THE GIANT MPUMALANGA LAND ‘SCAM’
David Mabuza, his wife, the dodgy farmer who ‘hijacked’ a community trust, the conman, Pam Golding Properties and the R45-million illegal sale
Nonhlanhla Mnisi has been implicated in brokering the sale of 12,000ha of Nkomazi nature reserve to the national government.
Awitness statement submitted to the North Gauteng High Court in early February alleged Nonhlanhla Patience Mnisi, the wife of South Africa’s deputy president, had received “substantial commissions” on a sale of contested land in Badplaas (eManzana).
After gathering a set of documents that filled three lever-arch files, an independent investigation by DM168 revealed the intricacy of the alleged fraud. Mabuza’s wife was implicated in the witness statement of public interest attorney Richard Spoor, in case number 35402/2010 of the North Gauteng High Court, brought by conservationist Fred Daniel against the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency and another 24 government entities in the long-distant past of July 2010.
The case has been cast as a David-and-Goliath battle between Daniel and Deputy President David Mabuza.
As far back as 1998, Daniel had been buying up farm plots in Badplaas in fulfilment of his vision to regenerate one of the most threatened biomes on Earth. But from 2003, in order to force him to cede the land, he had to face down harassment, arson, smear campaigns and death threats.
Daniel became convinced that Mabuza was behind many of the attacks, pointing to a phone call (for which he held the cellphone records) in which the ANC heavyweight had allegedly attempted to persuade him to accept the “false land claims” on his nature reserve, failing which his “safety could not be guaranteed”.
The apparent involvement of Mabuza’s wife, however, has not come to light until now.
“To the best of my recall, substantial sale commissions were paid to Premier DD Mabuza’s wife, who was a Pam Golding estate agent,” noted Spoor in his witness statement.
Although Spoor did not give oral testimony on the statement, DM168’s investigation has revealed that the contested land was 12,000ha in the south of Daniel’s former nature reserve, Nkomazi Wilderness. The investigation led us all the way back to 2004, to the core of the land claims “scam” itself.
Hijacked trust
In early September 2004, City Press ran an exposé titled SA’s own land grab. Written by investigative reporter Justin Arenstein, the piece divulged that Mpumalanga’s then land claims commissioner, Nceba Nqana, had spent R25.7-million on six farms in the Badplaas district, despite the fact that these farms had originally been bought for a combined price of R4.3-million.
In a follow-up article published by the Mail & Guardian in mid-September 2004, Arenstein noted that the deals primarily benefited prominent local land speculator and farmer Pieter Visagie, chairperson of the local land reform and development forum that advised the government.
“[Visagie] is also tipped to help the Ndwandwa communities take over commercial farming enterprises on their new land as part of an R8.8-milllion additional support contract signed by Nqana and supported by community leaders,” wrote Arenstein.
A few days later, the third exposé dropped, in which Arenstein revealed that more farms had been added to the government investigation and that Visagie, who had been coming up with allegedly wildly inflated prices and then selling the farms to the Land Claims Commission, actually “managed” the Ndwandwa Community Trust.
What was not revealed, however, was that the Ndwandwa Community Trust was about to be hijacked – and here, it so happened, was where the trail that would eventually lead to Mnisi appeared to begin.
In a series of affidavits obtained by DM168, Robert Nkosi, the undisputed founder of the trust, would provide concrete evidence that the original deed had been signed and executed on 5 February 2004, before being sent to the Master of the High Court for registration on 30 March the same year.
Nkosi, who would learn of the land claims “scam” through the media, would also provide testimony that he “came into conflict” with Visagie. This would result, ultimately, in the registration of a second “illegal” trust deed on 22 November 2006. Illegal how?
Here, the brazen acts of the alleged fraudsters would be exposed in intimate detail. Nkosi, again providing concrete evidence, would show that the original deed had been removed from the Master of the High Court’s file “under the pretence that the trust was to be amended”.
This was done even though the original deed had stipulated that amendments could only be made “with the consent of the founder during his lifetime” – Nkosi had given no such consent.
The Master of the High Court had apparently been “duped into issuing new letters of authority”, Nkosi would testify, because he believed that the originals had been stolen.
