NATIONAL NEWS - TV and radio personality Redi Tlhabi said South Africans owed Minister of Women in the Presidency Bathabile Dlamini an apology following former Bosasa COO Angelo Agrizzi’s testimony implicating government officials.

Then minister of social development in 2016, Dlamini warned against ANC officials discussing problems with the media, saying it was not the way the ruling party handled things.

Dlamini was responding to former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas who publicly alleged the controversial Gupta family had offered him R600,000 for a finance minister position, an offer he refused.

She warned against publicly discussing such matters as officials would start pointing fingers at each other. Dlamini said everyone in the ANC had “smallanyana skeletons” they would rather keep in the closet.

She said in an interview with the SABC: “We might have different issues and all those issues are not important, it is the ANC that is important because if one starts hanging dirty linen outside, the others are going to say ‘you too have done this and that’. This is why it has never been the culture of the ANC to discuss issues outside the ANC.

“Even that family, if people feel that it has to be brought to book, structures must do that. The officials must call them and talk to them and give them a marching order, not through shouting outside because all of us there in the NEC have our smallanyana skeletons and we don’t want to take out all skeletons because hell will break loose.”

More than two years later, all hell has broken loose and promises to get worse as Agrizzi keeps dropping names of those in the NEC.

It is for this reason that Tlhabi said South Africans owed Dlamini an apology as no one seemed to have taken her warning seriously at the time and mocked her instead.

“The nation must apologise to Minister Dlamini. We vacillated between mockery and humour when she unashamedly claimed [we] ‘all have smallanyana skeletons’. She was 100% correct. She was wrong on one thing though… hell will not break loose because ‘political solutions’ will be found,” she said.

Source: Caxton publication, The Citizen.