There was never a SETA Selection and Evaluation Panel. Nkabane lied
Image: GCIS
The weekend's portfolio committee meeting, which Minister Nobuhle Nkabane bunked out of, heard staggering new details about the cover-up of brazen ANC cadre deployment.
The evil system of ANC cadre deployment is a web of corruption.
There was never an 'independent panel' which made the SETA board appointments - as with all ANC cadre deployment corruption, it was done behind closed doors by the ANC and its handlers, one being Luvo Makasi.
The son of the ANC Chairperson, Gwede Mantashe, a former ANC KZN Premier, former ANC KZN MECs, and ANC office bearers currently serving in internal structures, were not appointed to these lucrative Board jobs by luck or accident. Their appointments were engineered.
It is now on record that four out of five named persons have so far denied being on Nkabane's 'independent panel' - only one named person remains to testify.
The committee testimony by witnesses, including Advocate Terry Motau, confirmed the conclusion from at least four out of the five people who Nkabane declared to Parliament served on this panel, that the panel did not exist. Nkabane lied.
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The bombshell revelation in the past 24 hours is that the names and applications for persons competing to serve on the SETA Boards were given directly to the Minister personally, in January 2025 (on her request) and not to the panel. This is contrary to Nkabane's claim to Parliament on 30 May that she didn't see the names until after "the panel" advised her.
Nkabane only created the 'independent panel' in March 2025, which we deduce from the 'appointment letters' for 'panel members' that she submitted to Parliament.
Nkabane had these applications for a full two months before she sent appointment letters to "the panel".
Two letters have been supplied to Parliament which show her appointing two different people as 'independent panel' Chairpersons. One, Mabuza Ngubane as Chairperson on the 7th of March, and another, Adv Terry Motau as Chairperson on the 15th of March.
Since then, both Motau & Ngubane have denied this, and Nkabane has admitted to Terry Motau that she indeed did not appoint him.
These revelations are staggering: Nkabane & the ANC had the CVs and applications for two months before she started her 'independent panel' scheme,
She attempted to appoint two different persons as 'Chairperson' - both of whom have testified to not having played any role in "the panel" and
Now, at least four out of five persons on the 'independent panel' deny ever serving on the panel.
With each passing day, Nkabane's ANC cadre deployment corruption scheme grows more and more brazen.
The DA's demand to Luthuli House by way of a PAIA application for information on the Party's role in Nkabane's cadre deployment is yet to be answered. The DA will be holding Luthuli House to the legal timelines of this.
The silence and inaction from President Ramaphosa show that an ANC party-wide cover-up may be underway, and the DA will not rest until full accountability follows.
Karabo Khakhau MP - DA National Spokesperson
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IOL News
3 hours ago
- IOL News
Two Judicial Sagas, Ten Years Apart: The Mabel Jansen and Selby Mbenenge Cases
Gillian Schutte is a film-maker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. Image: IOL West Indian psychiatrist and decolonial philosopher, Frantz Fanon, wrote that 'the Black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.' He named a violence deeper than physical domination: the psychic capture of the Black subject inside the white imaginary. In the colonial order, the Black man is not seen as a man; he is seen as a body, a phallus, a threat, an object of anxiety. The Black woman is not seen as a woman; she is seen as an overdetermined symbol, hypersexualised, violable, yet erased as a full erotic and political subject. Post-apartheid South Africa continues to move within these patterns. Two judicial sagas, ten years apart – the 2016 exposure of Judge Mabel Jansen and the current tribunal against Eastern Cape Judge President Selby Mbenenge – reveal how deeply colonial logic still shapes our public life, our media, and our institutions. In 2015, during a public debate on my Facebook page, Judge Mabel Jansen entered of her own will. She had been following my social justice feminist work for months, even inboxing me with praise. The debate she chose to join centred on a petition circulating about poor white Afrikaners begging the EU to 'repatriate' them – a discussion already thick with tensions about race, poverty, colonial grievance, and belonging. Into this space, Jansen dropped comments that landed like malfeasance. Here are her exact public statements: '99% of criminal cases I hear are of Black fathers/uncles/brothers raping children as young as five years old. Is this part of your culture? Because then you do not know the truth. And they do it to their children, sisters, nieces, and so on. Is this also attributable to white people somehow, because we take the blame for everything?' 