The real Nathi Mthetwa - and his one good deed: John Matisonn

Key topics:Nathi Mthetwa faced multiple corruption and interference inquiries before deathAllegations involved police, Richard Mdluli, and misuse of secret service fundsHe successfully reformed Cricket SA but didn’t tackle wider sporting corruption.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up for the BizNews channel here..By John Matisonn.The last ten days in the life of the late South African Ambassador to France Nathi Mthetwa offer clues to his state of mind when he died. He was about to face a grilling on the witness stand in at least three venues. On September 19, the Madlanga Commission heard him accused of political interference and corruption in the police. Within about a day, he reserved a room in Paris’s tallest hotel for September 29, ten days later, according to Le Parisien.Mthetwa would immediately have known that he would have to testify at the Madlanga Commission to answer those charges. He would have known soon afterwards that he would also have to testify before the parliamentary inquiry into the same matters, the inquiry’s chair, Ian Cameron, has confirmed.He was also due to be a witness in the Nkabinde Inquiry into suspended Gauteng Director of Public Prosecutions, Andrew Chauke.According to Reuters, a French prosecutor said Mthetwa sent a message to his wife on Monday “in which he apologised and expressed his intention to end his life”..Read more:.Macpherson suspends EPWP funds to Free State municipality over alleged abuse.Police said in his room on the 22nd floor of the Hyatt Hotel the sealed window had been forced open, possibly with a pair of scissors they found there. His body was only found at 11.10 the next morning because he fell onto an interior terrace that was not visible from the street. His death was especially poignant for me because I saw at close quarters his ability to act constructively if he chose to. In 2021, as minister of arts, culture and sport, he set out to clean up corruption in Cricket South Africa, and he succeeded. Clumsy legislation made his task particularly difficult, but he stuck with it. He is the reason the CSA chairperson is now independent of vested cricket interests.A few of us working on the project hoped he would go further. He could have cleaned up other sporting codes accused of acting against the public interest, but he didn’t. The allegations he faced now were extremely serious. His accuser, KwaZulu-Natal police commissioner General Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi, was so focussed on Mthetwa that he described an encounter with him as the worst example of political interference of his career. “If you want to talk about political interference, that was the worst I have experienced,” Mkhwanazi told the commission on September 19. Mkhwanazi said Mthetwa demanded he drop charges against disgraced Crime Intelligence (CI) head Richard Mdluli and reinstate him.“This can’t be right,” Mkhwanazi said he told the minister. “It’s not what I signed for when I joined the police.” He said as the newly appointed acting national police commissioner he was summoned to the home of Mthetwa, who was then police minister. “The minister ... said you must stop prosecuting Mdluli, stop the disciplinary case...“Then I said to the minister, maybe you brought me into the position and you thought you were going to use me as a pawn, but you are wrong. I’m not going to do that.“If you want me to stop you must give it to me in writing.”Mkhwanazi said what happened back in 2011 is still happening within crime intelligence today and he had to speak out about it."It cannot be that I allowed the Mdluli era, the minister Mthethwa era, under former president Jacob Zuma to happen like that, and it's happening again now, and I keep quiet."Evidence of Mthetwa’s involvement in the the Mdluli incident was given at the Zondo Commission. Mdluli was accused of using R195,581.45 of police funds to erect a boundary wall around Mthethwa’s private home in Kwambonambi, KZN.The Zondo Commission heard from intelligence officer Colonel Dhanajaya Naidoo that he had made three claims from the secret service account for funds to pay for the minister’s wall.Naidoo also spoke of the gift of a R400,000 Mercedes, purchased through the account and which Naidoo delivered to the minister in Pretoria.Naidoo confessed that Mdluli had instructed him to retrieve the vehicle as Mthethwa had claimed that “journalists were following him”. The former minister would also have known he could hire a lawyer to defend himself and to cross examine his accusers. When he died he was only 58.One question I’m left with is why did he clean up cricket, yet choose not to move on to do the same with other sporting codes that needed the same treatment? Perhaps it was because cricket was in the news over racial conflict, and cleaning it up was one way he could act. When he put in that hard work, did he care about corruption in cricket? Now we may never know.

The real Nathi Mthetwa - and his one good deed: John Matisonn

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