“The only conclusion that can be drawn is that the Ndwandwa Community Trust was hijacked as a vehicle to milk the land reform funds,” he would add, “and when I refused to be part of the scheme the [regional Land Claims Commission] officials and other officials conspired with Mr Visagie, who wanted me out of the way.”
The upshot of it all, according to the evidence, was that Visagie would continue to run the Ndwandwa Community Trust without interference.
By late 2010, the new owners of Nkomazi Wilderness, the Emirati state-owned company Dubai World, were looking to dispose of their non-core asset, into which they had sunk R340-million since buying the remaining 50% from Daniel in September 2008.
As part of the deal, Daniel had retained 2,000ha of his original 39,000ha reserve, in the hopes that the government would take action against the allegedly fake land claimants and he could then raise the capital to refinance his dream.
But Dubai World was not nearly as opposed to the land “scam” as Daniel himself.
In December 2010, Daniel was approached by Willem Dreyer, the local director of Dubai World, to ask if he was interested in buying back Nkomazi. At the same time, Dreyer was also attempting to sell the reserve to the regional Land Claims Commission, which had – unfortunately for him – bankrupted itself on the back of its own corruption.
Into the breach stepped a man by the name of Gustav de Waal, who had, according to the affidavits obtained by DM168, been a key player alongside Visagie in the alleged hijacking of the Ndwandwa Community Trust.
As reported by The Namibian newspaper in June 2010, De Waal had also been accused by his partners of “double-dealing” in a failed N$3-billion biofuel project in that country, and a former employee described him as “the sweetest conman you will ever meet”.
For this specific “con” – an epithet that would soon be confirmed by the evidence – De Waal had registered a South African company under the grandiose name of Investment for Agricultural Sustainability in Africa, or Ifasa. In early 2010, Ifasa had partnered with the Ndwandwa Community Trust, knowing that its letters of authority were fake.
The aim of the partnership was to purchase Nkomazi, with government backing, on behalf of the Badplaas land claimants. De Waal claimed to have R2.5-billion on hand for just such an investment.
Dreyer, meanwhile, would admit the following to Daniel via email in January 2011, after he had been confronted by the conservationist with what he knew: “The reason we embarked on this route [with Ifasa] is that relying on the court process proved to be tedious with a long and protracted timeframe.
“Legal counsel opinion supports our view that these claims are spurious in nature; however, they remain a land claim until proven to be spurious in the Land Claims Court or de-gazetted.”
As proof of the government’s involvement, among the trove of documents obtained by
DM168 was also an email from Lucas Mufamadi, operations director of the regional Land Claims Commission, to Dreyer. Dated 18 January 2011 and cc’d to Tumi Seboka, former head of the regional Land Claims Commission – the email referred to a memorandum of understanding that had been negotiated between the parties the previous year.
“Which of the two options reflected in the memorandum of understanding do you prefer?” Mufamadi asked Dreyer in the email.
The options, as reflected on page 9 of the MoU, were either that the entirety of the property could be purchased for R350-million, or that just the properties in the “south” could be purchased for R60-million.
But Daniel and his business partner John Allen would scupper the plans of Dubai World, Ifasa, the Ndwandwa Community Trust and the provincial government.
In an urgent application to the North Gauteng High Court in June 2011, Daniel provided evidence that Ifasa was a front for the land claimants, that “the whole transaction was dependent upon the obtaining of a state-issued guarantee somewhere in the region of R350-million”, and that the company had every intention of changing the land use from conservation to agriculture as soon as they had control.
Separately, Daniel confirmed via Ifasa’s lawyer, who claimed that De Waal owed him money, that the promise of a R2.5-billion investment was false.
In tandem with the application to interdict the sale, Ndwandwa Community Trust founder Robert Nkosi, backed and supported by Daniel, was preparing to lay a pair of criminal charges at the Badplaas police station – the first against Visagie and the “fake” trustees, and the second against the three directors of Ifasa. At a meeting in Pretoria in September 2011, attended by Nkosi, Daniel, Allen and the Master of the High Court, proof was furnished that the trust had been hijacked.
On 11 October 2011, the Master of the High Court pulled the trigger. In a letter to Nkosi on a Department of Justice letterhead, the Master noted that the trust’s letters of authority dated November 2006 were to be “revoked with immediate effect” and that the letters of authority dated May 2004 were henceforth considered “valid”. Within less than a month, on 4 November 2011, Judge Eberhard Bertelsmann issued a court order that the fake trustees should resign and that Nkosi should be reinstated.
