| Mzilikazi Wa Afrika | |
| Birth Name: | Leonard Mzilikazi Ndzukula |
| Birth Date: | 1971 11, df=yes |
| Origin: | Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, South Africa |
| Years Active: | 1995 –present |
Leonard Mzilikazi Ndzukula, better known as Mzilikazi wa Afrika (born 26 November 1971), is a South African investigative journalist who worked for the Sunday Times newspaper. He resigned with a colleague, Stephan Hofstatter, in October 2018 after the newspaper publicly apologised for a number of stories they wrote between 2011 and 2016 which were found to be not reflecting an honest truth.[1] [2] [3] He is a multi-award winning journalist, a music producer and also the author of Nothing Left to Steal.[4] [5] [6]
Wa Afrika was then employed by the Sunday Independent newspaper, beginning April 2019 and left to work for the Sunday World starting November 2023.[7] [8]
Mzilikazi wa Afrika's career in journalism begins in 1995 when he was employed as a freelancer by the Witbank News. In 1996 he started his own newspaper called Mpumalanga Mirror with his brother but months later the newspaper business failed, which led him to seek employment in 1997 at the now defunct news agency African Eye News Service (AENS) in Mbombela. Seeing the investigative talents he expressed at the news agency, the Sunday Times headhunted him and he began his first article with the national broadsheet in 1999 where he broke significant exposés - exposing the SABC boss Enoch Sithole's illegal residency in South Africa and his fake qualifications as well as the Department of Home Affairs's director-general Albert Mokoena's running of a private basketball team from government office.[9] [10]
Wa Afrika's major story in his entire career was on the Arms Deal scandal in 2001, a front-page story titled Tony Yengeni, the 4x4 and the R43bn Arms Probe, which got Tony Yengeni imprisoned for corruption .[11] [12]
Mzilikazi wa Afrika was arrested in August 2010 by the South African police on charges of fraud and defeating the ends of justice,[13] which escalated the debate in his country about media freedom and, in light of a proposed Media Appeals Tribunal and Protection of Information Act seeming attempts by the governing African National Congress to curtail it.[14]
Suggestions abound that the arrest was politically motivated, coming as it did just a day after Bheki Cele, reacting to an article by Wa Afrika which detailed the police chief's involvement in a dubitable R500,000,000 lease agreement, described him as "shady" and hinted at reprisal. The Sunday Times subsequently quoted "a senior police official close to the case" as admitting, "Ja, it's political pressure," while Wa Afrika himself claimed to have been asked by his captors "whether I was involved in discrediting senior ANC office bearers in Mpumalanga. That made me wonder whether the police were investigating a criminal or a political case. They also wanted to know who are the big politicians I'm working with behind the scenes. This made me conclude the police were sent by politicians to harass and intimidate me". The prosecution claims that Wa Afrika was in possession of a forged letter of resignation from Mpumalanga premier David Mabuza, whose denial and formal complaint at the Kabokweni police station in Nelspruit it was that culminated in the arrest. The letter, faxed anonymously to The Sunday Times, had yet to be publicised. The arrest took place on Wednesday, 4 August, at 11:15 outside The Sunday Times building in Rosebank, Johannesburg, in spite of the fact that Wa Afrika's lawyer, who has since echoed claims of political meddling, had already negotiated for him to hand himself over at the Kabokweni police station.[15]
Several police vehicles with sirens blaring pulled up alongside wa Afrika outside the Sunday Times building while he was walking to the police station. Police bundled him into an unmarked vehicle and drove off at high speed.
At 19:00 the following day, the newspaper approached the High Court in Pretoria, bringing an urgent application for the journalist's release, which acting Judge Johan Kruger ordered three hours later, following an agreement with the state. Wa Afrika was released at 22:30 and appeared in Nelspruit Regional Court on the next day, 6 August, on charges of fraud, forgery and uttering. He was released on R5,000 bail and ordered to surrender his passports, not to leave the country or interfere with state witnesses, and to report to his nearest police station once a week.
Another suspect in the case, Victor Mlimi, deputy director of the Mpumalanga housing department, was according to his lawyer, Daniel Mabunda, questioned for two hours about the ANC's provincial leadership squabbles and where his own allegiances lie: "I was present when my client was asked, 'Are you destroying the image and integrity of the ANC in Mpumalanga?' I advised my client not to answer that question. It struck me that this has more to do with politics than a criminal case".[16]
Asked by The Sunday Times about the negative impression created by the police's heavy-handed action against wa Afrika, Cele's spokesperson Nonkululeko Mbatha replied,"I cannot undo that impression but the fact of the matter is no one is immune from investigation of what is suspicious of criminal nature. Lastly, insinuations about a directive issued by the general (Cele) to apprehend or intimidate the journalist are incorrect and a figment of imagination." Mabuza's spokesman also denied that he had exerted any pressure on police or that the arrest was an attempt to intimidate the journalist and countermine his investigations into the murders of Mbombela speaker Jimmy Mohlala and provincial arts and culture spokesman Sammy Mpatlanyane, whose names appeared on a "hit list" which emerged in 2009.[17] [18]
In 2004, Mzilikazi wa Afrika was fired from Sunday Times following a discovery that he had close ties with businesswoman Soraya Beukes who had been arrested for defrauding the South African government in the Travelgate. Wa Afrika and his investigative colleagues at Sunday Times had earlier written a powerful story about how members of the Parliament of South Africa used travel vouchers, issued by the government to allow them to visit their constituencies, to hire top cars and slept at luxurious hotels unrelated to their work and Beukes' company and that of other travel agency owners would then aid the scam by claiming millions of rands for these unauthorised travels by creating fake air tickets and other documents so that government paid.[19] It was revealed in court by a police detective investigating Beukes and co-accused that Wa Afrika gave contacts of Beukes to a hotel owner in Mozambique and said she was "innocent" in the Travelgate and could invest in his hotel. Hearing this, the Sunday Times management acted and dismissed Wa Afrika for failure to "manage a conflict of interest".[20] He was reinstated two years later.[21]
In October 2018, the Sunday Times publicly apologised for a number of stories Wa Afrika, Piet Rampedi and Stephan Hofstatter wrote - stories which were found to be not reflecting an honest truth. In a full-page apology titled We Got it Wrong, And For That We Apologise, editor Bongani Siqoko said the paper apologised for the reportage of allegations of police killings in Cato Manor in KwaZulu-Natal, claims that the South African government illegally deported Zimbabweans to face execution in their country and reports that the South African Revenue Service (Sars) ran a politically aligned spying unit under Pravin Gordhan.[22]
Wa Afrika and Hofstatter then quit the newspaper.[23]
Mzilikazi wa Afrika has scooped a lot of awards since he joined Sunday Times in 1999. Wa Africa's 2012 Taco Kuiper Investigative Journalism Award was returned after the scandal which found that he, investigative unit colleagues Stephan Hoffstatter and Rob Rose did not report an honest truth in their Cato Manor investigative story.[24] Some of his awards include -