Arthur Greene and Zukile Majova
Julius Malema summed it up neatly when he said: I love #TokyoSexwale and I want to support him. Mara hai (But no).
That comment, finished off with an “I don’t know” emoticon, is a clear indication of how ANC veteran Tokyo Sexwale confused the entire nation this week – including those who would ordinarily support any anti-Ramaphosa rhetoric.
On Thursday, the one time presidential hopeful gave a two-hour long press conference, which has since become the talk of the nation.
In it, he claimed he was privy to the world’s largest concentration of wealth, and claimed it had been stolen from South Africa.
His theory is neither straightforward nor completely logical, but here’s a summary:
- Sexwale was approached in December 2018 to be a joint mandate holder of the “White Spiritual Boy” (WSB) Trust, worth an alleged $600 trillion.
- $3 trillion of this fund was apparently kept in a Standard Bank account in South Africa.
- Most of the WSB Trust was not funded with South African money. The fund is based in Singapore and managed by a Chinese man named Chuck Leong.
- In February 2019, Sexwale said he wrote a letter to Minister of Finance Tito Mboweni and the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) to inform them of his appointment as joint mandate holder of the trust.
- Sexwale and an unnamed business partner raised billions of rands that were sourced from an unnamed family.
- He claims the fund was intended to fund free education and give handouts to the poor.
- He claimed that had the fund not been looted, millions of Covid-19 social grants beneficiaries could have earned R2,700 a month instead of R350.
- When he attempted to ensure that the money was “brought into the economy”, Sexwale claims that he discovered the money had been stolen.
- He says he then wrote directly to President Cyril Ramaphosa, via WhatsApp, to inform him of this theft, but received no response.
- In the messages, he claims that the stolen money was making its way back into South Africa having been laundered as investments.
On Monday 19 April, the South African National Treasury and the SARB released a joint statement in which they said Sexwale had simply fallen victim to “a common scam” that has been around since 2016.
Sexwale is still sticking to his guns. On Thursday, the Hawks confirmed that Sexwale had registered a complaint about the missing billions.
