ANC election debt haunts Joburg socialite demanding millions – report

A Gauteng businesswoman’s long-running struggle to get the ANC to pay her the R2.2 million she claims she is owed has now landed in the courts.

Sihle Bolani reportedly claims she was asked to render public relations and project management services to the party ahead of last year’s local government elections and has reportedly claimed in court papers that “some party officials demanded bribes from her” if she wanted to be paid, reported Sunday World.

She has accused at least three men of asking her for a kickback of “about R800 000” in the aftermath of the ANC’s failed re-election campaign. The party lost two of the three major metros in Gauteng.

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Bolani has named several top ANC officials in her court claim.

She revealed in her papers that she later even agreed to a settlement amount of R1 million after several meetings with  people she took to be ANC representatives, but when that was not paid, she went back to demanding the full R2.2 million.

In their response to the matter, however, the ANC’s secretary-general, Gwede Mantashe, reportedly informed Bolani that she may have been duped into working with a company not officially authorised to represent the ANC. Court documents reveal that he told her the company she had dealt with, Black Carbon, was not an entity the ANC owned “nor does it have any shares in it”.

The tabloid also spoke to ANC spokesperson Zizi Kodwa, who said that the man Bolani had been dealing with, Joseph Nkadimeng, “has never [been] appointed … to represent the ANC and we have never appointed any company called Sihle Bolani Communications during the local government elections campaign”.

He said Mantashe’s response had been correct, since the “ANC has no knowledge of any Joseph Nkadimeng”.

Sunday World, however, referred to Nkadimeng as a “colleague” of Gauteng MEC of transport Ignatius Jacobs.