Nomsa Masuku, one of South Africa’s four electoral commissioners, was arrested for fraud allegedly committed while she headed a charity a decade ago. The arrest, just weeks after the elections, had nothing to do with false claims of vote fraud.
MARY ALEXANDER • 5 July 2024
Has an Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) official who reported vote rigging in South Africa’s 29 May 2024 elections been arrested?
That’s the claim circulating on social media since late June.*
The election results were historic. The African National Congress (ANC) won just 40.2% of the national vote, losing its 30-year parliamentary majority. Next up was the Democratic Alliance (DA) with 21.8% of the vote, and then the new uMkhonto weSizwe Party (MKP), headed by former president Jacob Zuma, with 14.6%.
With no outright winner, ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa invited the DA and other parties to form a government of national unity (GNU), last seen in South Africa from 1994 to 1997. The DA accepted but the MKP, which has challenged the election results in court, declined. The GNU cabinet of ministers was sworn in on 3 July.
The viral claim has it that “senior IEC officials” confessed that they had been bribed by Ramaphosa and DA leader John Steenhuisen to rig the elections “in favour of the ANC 40% and the DA 20%” so that the DA could “sneak into” a government of national unity.
Africa Check has debunked the claim that the ANC and DA bribed IEC officials to rig the elections.
But the new claim adds:
Now one of many IEC whistleblowers gets arrested by the Hawks for an old case of where she used to worked from 2006-2011 at one of the commercial Banks whose Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) Partner was no other than Ramaphosa […] to humiliate her. Why did the Hawks arrest her after 13 years and on whose instructions […] After she has implicated Ramaphosa in Vote Rigging and Bribery[?]
The Hawks are the police’s Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation.
The claim is attributed to the “uMkhonto weSizwe Khoisan Federation” and ends by reiterating the MKP’s court challenge to the results. The party withdrew its case on 3 July.
She’s not mentioned by name, but the claim clearly refers to Nomsa Masuku. Masuku is one of the IEC’s four commissioners and was arrested on 21 July, the day before the claim appeared online. One version includes a screengrab of a news report of her arrest.
Is there any evidence Masuku was arrested because she’s “one of many IEC whistleblowers” to election rigging?
R1.2 million theft from charity reported 10 years ago
Masuku’s arrest – coming so soon after the elections and given her high position in the IEC – was widely reported by local news.
But the arrest was for well-documented fraud, allegedly committed while Masuku headed the Standard Bank charity Adopt a School more than a decade ago.
A police spokesperson said an “intensive probe” by Hawks investigators established that Masuku had “flouted the processes of the trust by awarding scholarships to friends and family members through manipulation of documents and without the approval of the committee, with some of the monies deposited directly into her personal bank account to the tune of R1.2 million”.
A TimesLive report details the case against Masuku. One detail is that the matter was “initially flagged by Standard Bank and reported to police 10 years ago”.
The case has nothing to do with South Africa’s 2024 elections.
Ramaphosa was once a director of the board of Standard Bank and several other companies, but resigned from these positions after his return to politics in 2012.
The ANC’s performance in the 2024 elections was its worst in 30 years. In the event that Ramaphosa had bribed IEC officials to rig the polls – and then had a whistleblower arrested “to humiliate her” – his party surely would have won far more than just 40.2% of the vote.
But there’s no evidence for any of this. The claim is false.
* Some Facebook and Instagram users may have deleted their posts after Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program rated their claims as untrue.
Published by Africa Check on 9 July 2024