The businessman at the centre of the controversy surrounding an alleged R500 000 cash donation to the South African Communist Party (SACP) demanded on Thursday that the police ”get a move on” with the investigation into what happened to the money.
Nearly a year after he laid a charge at the Bedfordview police station in Gauteng, Charles Kasinja Modise said he has not been told ”about the status and progress of this charge”.
However, in the interim, the SACP held an inquiry into the matter and announced that there was no evidence of such a donation.
”But I find it most surprising that neither myself nor my wife was approached to testify at this investigation regarding my donation,” he said.
According to Modise, he and his wife were personally thanked for the money by SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande at a dinner at the Birchwood Hotel in Boksburg.
He had been specifically invited to the dinner to meet Nzimande after handing over R500 000 in cash to two SACP members, Willie Madisha and Lefty Matsebe, in the presence of Madisha’s driver.
Nzimande denies that he ever met Modise or received the money.
Modise, who is facing charges in the Northern Cape relating to fraudulent tenders, said that he was ”shocked and angered” when he discovered last year that there was no record of his R500 000 having reached the SACP.
He discovered that there was no record of the money when he was again approached for a donation to the party. ”I was so incensed that I instituted a criminal charge,” he said.
In the wake of these charges and statements made about the affair, then Congress of South African Trade Unions president Madisha was axed by the labour federation for ”bringing Cosatu into disrepute”. On the same basis, he was controversially suspended as president of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu).
Madisha has maintained that he is the victim of a purge in the SACP for having ”told the truth”, pointing out that the leaderships of both Cosatu and Sadtu are dominated by members of the SACP. — Sapa