Vyjtie Mentor Picture: Gallo Images
Former ANC MP Vytjie Mentor has been treated as a bit of a media darling and a hero ever since she came forward last year with startling allegations against the Gupta family and President Jacob Zuma.
Few of us had heard of her before that, and Zuma himself apparently said he didn’t know who she was (though, of course, if our president told me my name was Charles Cilliers, I would still feel compelled to check my ID book).
She claimed on the platform she’s become famous for, Facebook, that the Guptas had offered her a Cabinet post as minister of public enterprises after Barbara Hogan “got the chop”.
Mentor claimed Zuma was in an adjoining room at the Guptas’ Saxonwold home at the time and he made an appearance after she rejected the offer.
She was the first ANC member to come forward about Gupta state capture, and she was rightly applauded for doing so, because the floodgates that have culminated in the #GuptaLeaks started to open right after her post.
She played no small part in making that happen.
Former minister Hogan wasted no time to step forward and underline that she believed Mentor, because she had also been approached by the Guptas to have government drop SAA’s route to India, she said.
The then deputy finance minister, Mcebisi Jonas, eventually also alleged he had been offered a truly preposterous bribe of R600 million to become the Guptas’ finance minister on a leash.
Mentor, though, has subsequently made a string of further revelations and allegations that smell like they may have been cooked in a slightly cracked pot.
ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe wants to sue her for a post about his wife in which Mentor was clearly a little confused about the financial circumstances surrounding Eskom’s awarding of a five-year catering contract worth R639 million to a company called RoyalMnandi Duduza.
The Mail & Guardian reported that RoyalMnandi is part of the Bidvest group, of which Mantashe’s wife is a director. Another company received an even bigger catering tender, bringing the total to R1.4 billion.
Mentor, however, conflated the two tenders in her Facebook post and said Gwede’s wife was in fact the lucky beneficiary of the full R1.4 billion.
These days, Mentor’s followers and even we in the media can’t wait for the next exciting instalment to drop in the gripping miniseries The Vytjie Files – but there has to be a limit to how much this woman knows and how much of what she claims to know is credible.
Yesterday, she let rip on how our new finance minister, Malusi Gigaba, is actually a Zimbabwean who was born as “Gigamba”. Over the weekend she spoke about how this same Gigaba/Gigamba had supposedly had an affair with a married woman named Judy/Judith, but she offered no proof of it.
After Zuma’s cabinet reshuffle at the end of March, Mentor went as far as to throw her weight behind an allegation by a little-known ANC member who claimed that Gigaba had signed off on a new nuclear deal after just one day in his new job.
At that point it seemed unlikely that the most expensive deal in South African history would have been sneaked through in such a fashion – but people were reeling and ready to believe just about anything. And Mentor is always on hand to drop some big conversation starters.
Obviously, the nuclear deal has not been signed, and every time Mentor makes an allegation that doesn’t get proven, or turns out not to be the case, we take her just that little bit less seriously.
She’s sadly becoming that villager who shouts “Zupta!” every night while on patrol.
Is she a bit of a fabulist who concocts tales based on fragments of memory and things she’s hearing, seeing on TV or reading? Maybe. She probably means well, but clearly also likes all the attention.
Which is a shame, because it’s probable she was telling the truth about her visit to Saxonwold and the offer she got from the Guptas.
So we can’t write her off, and will probably keep reporting on whatever she says (because, hey, she’s Vytjie Mentor, Baby), but I’ve been taking her with more than a pinch of salt for some time.
Charles Cilliers, Citizen.co.za digital editor
