also adamant that the alleged fracas at the branch meeting did happen.
Most troublingly, Maleka claimed that he had not spoken to The
Weekly at all. He was reluctant to discuss the issue, but said he could
only remember at the time having talked to either the Sunday World or
the Sunday Sun. According to Maleka, he and Moletsane withdrew
their complaints against Magashule after discussions with the premier.
‘We sorted things out, everything is fine now,’ he told me. He did not
want to provide further details on how the matter was resolved.
I asked Ntsele whether his newspaper had fabricated the ‘plot’. He did
not respond to any of my queries about his business dealings in the
Free State or his alleged friendship with the former premier.
Another early ‘scoop’ by The Weekly was a front-page lead in late
2011 that detailed an alleged plot to ‘assassinate’ Magashule.^22 The
story was wafer-thin in terms of its sourcing and it lacked concrete
evidence that a plot really existed. It was also strangely reminiscent of
similar claims that had been circulated about Jacob Zuma since at least
2007.^23 Zuma and his allies propagated such claims to great effect to
paint the former president as a victim and thereby bolster his support at
key moments in his scandal-ridden career as a politician.
Then, in early 2012 , as the ANC was starting to prepare for that
year’s elective conference in Mangaung, Ntsele’s newspaper followed
up with a report headed ‘Inside regime change war room’. The piece
outlined a series of dubious tactics used by the Regime Change faction
in an attempt to get rid of Magashule and Zuma. Yet one of their main
sources was Magashule himself, a fact The Weekly was astonishingly
candid about: After months of painstaking investigations and extensive
interviews with ANC branch members and chairperson [Magashule],
The Weekly can reveal the diabolical and delusional modus operandi
nora
(Nora)
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