FORMER wife of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, has expressed shock as South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority says she might be prosecuted for the deaths of two men during the apartheid era.
“Mrs. Mandela wishes to express her surprise and shock at the statement that there are processes currently underway which will lead to her prosecution for the deaths of the late Lolo Sono and Siboniso Tshabalala,’’ her attorney, Pops Mageza, said in a statement.
“To her knowledge, these are matters that have already been comprehensively dealt with in open transparent televised public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC),’’ the lawyer said.
In 1996, Nicodemus Sono told the TRC which investigated apartheid-era crimes that he last saw his son, Lolo, on Nov. 13, 1988, badly beaten, in a minibus with Madikizela-Mandela and members of her notorious Mandela United Football Club.
The remains of the two men were exhumed in Soweto last week, 25 years after they went missing.
Mageze said the TRC issued a final report on Sono and Tshabalala and ruled that they were murdered by Madikizela-Mandela’s former friend Jerry Richardson who died in prison.
Richardson applied for amnesty at the TRC on the basis that he received orders to murder the two from Madikizela-Mandela.
However, the TRC found that there was no evidence to support his claims.
Madikizela-Mandela is no stranger to controversy after she was convicted of kidnapping in an unrelated case in Soweto in the 1980s.
Although millions of South Africans regarded Madikizela-Mandela as the “Mother of the Nation’’, her involvement in several human rights abuses has also outraged many.
These included the 1988 kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old African National Congress (ANC) activist Stompie Moeketsi.