Deputy President Paul Mashatile has been tipped off to WhatsApp messages involving two cabinet ministers and a senior NPA official discussing a plot to charge him.
The ministers and NPA official, who are known to Sunday World, cannot be named for legal reasons.
According the WhatsApp messages, the two ministers told the NPA official to charge Mashatile with perjury after a case was opened against him by a group of disgruntled ANC members in North West.
In the message, one of the ministers informed the official to “please proceed with the prosecution”.
When the official asked if some government leaders were aware of the proposal to charge Mashatile, the question was responded to with a forwarded message suggesting that they were aware.
When the official asked where the forwarded message was coming from, the official was told it was transmitted by the other minister, who was not part of the conversation.
The official, in the WhatsApp messages, agreed to proceed but raised concern that “it’s not often that you get to charge a deputy president of a country”.
Yesterday the official claimed that the WhatsApp messages were fake.
“These days people can fake things; with the technology today, they can put a story that is very believable while it isn’t. Technology has advanced so much.
“I don’t know ANC people. I don’t know anybody.”
The official added that nobody had ever put them under pressure to prosecute anyone.
“Nobody will dare try and do that with me. I am proud of my integrity, which I have built over the years,” the official added.
Mashatile’s acting spokesperson, Keith Khoza, yesterday confirmed that the deputy president was made aware of the WhatsApp message last week.
“We can confirm that we have seen the WhatsApp messages in question. This exposes the ongoing malicious and political prosecution against the deputy president,” Khoza said.
The WhatsApp messages come after the NPA in North West wrote to the NPA head office recently, stating that there was not enough evidence to prosecute Mashatile. The NPA headquarters wrote back to the North West branch and asked it to re-evaluate its decision not to charge Mashatile.
Mashatile’s woes started when an ANC member, Sello Molefe, opened a case against him.
Molefe and other ANC members are challenging the validity of the party’s provincial conference in 2022 where Nono Maloyi was elected as the chairman in the province.
The group claims that the interim provincial committee (IPC) that led the provincial conference did not have the blessing of the ANC national executive committee (NEC) as their mandate had not been renewed.
Mashatile’s crime is that he deposed an affidavit under oath claiming that the NEC had taken a resolution to reappoint the same IPC structure.
But unfortunately for Mashatile, some of the members of that IPC had already resigned and others were dead at the time, which suggests that he had committed perjury.
The two ministers implicated in the WhatsApp messages could not be reached for comment, as they were still locked in an NEC meeting, which started on Friday and is expected to end tomorrow.
One doesn’t need an elaborate plan to find this guy guilty of criminality