Guy Oliver
Gaby Magomola, an influential businessman who is connected to South Africa’s political elite, has been charged with rape.
Magomola, a director of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) who is said to have privileged access to Cabinet ministers, appeared in court on November 7 – the 26th anniversary of his marriage to Nana Magomola, a Reebok director. The case was postponed to March 6 next year, when Magomola is expected to plead, court officials said.
Cape Town police are still raw from allegations earlier this year about their lack of sensitivity when dealing with the Robben Island rape of Nomboniso Gasa, wife of then-African National Congress MP Raymond Suttner. They have been reluctant to divulge details of the rape Magomola has been accused of. The incident allegedly happened on August 9 this year – the day National Women’s Day is celebrated in South Africa.
A police representative said the incident occurred in Cape Town’s city bowl suburb of Oranjezicht at 3am. The complainant reported the incident to the police nine hours later, police said, declining to divulge further details. Even the age of the victim is considered confidential: police would say only she is between 18 and 49.
According to sources, Magomola had given a woman a lift home after a Friday night party and the rape allegedly occurred in his parked car on an Oranjezicht street.
Magomola and his wife Nana merit separate entries in several business who’s who listings and are regarded as movers and shakers across the sub-continent. Magomola has maintained his directorships with his finance company BancPlus, Gestetner South Africa and PAG Limited, and was appointed to the CSIR in April.
According to MacGregor’s Who’s Who, he was imprisoned on Robben Island in 1963 when he was 20 years old and spent five years there for political offences against the apartheid state.
His Robben Island credentials were the bedrock of an impressive career which has not gone unnoticed. In 1990, at the annual meeting of the American Congressional Black Caucus, he received the Ben Brown Achievement Award. The state of Alabama conferred on him the Freedom of the City of Birmingham.
Closer to home, he was the 1988 recipient of the Black Management Forum’s Business Award. He is a trustee of the University of Cape Town’s Foundation and a past governor of the Urban Foundation..
Magomola was chief executive of the African Bank from 1987 to 1989, and a former director of the African Bank Insurance Brokers and Shareworld. He was the deputy chair of Afrilink Holdings, the national vice-chair of the Institute of Marketing Management and the Pretoria chair of Fabcos from 1989 to 1992.
He has held management positions at Citibank’s New York offices and was a personal assistant to Chris Ball during his controversial tenure as managing director of First National Bank in the 1980s.
After the alleged August rape, Magomola accompanied his wife, who was on Ball’s Olympic Bid Committee, to Lausanne in September when the bid city was announced.
Nana Magomola is also a director at Transnet and the New Housing Company, and a trustee of Aiesec. She was a deputy director of the Independent Electoral Commission during the 1994 elections, and penned the manual for international observers.
Ball said she was seconded to the Olympic Bid Committee at the suggestion of the deputy president’s office. He said, however, that he was unaware of the rape charges against Magomola when his former personal assistant accompanied the Olympic team to Lausanne.
The legacy of the police mismanagement of the Gasa case earlier this year has heightened sensitivity towards rape cases – and, given the high profile of the accused, this case is likely to test the strength of the new police reporting regime regarding rape cases.
The “tread lightly” approach to rape cases, particularly when the allegations involve high-profile accused or victims, is not, however, confined to police ranks.
Andre Bouwer, the state prosecutor in the Magomola case, says he is swamped by several hundred cases a year. “Usually I am very helpful with Cape Town’s media, you can ask them. But this is one case I don’t want publicity about.”
Magomola’s Pretoria-based defence lawyer, Charl van der Westhuizen, not unsurprisingly agreed with the prosecutor’s sentiments about pre-trial publicity. He said the woman Magomola is charged with raping was sophisticated and that the rape charge and any publicity around it could harm his client’s career. Magomola’s career history is expected to form part of his defence, if he pleads not guilty.