'Fact: Black children and women are raped and abused, and beaten by Black men to an extent that is so sickening that one cannot even cope with it. And that is a fact.' 'Want to read my files: rape, rape, rape, rape of minors by Black families. It is never-ending.' 'Show me one Black woman who has not been molested herself … but culturally that is the viewpoint.' 'Apparently sex is simply to be had when required. And five years old, by the way, is old … apparently it is not regarded as rape, but the exertion of a male's right. And women allow the father to be the first.'When I answered that the majority of Black uncles, fathers, and brothers do most certainly not rape 5-year-olds, she replied, 'Oh yes, they do. 'She also inboxed me privately: 'In their culture, a woman is there to pleasure them. Period. It is seen as an absolute right, and a woman's consent is not required. 'I still have to meet a Black girl who was not raped at about 12. I am dead serious. One of her public posts also asserted that 'while white men also rape, it is not our natural way, whereas with Black men it is a way of life.'As Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks, 'The Negro is eclipsed. He has been turned into a penis. He is a penis.' Jansen's words performed this symbolic reduction: the Black man as violent phallus, the Black woman as voiceless body. For a year, I agitated for the system to act. I wrote articles, raised alarms, contacted advocates and constitutional lawyers, and lodged a formal complaint with the Judicial Service Commission (JSC). Silence. It was only when UCT activist-academic Brian Ihirwe Kamanzi shared the screenshots on Black Twitter a year later, after I drew his attention to them, that outrage ignited. The Black Lawyers Association stepped in. Organisers mobilised. Protests were staged, interviews were had, and the JSC could no longer look away. However, during this uprising, the media played a familiar game – they repeatedly referred to Gillian Schutte sharing private inboxed messages and questioned the morality of this. In short, I became the focus instead of the racist inner workings of the Judge and the fact that she presided over gender-based violence cases in her court. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. 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Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ They tried valiantly to turn the focus of the protests onto my amorality in order to divert the Black organising against Jansen to me. It failed. In the JSC hearing, Jansen's defence lawyers, using this same trope in their defence, sought to discredit me, portraying me as ideologically radical, emotionally unstable, and mentally unbalanced. How a huge firm with much experience imagined this was a good defence baffled even the judges who presided over the hearing. My own attorney, Tracey Lomax, spoke eloquently to this matter. The defence strategy failed. The JSC prepared for impeachment. Jansen resigned before the process was completed – escaping formal judgment but not public disgrace. My life turned into a living hell with multiple death threats aimed at my family, men with Voortrekker beards parked outside our house every day for a week, tracking our movements, an envelope laced with poison in our post-box which attacked my husband's central nervous system for days, and plentiful murderous social media aimed at instilling a sense of instability in our daily life. The media ignored this onslaught but chose to report on Jansen's claims that her life and the life of her children were being threatened because I wanted my '15 minutes of fame'.Privacy Only Applies to Whites, Then? This political history forms the backdrop to the Mbenenge case. In the current tribunal, private WhatsApp exchanges between Judge President Selby Mbenenge and court secretary Andiswa Mengo – filled with flirtation, erotic humour, playful negotiation, and mutual pleasure – have been hauled into public spectacle as evidence of sexual misconduct. The 'privacy argument' raised to shield Jansen has been discarded without hesitation. Fanon is again essential. In the colonial imaginary, Black male sexuality is imagined as excess, danger, and violence; Black women are imagined as bodies without agency. There is no script to hold African men negotiating desire, speaking of cunnilingus, imagining female pleasure, or showing concern for mutual satisfaction. There is no space to imagine African women as agents of their own pleasure, as partners in joy, as subjects of flirtation and orgasm. This is what Fanon called the white neurosis – a psychic malaise that turns Blackness into a site of