipt of a “mandate” from the people.
Themba ‘Masofa’ Sgudla says he is joining one of the ANC factions currently in court to assist with evidence of alleged wrongdoing he witnessed while he was deputy president DD Mabuza’s friend.
EFF leader Julius Malema has said he doesn’t see ANC leader Cyril Ramaphosa finishing his term of office, saying the ANC is in the process of “vomiting” him
