Funeral association raises funds for Zuma’s legal fees

The National Funeral Practitioners Association of SA (Nafupa-SA) has reportedly launched a campaign to raise funds to pay former president Jacob Zuma’s legal fees.

This after the NPA on Friday announced it would prosecute Zuma on 16 charges of corruption related to the multimillion-rand arms deal scandal in the late 1990s.

Nafupa-SA is the same controversial organisation that honoured Zuma earlier this month for being the “father of radical economic transformation”.

The business forum has been accused of stoking racial tensions in KZN by banning white and Indian business owners from operating in townships, as well as, employing “Mafia-style tactics” in their business practices.

Times Select reports that Nafupa-SA has already started its campaign to raise funds for Zuma’s legal fees.

The business forum’s president, Muzi Hlengwa said this was not to allow “Msholozi to fall victim to wild dogs – because we strongly believe that he is being attacked solely for advocating radical economic transformation and land expropriation”.

“We are busy planning a national tour whereby we will take Msholozi to all nine provinces to ensure the people of South Africa that he is 100% for radical economic transformation, and he has our support. We’re still at a planning stage,” Hlengwa was quoted as saying.

He said Nafupa-SA’s support for Zuma wasn’t political, as they would have done the same thing for former president Thabo Mbeki if he had supported “radical economic transformation”.

“Remember there are political implications around this thing. So we are very careful on how to do things … we don’t want to be viewed as political and people who support Msholozi because we were his faction. The majority of us are not even members of the ANC,” he said.

As the debate r0ages on about Zuma’s state-funded legal fees, the DA and EFF want President Cyril Ramaphosa to scrape a deal he reached with Mbeki that any government funds spent on his court cases would be repaid if he lost the case.

At the weekend, Sunday Times that the opposition parties have given Ramaphosa until Thursday to revoke the deal.