phobic fantasy. It is why, in this case, liberal white feminist discourse reproduces the same reductive gaze as Jansen's open white supremacy. Both erase the fullness of Black erotic life. Both install the same whiteness default: the monstrous Black man, the violated Black woman. Yet the messages between Mbenenge and Mengo belong to ukudlalisa ngamazwi – an idiom of wordplay, teasing, humour, and mutual consent, deeply woven into isiXhosa culture. Mengo jokes, withholds, offers, and winks. She participates. She chooses. She suggests. She enjoys. Inside the tribunal, however, Advocate Scheepers has acted not as investigator but as moral accuser, akin to the inquisitors of the 12th-century European witch-hunting inquisitions – cross-examining by assertion, visibly contemptuous when blocked from introducing irrelevant material or over-the-top suggestion, following a script familiar to those who have watched how donor feminism, legal machinery, and liberal media merge into spectacles of moral panic. This script does not rely on careful evidence. It feeds on atmosphere, insinuation, and the rapid buttressing of guilt. Judge President Selby Mbenenge has not denied his role in the mutual flirtation – he has owned his sexuality as well as acknowledged Mengo's right to pleasure without judgment or shaming language. But he has resisted. He has challenged the expansion of charges, insisted on keeping the process tied to the legal question, and unsettled the moral machinery gathering around him. He has foiled the plot to take him down through perception, even while mainstream media is working overtime to create the idea that he is guilty. As in the Jansen case, where the system worried over a white woman's privacy and reputation, then turned its disciplinary gaze onto the whistleblower, in the Mbenenge case, the system moves to discipline a Black man, stripping away the agency of a Black woman, reducing them both to spectacle. Black X and Black AgencyOutside the courtroom, however, another public reads the messages differently. Across social media, across age and gender, people laugh delightedly, joke, make memes, print T-shirts with Mengo's face and the word 'ewe' – marking her participation, her agency, her pleasure. Besides many expressing recognition of 'her gameplay,' no one is going all out to shame Mengo. In this space, indigenous language speakers understand nuance, social cues, cultural code, idioms in isiXhosa and the many languages of South know that when Mbenenge refers to isiXhosa idioms and relational behaviours, he is not harking back to some precolonial animist past as liberal media asserts. He is speaking of DNA memory – the knowledge that African life has not been entirely erased by whiteness, that Ubuntu and cultural coding still live in modern African existence. For white structural racism, this is intolerable. What it cannot understand, it cannot rationalise. What it cannot rationalise, it must sully. What it cannot sully, it must discipline. The inquisitor's grasp moves in to capture, restrain, and reimpose bondage. As Fanon warned, 'the colonised is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.' Any trace of unapologetic African intellectual and erotic agency, humour, or joy threatens this fragile white psychic order. What Machinery is at Work Here? This tribunal, then, is not only a legal proceeding; it is a political operation, where the machinery of whiteness works hand in hand with state power, NGOs, media platforms, and donor-aligned intellectuals to neutralise a judge who refused to serve colonial interests. It is no coincidence that Judge President Selby Mbenenge blocked Shell's seismic blasting along the Transkei coast, protecting ancestral marine lands from exploitation by powerful international actors. Shell (via BG International) and Impact Africa are leading the Transkei offshore exploration bid, while TotalEnergies, QatarEnergy, and Sasol have been advancing their own offshore successes further west, in the Orange Basin off South Africa's west coast. TotalEnergies and QatarEnergy recently secured significant stakes in Block 3B/4B of the Orange Basin, consolidating a major fossil fuel presence alongside Sasol's earlier partnerships. Mbenenge's ruling against Shell must be seen not merely as environmental justice but as a rare legal obstruction to a growing multinational fossil fuel push, largely headquartered in London, Paris, Doha, and Johannesburg. His landmark directives to rename Eastern Cape courts with indigenous African names also signalled a deeper dismantling of the linguistic and legal scaffolding of colonialism — a stance that may help explain why he has been targeted and discredited in other public arenas. These are decolonial interventions that have rattled both local elites and global extractive interests. And now, on Black X, we see why this moment has caught has become a symbol of a man