JOHANNESBURG – South Africa’s Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba on Sunday apologised to his family that a “video containing material of a sexual nature, meant for our eyes only” had leaked and been used in an attempt to blackmail him.
Malusi Gigaba and his wife Noma rarriving for the Opening of Parliament. Picture Cindy Waxa /African News Agency/ ANA
He stated on Twitter that the video had been “stolen when my communication got illegally intercepted/my phone got hacked in 2016/17.”
ZimLive has seen the 13-second video, which shows Gigaba, with his T-Shirt pulled up, stroking his member. He says on the video: “Mhh, imagine if this was in your mouth, oh baby!”
It is not believed that video was sent to his wife, Nomachule.
A mobile phone screenshot which circulated on social media on Sunday of a conversation between Gigaba and his former mistress, Buhle Mkhize, reveals that the minister desperately pleaded with her to “delete those pictures and videos” and not to upload them to a South African pornographic website.
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“For old times sake (sic) please do the right thing. Remember all I have done for you. That video and those pictures will destroy me. Please don’t upload them on (website name) please I beg you,” Gigaba purportedly wrote to Mkhize.
The authenticity of the exchange between the two could not be verified, but it fits into the events around a social media spat that erupted between Gigaba’s wife Nomachule and Mkhize in May 2017.
It was reported at the time that Nomachule sent Mkhize a message on Instagram, apparently calling Mkhize a prostitute. “Miss photoshop and a lot of makeup awuve ufake [you are fake]. Go to hell, prostitute, tell the world, I am not shaken, loser, you have been doing this since last year,” one of the messages reportedly read.
In response, Mkhize appeared to threaten the Gigabas, indicating that she has a recording on tape that could embarrass the minister.
In the undated phone conversation that was circulated on Sunday, Gigaba asks Mkhize to “be the bigger one, do not allow yourself to be agitated by my wife please”, to which she shoots back: “Why must I listen to you now? Where were you when she was attacking me this time?”
Mkhize, from the screenshots seen by ZimLive, never promised not to leak the pictures and video Gigaba was keen to keep a lid on, stating that she would go to sleep and “decide tomorrow when I wake up”.
“N.B: I am not a bitter ex, she is a bitter wife,” she said of Gigaba’s wife. “Your wife should have let me be.”
In blaming the leak on a hack, Gigaba could be avoiding a new confrontation with his former mistress – perhaps fearing she could leak the pictures he sent her.
Gigaba maintained on Sunday that the problem was not him but those who were circulating the video.
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South Africans, he said, must “constructively engage with the question of whether it is correct to condone and promote the gross invasion of the privacy of others by distributing such material, more especially in the clear absence of a public interest justification.”-zimlive
