Former president Jacob Zuma is fighting back, and hard. This after it was reported that his lawyers are taking the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) to court in an attempt to force the NPA to reveal whether it or anyone else made any payments to his rape accuser after she charged the former president with rape.
Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo, who was known previously by the pseudonym “Khwezi”during the rape trial and till the time of her death, accused Jacob Zuma of rape in 2005. Zuma was acquitted in May 2006.
The move has been slammed by former Zuma rape case prosecutor Charin de Beer, who says any suggestion that the AIDS activist was paid to go ahead with the case is “absolute nonsense”.
The High Court in Johannesburg, when acquitting Zuma looked into some of the allegations of rape made by Khwezi against other men‚ some of which were contained in her memoir‚ and found them to be false.
Referring to six prior cases‚ it saw a pattern that she was inclined to falsely accuse men of having raped or attempted to rape her.
The court also found out that the state had failed to prove the case against Zuma‚ accepting his version that they had consensual sex.
Kuzwayo, with her mother fled to the Netherlands after Zuma was acquitted of raping her in 2006. They struggled with language and cultural differences in the Netherlands and later left for Tanzania before returning to South Africa. She died in October 2016.