Jackie Davies
South Africa’s acting ambassador to the United States, Ndumiso Ntshinga, is about to be accused of human rights violations next week when his South African nanny applies for political asylum in the US.
Ntshinga flew the young Eastern Cape woman to the US on a work visa as a nanny in 1996 but allegedly assaulted her during a party at his Maryland home, near Washington DC, in April 1998.
Nattie Mdingi laid criminal assault charges and claims that Ntshinga has since threatened to have her killed for embarrassing him in public when she returns to her rural home near Butterworth in the Eastern Cape.
Her case has been formally adopted by the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), a well- respected US human rights organisation. The NLG will publicly release police photographs of her injuries – including human bite marks – and her asylum application at its regional conference in Washington on Saturday.
Mdingi is to attend the conference, where she will present her story as a case study during a panel discussion entitled “Slavery on Embassy Row: Exposing the Practice of Indentured Servitude in the United States”.
The panel will discuss the abuses suffered by foreign nationals “employed” as domestic servants by diplomats and international organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Mdingi will share the platform with representatives from the Peace and Security Program at the US Institute for Policy Studies and the US Department of Justice’s Worker Exploitation Task Force.
The issue of abuses involving foreign domestic workers in the employ of diplomats has been an ongoing scandal in Washington DC, and has received considerable local media coverage.
Mdingi says in her sworn statement to the NLG that she was brutally attacked by Ntshinga and one of his guests at a private party Ntshinga held, following a altercation between the guest and the young nanny.
After she went to the police and a full investigation was initiated, Mdingi alleges that Ntshinga threatened her life for publicly accusing him of the assault. “I am scared, feeling alone and hurt,” she said. “I am from the underclass and fear retaliation.”
Mdingi has been in hiding since the incident and her lawyer, Niel Nolan, says the NLG is currently preparing the asylum request on her behalf, based on her claim that Ntshinga will carry out his threat on her life if she returns home.
The NLG intends to question why the state’s attorneys did not prosecute the case against Ntshinga, despite considerable documentation and photographic evidence of Mdingi’s injuries.
In an affidavit included in the prepared but never issued case against Ntshinga, investigating police officer Collen Schmidt said: “The victim fled to the bathroom and locked the door. The defendant [Ntshinga] kicked open the door and kicked and struck the victim with his fists all over her body.”
“We are proceeding with preparations for a political asylum application,” said Nolan.
Re-examining the alleged assault incident and the subsequent alleged death threats will be an embarrassment for the South African embassy, which stood by Ntshinga last year. “We consider the case closed,” said embassy representative Daniel Ngwepe last November, after the embassy conducted its own informal investigation by New York-based embassy counsel, Lennox Hinds.
Ambassador Franklin Sonn said at the time that he was satisfied, on the basis of Hinds’s inquiry, that the case against Ntshinga was untrue and that Ntshinga had acted only as a “peacemaker”. Ntshinga has rejected all the allegations.
Ntshinga is scheduled to leave the US at the end of March when his present term expires. He will then be sent to Pretoria to await a new senior foreign posting.
An application for political asylum will allow Mdingi to remain in the US while her case is under consideration. – African Eye News Service