As for the urgent interdict that Daniel had brought back in June, the scam had now collapsed along with the deal. But importantly, before Deputy Judge President Willem van der Merwe on 4 October 2011, Dubai World’s counsel had provided an undertaking to Daniel’s counsel that the company would not sell Nkomazi until all of the disputes in the interdict proceedings had been resolved.
Given that he was still a partial landowner with “full traversing rights”, Daniel’s argument was that it would be catastrophic to sell to the “fake” land claimants and to change the land use.
After the court order of Judge Bertelsmann, the interdict had obviously become moot. Still, Dubai World, which now couldn’t get its R350-million bank guarantee from the government, remained tied up with Daniel on the issue of partial ownership and traversing rights – and so the company’s undertaking not to sell would remain in place, subject to arbitration.
In late June 2015, while the matter was still under arbitration, Daniel took a phonecall from Spoor. His former attorney, who had since 2008 been proffering his land rights expertise to Dubai World, informed the conservationist that the south of the nature reserve had just been sold.
Daniel, shocked, asked Spoor to verify the sale. A few days later, he received a print-out from the deeds office.
The new owner of a consolidated 12,000ha in the south of Nkomazi, as per the printout, was the national government of the Republic of South Africa. The purchase price was listed as R45-million.
The consolidated properties, when broken up by DM168 into their original component farms, were practically identical to the farms listed in the scuppered MoU between Dubai World, the regional Land Claims Commission, the fake Ndwandwa Community Trust and the disgraced Ifasa.
Agency of the year
In her profile on the website of Pam Golding Properties, South Africa’s leading real estate agency and the winner of best international real estate agency at the 2020/2021 International Property Awards, Nonhlanhla Patience Mnisi opens with the fact that she has been employed by the company since 2012.
“Granted,” she writes, “my name is Patience but I am not slow.” She casts herself as a “diligent, thorough and eager partner” in her clients’ real estate endeavours. Her “most notable sales”, she says, “were achieved in May 2015 to the value of R5-million”.
As it turns out, on a commission of “at least 7.5%” – which a blog on an industry website says all Pam Golding agents have “allegedly been taught to work on” – that would be the upper ballpark of her earnings if Mnisi was indeed the broker of the south of Nkomazi to the government.
The timeline, also, would match. But it was the steps in the process leading up to winter 2015, as well as her betrothal to the provincial premier and the testimony of Spoor in February 2022 (again, Spoor was one of Dubai World’s attorneys at the time of the sale), that would serve as the ultimate smoking gun.
Then there was the document, dated 29 June 2015, on the letterhead of the legal firm Du Toit-Smuts & Mathews Phosa. Addressed to the chief director of Land Restitution Support in Mpumalanga, the subject line was, “Properties available for sale to the regional land claims commission”.
In the body of the letter, the firm confirms that it was acting as representatives of “Seldsaam Beleggings CC, trading as Pam Golding Properties Nkomazi”, the same branch in Badplaas for which Mnisi had been working since 2012. The attorneys further confirmed that Pam Golding Properties Nkomazi had been “appointed by Dubai World … to broker the sale of its properties”.
Given that 12,000ha had already been sold in the south, the apparent purpose of the letter was to inform the regional Land Claims Commission that the remainder of the reserve was up for sale.
Daniel had obtained the document from a source in the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform, after he had emailed this friendly government official. In the email, he had pointed out that Dubai World had “acceded to a court order not to alienate or sell any of their assets pending the finalisation of the litigation”.
In terms of Mnisi’s involvement, Daniel had by then suffered too much at the hands of Mabuza to doubt that she was the agent.
In early August 2015, he fired off the next in a barrage of blunt and defiant emails, this one to Hamish Stuart, Dubai World’s international director of real estate.
“Mabuza is under investigation as the mastermind behind the land fraud in Badplaas,” he wrote. “He is now linked to Visagie/Ifasa [Gustav de Waal] and Tumi Seboka. His wife Patience Mnisi, the Badplaas agent for Pam Golding, is behind the brokering of the Nkomazi farms this year.”
