OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Tuesday
POLICE have admitted that Winnie Madikizela-Mandela led a bizarre police raid on a Johannesburg pensioner’s home to search for goods she claimed had been stolen from her daughter.
Madikizela-Mandela, former President Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife, raided 66-year-old Stella Kallmoka’s home in the Johannesburg suburb of Yeoville on Sunday night, accompanied by eight bodyguards, two policemen and her daughter Zindzi Mandela-Hlongwane.
Police found no stolen goods in Kallmoka’s home, but seized her car after a witness said it had been used in the alleged robbery at Mandela-Hlongwane’s home in a neighbouring suburb, said police representative Mary Martins-Engelbrecht.
”There was a housebreaking, there was a search of Mrs Kallmoka’s house and her car was taken. We could not find any proof that it was used in a crime and we found no stolen goods in her home,” Martins-Engelbrecht said. ”Her car will be handed back today.”
She would not comment on the legality of Madikizela- Mandela’s participation in the raid, but said the incident had made ”the police look bad.”
Madikizela-Mandela is rarely far from controversy.
In a letter published by The Sunday Times last weekend she called on President Thabo Mbeki to apologise publicly for what she called his ”grievous maligning” of her at a top-level meeting of the ruling African National Congress (ANC).
In the letter Madikizela-Mandela, who is also the ANC Women’s League president, asked Deputy President Jacob Zuma to intervene to repair her relationship with Mbeki, who she says criticised her at an ANC National Working Committee meeting in Durban last May.
She said Mbeki had suggested she was a rumourmonger unworthy of any serious position in the ANC, and a disloyal member of the ruling party ”bent on destroying the organisation by casting malicious aspersions on its leader.”
Madikizela-Mandela was hailed by black South Africans as the ”Mother of the Nation” during apartheid and is still immensely popular, especially among the poor, despite her 1991 conviction for kidnapping and even though her then husband sacked her from his newly elected government in 1994. – Reuters
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