who refuses shaming, a man who playfully, rather than patriarchally, knows his way around women's pleasure, a man whose unapologetic erotic agency defies the colonial scripts that position Black men as either dangerous or deviant. Mbenenge stands for an African masculinity that refuses containment, that speaks of mutual pleasure, that celebrates the playful, relational, and knowing erotic exchanges of African life. He insists that private flirtation is his right as much as it is Mengo's, arguing with conviction in the face of a non-Black legal team linked to an ecosystem of liberal media, ngo's, and, quite possibly intelligence think tanks, all working in tandem to remove him from his position. Together with his brilliant advocate, Muzi Sikhakhane, Mbenenge has, in many ways, put whiteness itself on trial – exposing how it moves through media headlines, NGO scripts, donor-backed moral campaigns, and institutional inquisitions. This is not the end of his story. It is the beginning of a broader political and cultural eruption – a struggle to reclaim African erotic agency, economic and environmental sovereignty, and decolonial justice. Black X will fight back. *Gillian Schutte is a filmmaker, and a well-known social justice and race-justice activist and public intellectual. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
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IOL News
6 hours ago
- IOL News
Madiba's legacy: Time to reclaim the soul of the struggle
ANC president Nelson Mandela smiles on April 27, 1994, as he casts his vote at the John Langalibalele Dube's Ohlange High School in Inanda, near Durban. We were once a society celebrated for the moral imagination of our negotiated settlement, hailed as a Rainbow Nation that chose dialogue over destruction, political patience over military confrontation. That fragile consensus has disintegrated, says the writer. Image: AFP Zamikhaya Maseti As the world paused to observe Mandela Day this week on July 18, 2025, we are reminded that this day, solemnly declared by the United Nations in 2009, stands not as a decorative event on the calendar but as a global summons to political and ethical conscience. Mandela Day was never meant to be reduced to a moment of philanthropy. It is a moral provocation. It demands reflection, honesty, and action from all of us, particularly those who profess to walk in the shadows of the long and unfinished journey that began long before 1994. On February 11, 1990, President Nelson Mandela emerged from Victor Verster Prison with his fist raised high in the air, a gesture that immediately entered the symbolic archive of revolutionary imagery. It was not a sign of triumphalism. It was a signal. A political message carved into the conscience of this country and the watching world. That image did not mark the end of the struggle. It marked its transformation. It did not signify closure. It announced a continuation. It called upon the oppressed and the marginalised, the landless and the working poor, to pick up where he and his fellow Rivonia Trialists had left off. The prison gates had opened, yes, but the gates of justice remained locked for millions. He did not emerge bitter after twenty-seven years of carceral humiliation. He came out with the integrity of purpose intact, preaching reconciliation, peace, and coexistence. The reconciliation was meant to be just, it was meant to be transformative, and it was meant to be rooted in redress. This year's Mandela Day finds South Africa at a historical crossroads. It coincides with the build-up to what may become a defining moment in the life of our post-Apartheid democratic project, the much-anticipated National Dialogue, now just a month away. In a previous reflection, I described the National Dialogue as a conversation we did not know we truly needed. It is now apparent that we are a society adrift, lacking a common moral vocabulary and torn apart by deepening social fragmentation. In the context of Mandela Day, we must be courageous enough to pose the most uncomfortable but essential questions. Have we remained faithful to the founding ethos of our democratic transition? Have we honoured Mandela's radical legacy, or have we betrayed it? We were once a society celebrated for the moral imagination of our negotiated settlement, hailed as a Rainbow Nation that chose dialogue over destruction, political patience over military confrontation. That fragile consensus has disintegrated. Today, we speak less like a Nation and more like a federation of bitter factions divided by race, class, geography, and ideology. The dream of non-racialism has withered into suspicion. The national unity once imagined in the fervour of 1994 has been replaced with racial scapegoating and retreat. This is not the country Mandela sacrificed his freedom for. This is not the inheritance his fellow Rivonia Trialists hoped to bequeath to