Khwezi’s book details how Zuma ‘forced himself onto a journalist’

A soon-to-be launched book about the late Fezekile Ntsukela Kuzwayo has detailed how President Jacob Zuma allegedly forced himself onto an unnamed journalist.

The book, Khwezi, written by former 702 presenter Redi Tlhabi, details how the president allegedly invited a female journalist to his home in Forest Town, the same home where Khwezi accused Zuma of raping her.

The Sowetan has reported that the unnamed journalist was invited by the president to his home following a meeting with the South African National Editors’ Forum to interview him about “sensitive news matters” in front of one of his trusted aides.

They got to the president’s home and he asked the journalist to accompany him to another room as he had “something to show her”, the book details. Though she felt uncomfortable being invited to the president’s home, the journalist reportedly did not think much about it.

“She followed him, he opened the door to a room and she stepped inside. It was his bedroom. Before she realised what all this meant, he had his arms around her, pressing himself against her body and he planted a long, determined kiss on her lips.

“Her back to the door, she froze for a moment as his tongue invaded her mouth,” Tlhabi writes in the book.

After managing to pull away from the president, he loosened his grip and stopped kissing her, though still smiling. She reportedly told the president that she was on her period, to which the president told her not to worry as they “could try next time”.

Though the journalist said she did not believe Khwezi before, thinking Zuma was a “victim”, she only realised when it happened to her that Khwezi had “been telling the truth”, she claimed in the book.

Khwezi accused Zuma of raping her in 2005, a charged he was acquitted of in 2006.

The journalist reportedly told Tlhabi she had to speak out about the incident, though she wished she should have come out sooner.

“My family, Zuma’s position… I saw how brutal it was, the total humiliation of Fezekile and her mom, I did not have the appetite for it. The easiest things was just to block it off. Who would have believed me?” she was quoted as saying by the publication.

When contacted for comment, Zuma’s spokesperson Bongani Ngqulunga reportedly told the publication: “The Presidency is unable to comment on allegations by a complainant who has bot been identified.”

In former ANC MP Vytjie Mentor’s self-published a book called No Holy Cows, she reportedly also alleges that Zuma sexually harassed her when he was still deputy president of South Africa.

She reportedly claims the incident occurred when she was still the chairperson of the ANC parliamentary caucus in the early 2000s.

In an extract from the book quoted on the website, she claims that during an encounter in Zuma’s office he sat uncomfortably close to her and then “shoved his hand in between my thighs,” BizNews quotes her as alleging.

She claimed her “big inner thighs” were all that stood between her and his hand reaching her pubic area.

Mentor apparently then “slapped him across his ugly face with my handbag” and stormed out.

The president has still not responded to the allegations.

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