Johannesburg – Five years after escaping the "Cupcake sex scandal," President Cyril Ramaphosa is back in the midst of yet another scandal that his cabinet members have successfully protected him from.
On Tuesday, Ramaphosa survived a possible impeachment process against him after only five ANC Members of Parliament (MPs) rebelled against the party by voting in favour of the Phala Phala report to be adopted.
In 2017, then deputy president Ramaphosa, who was vying for the position of president of the ANC and the country, became the face of a sex scandal linking him to eight young women.
He was reported to have allegedly exchanged erotic pictures and videos with these young women, with some of them calling him “Cupcake”.
It was also said that the now-state president financed the lifestyles of some of them, with one woman reported to have alternated as the deputy president’s medical practitioner and lover.
Ramaphosa's attempt to squash the sex scandal failed after he lost his court bid to prevent the Sunday Independent from publishing the sex scandal article about him.
The urgent application heard in the high court in Joburg was struck off the roll.
A few months later, Ramaphosa emerged from Nasrec as ANC president after having allegedly bought the conference through brown envelopes.
Just days before the 55th ANC national conference and more than five years later, with another elective conference also set for Nasrec, Ramaphosa has a new scandal: the Phala Phala farm scandal.
He has been accused of the worst scandal after having been accused of concealing a theft of millions of dollars in foreign currencies at his Phala Phala farm in February 2020.
In 2017, Independent Media was the first publication to report on Ramaphosa’s alleged affair with eight young women.
According to a former Independent Media editor, an investigation by his team included going through hundreds of emails linking Ramaphosa to a string of extramarital affairs.
The emails were so damning because they were accompanied by pictures, erotica videos, and bank deposit slips.
Former editor of Independent Media, Steve Motale, said the first thing he and his team of reporters did was to take time to verify every single document they were given by their sources.
Motale, who had in the past discarded damning information on Ramaphosa that failed credibility tests, said the evidence against the current ANC president was so damning that he could not doubt its veracity, which is why he went ahead with the story.
However, in a media statement, Ramaphosa accused Independent Media of a "well-resourced" campaign against him after questions sent to him by the paper were circulated on social media.
“It is evident that there is a well-resourced, coordinated covert operation under way to prevent those responsible for wrongdoing from being held to account and for the integrity of our law enforcement agencies and other state institutions to be restored,” Ramaphosa said.
Ramaphosa described the alleged social media smear campaign against him as a dirty war against those who're working to restore the ruling party.
“Resembling in many ways the “stratkom” techniques of the apartheid era, we have seen in recent weeks a number of attempts at disinformation directed at me and people with whom I am associated.
“These activities need to be seen within a broader campaign that has targeted several political leaders, trade unionists, journalists, and civil society activists,” Ramaphosa said.
This time, Ramaphosa has contested the report of the Section 89 independent panel.
Last Monday, Ramaphosa filed papers with the Constitutional Court in a bid to set aside and declare the scathing Section 89 Phala Phala report as unlawful.
The Star