To back up his contention that Mabuza was “under investigation”, Daniel provided a link to a lead story that appeared in The Sunday Independent. Headlined Probe puts politician in spotlight, the report opened with the statement that the “biggest land restitution fraud case in South Africa, involving more than R70-million and a proposed R2.5-billion project, could return to haunt prominent Mpumalanga businessmen and politicians”.
Apparently, the investigation into the Ifasa affair – which had been initiated by Nkosi’s charges in 2011, but had stalled in 2013 owing to what the Hawks termed “a lack of evidence” – had just been widened to include Mabuza and Mpumalanga’s former deputy director of Land Reform Services, Sunnyboy Maphanga.
By all accounts, it was because of Daniel’s consistent pressure that the sale of the rest of Nkomazi to the government did not go through. But the full and complex narrative had by then gathered an explosive head of steam – and the evidence, when it came to what the Hawks would do about it, appeared to fall once again into the void.
“I am unaware that my husband was a person of interest when the Hawks widened their investigation in August 2015,” Mnisi responded when DM168 put the question to her via email. “Please ask the Hawks what [the] outcome of the investigation [was].”
The Hawks, through spokesperson Brigadier Nomthandazo Mbambo, got back to us instantly. They had “no record of such an investigation”, she stated.
As for the documentary evidence that
DM168 offered Mnisi for comment, specifically the deed of sale of 12,000ha in the south and the letter from the attorneys Du ToitSmuts & Mathews Phosa, Mnisi once again denied any knowledge.
Regarding the former, she stated that she had “nothing to do with the sale”, whereas her response to the latter was that “the lawyers did not write the letter under [her] instructions”. She claimed, even though she worked in Badplaas, never to have heard of Ifasa or the Ndwandwa Community Trust.
Mnisi further denied that the citation of the R5-million figure on her profile had anything to do with commission, insisting that it was for “sales achieved”.
Mnisi expressed her embarrassment and dismay that Spoor had included the allegation of “substantial sale commissions” in his witness statement, informing us that she had first learned of it in a report in City Press – an article that had not presented the evidence or allowed for her comment. Her full response to DM168 (which can be accessed via the extended online version of this article) was, she stated, a repetition of a rebuttal that she had placed in The Star.
Mnisi also urged DM168 to ask her superiors at Pam Golding Properties for their take on events.
We had done so already, in a 10-point questionnaire sent to the company’s CEO Andrew Golding, but we received no reply. What we hoped to glean, aside from clarity on the documentary evidence as outlined above, was whether Golding believed it was irregular or illegal for a commercial property company to broker land under a series of claims – particularly when those claims had been acknowledged as “spurious” by his own client.
By our reckoning, Pam Golding’s work had always been to sign up sellers, advertise for buyers and take a cut of the sale. In this case, as evidenced by the history, the buyer was already locked in – it was the “national government of the Republic of South Africa”, which for more than a decade had allegedly been employing any means necessary to get its hands on Nkomazi Wilderness.
Further, it had always been the primary job of the Land Claims Commissioner to satisfy a “willing seller” on a property where a land claim had been deemed legitimate.
Even if the claims weren’t spurious, would the involvement of a real estate agency not expose the system to abuse, with the taxpayer on the hook for potential fraud?
Failing an engagement with Golding on the issue, we put the question to Spoor.
“At least 95% of land claims are settled outside the Land Claims Court,” he told us, “and 95% are overinflated. But it is rare for estate agents to get involved. I’m not aware of any other case where estate agents were involved.”
A formal request from Daniel’s attorneys, in February 2019, to Advocate Shamila Batohi of the National Prosecuting Authority to reinstate the charges against the Ifasa directors and the members of the fake Ndwandwa Community Trust would go unanswered. (Note:
DM168 found it impossible to disentangle the crossover between the Hawks and the NPA on the matter.)
The only chance for justice, it seems, remains case number 35402/2010 of the North Gauteng High Court, which is due to resume – for a third round of hearings – on 25 July 2022.
At least 95% of land claims are settled outside the Land Claims Court and 95% are overinflated. But it is rare for estate agents to get involved
Richard Spoor, public interest attorney
The full investigation of this story will be available from 21 March at www. dailymaverick.co.za.