How Vytjie Mentor ‘saved’ Ramaphosa from being arrested

On Monday on Facebook former ANC MP Vytjie Mentor repeated the rumour from earlier this year that former president Jacob Zuma had intended to arrest Cyril Ramaphosa instead of step down.

However, she claims that a well-timed Facebook post on her part may have been enough to expose the plot, and Zuma was then unable to get the defence force to come to his rescue in an alleged planned state of emergency.

In her post, she references the strange sequence of events on February 14, when Zuma finally agreed to a recall from the ANC and resigned in the evening.

Prior to that, he had still been in a fighting frame of mind, refusing to leave. He was demanding reasons for his recall from the ANC, which was in no hurry to supply any. He offered an exclusive interview to the SABC during the day in which he appeared to be defying the recall.

Zuma insiders have maintained that Zuma was weighing his legal options and powers before coming to the conclusion that he had no option but to go because he stood no chance in an upcoming EFF-sponsored motion of no confidence in parliament if the ANC was not supporting him any more.

Mentor, however, reckons Zuma’s plan was presumably to treat his recall as treason, which would have been excuse enough to arrest Ramaphosa as the ringleader and declare a state of emergency.

She claims this plot was being hatched between the ministers of police (then Fikile Mbalula) and defence (Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula) because they’d earlier had a meeting at a restaurant near parliament. However, she suggests their plans may have been thwarted by a well-timed Facebook post from herself that “exposed” them.

“The Defence Force refused to come to the party for the State of Emergency, and by 10pm he was forced to resign.”

She then references this past weekend’s reports that Zuma and his supporters have nevertheless not given up and “are currently plotting on violence, destabilising the country, throwing the pending National Elections into turmoil, and finally dethroning Ramaphosa as President of the country and of the ANC”.

These reports have been rejected by the ANC leadership in KwaZulu-Natal, though many continue to believe that a split in the ANC is still on the cards.

Mentor has made outrageous claims in the past, including that Minister Malusi Gigaba is actually a Zimbabwean, that Zuma was an apartheid spy, and that someone is somehow in control of the weather and secretly causing the Western Cape drought to punish DA voters.

She has, however, received widespread acclaim for blowing the whistle on the Guptas and state capture.

Her post, like much of what she writes on Facebook, divided opinion, with some being grateful for her contribution and others dismissing her.

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