future generations. Mandela Day must not be reduced to cooking for communities or painting classroom walls. These gestures are not inherently wrong, but they are dangerously insufficient. They become symbolic bandages on wounds that require political surgery. We need to elevate Mandela Day beyond gestures. It must become a platform to interrogate structural injustice, economic exclusion, and the social distance that continues to define our post-1994 reality. The uncomfortable truth is that we have regressed. The South African Nation, post-February 11, 1990, defined by an ethos of Rainbowism, has collapsed into a contest of parallel grievances. The original project of inclusive nation-building has been corroded by policies that, while well-intentioned on paper, have had contradictory consequences in practice. The Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy, for instance, while aimed at redressing apartheid-era dispossession, has inadvertently alienated certain sections of the Black majority (Africans, People of Colour, People of Indian origin, and the Khoisan People). When I refer to Black people, I do so in the tradition of the liberation movement as a historically defined social category forged through a collective struggle against colonialism, land dispossession, and Apartheid. That Black unity, painstakingly built in the trenches of resistance, is today fraying at the seams. We are witnessing a tragic reversal, a balkanisation of the oppressed into fragmented groupings, each speaking a different political grammar, each wounded by a different historical wound. Instead of deepening national unity, certain policies have created perceptions of intra-Black competition, fuelling resentment, bitterness, and ultimately disunity. We must confront the ideological implications of this drift. The emergence of what I call the Lumpen Bourgeoisie, a predatory class in itself, lacking revolutionary consciousness, obsessed with accumulation and proximity to power, stands in stark contrast to the National Bourgeoisie, a class for itself with a progressive mission, national vision, and clarity of purpose. The former is transactional and extractive. The latter, at least in theory, is meant to be developmental and historically conscious. The BEE unintentionally fostered the rise of the former while neglecting the ideological nurturing of the latter. This is not an attack on BEE per se. It is a call for its recalibration, for its redistributive potential to be realigned with the historic aspirations of the Freedom Charter and the social compact imagined at the birth of our democracy. Policies must not only transfer wealth, but they must build productive capacity, foster unity among the oppressed, and dismantle systemic privilege at its root. Equally important is the role of White South Africans in the post-1994 Nation. We cannot build a united country if significant sections of the population continue to self-isolate and insulate themselves from national challenges. The recent episode involving forty-nine self-exiled White farmers who left South Africa under the illusion of genocide and were caught in the geopolitical crossfire of a now-fractured Trump-Musk alliance is telling. It reveals the continued racial distrust, the misinformation industry, and the alienation of White South Africans from the collective destiny of this country. It also reveals a troubling reality that we are once again singing from two hymn books, one Black, the other White. These wounds will not heal through sentimentality. They require political honesty, institutional courage, and leadership with historical memory. That is why the National Dialogue is important. It must be a space where these contradictions are surfaced without fear. The Dialogue must ask why Mandela's Rainbow Nation has faded. The reconstruction of national unity cannot be subcontracted to slogans. It must be lived, nurtured, and constantly renewed. Mandela Day offers us a moment to recommit to the work of Nation-Building. It invites every South African, Black or White, rich or poor, urban or rural, to become an active participant in the unfinished struggle for a just and equal society. We all have a role to play in bridging the fissures of mistrust and despair. Mandela Day must be a call to civic renewal, to ethical leadership, and deep, principled reconciliation. Not the reconciliation of forgetfulness, but the reconciliation of truth, justice, and inclusion. In the name of Mandela, we must confront the fractures, realign our compass, and rebuild a Nation worthy of his legacy. * Zamikhaya Maseti is a Political Economy Analyst with a Magister Philosophiae (M. PHIL) in South African Politics and Political Economy from the University of Port Elizabeth (UPE), now known as the Nelson Mandela University (NMU). ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL, Independent Media or The African.
