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Wives of President Jacob Zuma during the inauguration of the National General Council of the ANC (African National Congress), held at the Durban Exhibition Center, South Africa, on September 20, 2010. From left to right, Zumas’ wives: Bongi Ngema, Thobeka Madiba, Nompumelelo Ntuli and MaKhumalo Zuma. (Photo by Gallo Images / Foto24 / Felix Dlangamandla)
The dethroned ruler chooses banishment to beheadings in his castle.
First published by Daily Maverick 168
As legal and other costs affect his savings, former President Jacob Zuma appears to be shedding expensive wives and fiancées. As it stands, Zuma, the number one defendant in the upcoming State vs. Jacob Zuma and Thales, has already said he has to sell his socks to survive.
Henry VIII, King of England, was quite extreme in discarding wives, starting a new church, and beheading two of them.
But Jacob Zuma, as his star fades, legal fees drain his finances and former benefactors evade global arrest, appears to be cutting down on expensive marital baggage, with three women now being kicked out of Zuma’s home.
The first to leave was Nompumelelo Ntuli, or MaNtuli, who was exiled in 2015 from returning to the Zuma Nxamalala Farm, located on a gentle slope on the eastern border of the Nkandla Municipality in KwaZulu-Natal.
The country’s fourth First Lady, who married Zuma in 2008, was accused of poisoning her husband and has since lived a penniless life of exile in an unknown area. Despite the fact that the National Prosecutor’s Office in 2019 refused to prosecute her, finding no evidence, MaNtuli remains persona non grata.
The second quasi-Mrs.Zuma to face the Iron Curtain is the former president’s latest ingoduso (fiancé), Nonkanyiso Conco, 24, who gave birth to Zuma’s son on his 76th birthday on April 3, 2018.
Conco lived in the luxurious Ballito Hilltop Estate until she was sent back to her mother’s home in the Eastern Cape in 2019 after drawing the ire of the Zuma family.
“Mrs.” Zuma or LaConco, as the radio host calls herself, was accused of embarrassing the former president by posting on Instagram that she was essentially a “single mother” who had to work hard to support her son, which suggests, of course, that Zuma was a delinquent father.
Conco has a strained relationship with his own father, Fartescue Conco, as Zuma paid lobola to the maternal side of Nonkaniyso’s family, thus violating tradition. Fartescue warned that the anger of the ancestors would soon be felt, and it did.
Then, in a surprising turn of events in January 2020, one of Zuma’s most loyal wives (well, on Instagram at least), the sixth First Lady Thobeka Madiba, was unable to visit Nxamalala. This after her husband reportedly accused her of removing the SIM cards without his permission.
Madiba-Zuma, who married Zuma in 2010, at the height of her popularity, is an active Instagrammer and has had no qualms about declaring her love and devotion to her husband over the years.
For example, in 2017, on his anniversary, he posted:
“It’s our anniversary, do I remember when we met? Twenty-four years ago, how could I forget the way I felt when I laid my eyes on you? I knew she was someone who would change my life forever. ”
However, in August 2020 things had turned sour when Madiba-Zuma took her husband to maintenance court in Durban. In the newspapers, it was revealed that the former president had failed to pay R14,000 a month in child support for her 14-year-old daughter, one of the couple’s three children.
Zuma’s attorney, Eric Mabuza, went to great lengths to point out that Madiba-Zuma had “not worked” since the daughter’s birth. It was Zuma, Mabuza said, who had supported the boy for the past “13 or 14 years.”
The women Jacob Zuma chose to marry earlier in his life made their own way, had careers, and could support themselves.
Currently, as far as we know, Zuma is left with only two spouses, the First First Lady, Gertrude Sizakele Khumalo-Zuma, or MaKhumalo, and Bongi Ngema-Zuma, whom he married in 2012.
Ngema-Zuma was implicated in the #Guptaleaks email hoard for having received a payment from the Gupta family for their R5.4 million Waterkloof Ridge mansion in Pretoria.
Payments were made through accounts that had bribes from Transnet bidding. Ngema-Zuma was also hired by Gupta’s JIC Mining Services in 2010.
MaKhumalo is older than Jacob Zuma. They met in 1959. Four years later, Zuma was sentenced to 10 years in prison, which he served on Robben Island. The couple married after their release in 1973.
Two years later, Zuma went into exile in Swaziland, where he met his second wife, Nkosazana Dlamini, a student activist at the time. They married in 1982.
Dlamini Zuma became a doctor and held positions in the cabinets of former Presidents Mandela and Mbeki. He divorced Zuma in 1998 after 16 years of marriage and four children. Today she is the Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs of the country, so it is not a financial drain.
MaKhumalo and Zuma have no children and she remains the matriarch of the family in Nxamalala.
He has always had a productive rural life. She is an enthusiastic farmer and runs a spaza shop and women’s cooperative in the village of KwaNxamalala. Deeply devoted, she is also a member of the Salvation Army.
MaKhumalo is a low maintenance wife, who abandons the glamor of public life and is not the financial burden that later wives seemed to be in former Number One.
Kate Mantsho was Zuma’s third wife. They were married in Mozambique in 1982 and had five children. Mantsho moved to Mozambique from South Africa in 1974, where he obtained a diploma in languages. She was fluent in almost all the official languages of South Africa, as well as Portuguese, German, French and Ki-Swahili.
As deputy station manager for Mozambique’s Linhas Aéreas De Mozambique (LAM) airline, Mantsho helped smuggle ANC cadres out of South Africa. She was a leader in her own right.
Mantsho committed suicide in 2000, leaving a devastating note addressed to her husband, whom she prohibited from attending her funeral.
By then, Zuma had already met Nompumelelo Ntuli, whom he would formally marry in 2008. MaNtuli, from the beginning, arrived with a lot of luggage and an enormously demanding lifestyle.
The year of their formal nuptials was not a good one for the man who would later become president of the republic. The previous years had also been difficult, and Zuma was facing a rape charge.
But after 2009, things began to look very bright for South Africa’s polygamous First Citizen and its wide circle of enthusiastic benefactors. He was the first president to proudly wear his customs and traditions, even as he modified the rules to suit his personal wishes and accommodate a seemingly limitless line of “girlfriends” in addition to existing wives.
MaNtuli originally lived in a huge house on Durban’s Morningside “Millionaire’s Mile” with the couple’s three children. The rent was paid by Jacob Zuma’s “blessed”, Erwin Ullbricht, through the unregistered Nxamalala Trust.
Mrs. Zuma No 4 had all of her expenses paid for by benefactors, let’s say good weather friends, who could easily disconnect faster than you can say “eviction”.
Which is what happened to MaNtuli in 2010 when she was almost thrown out of the mansion. Meanwhile, her domestic worker had taken her to the CCMA for disobeying labor laws and general abuse.
Then there was an earlier scandal about MaNtuli’s alleged affair with her bodyguard, Phinda Thomo, who was found dead in the bathroom of her Soweto home in 2009 in an apparent suicide.
So while MaNtuli gave birth to a boy after the affair with her bodyguard, claiming that the baby was the president’s, the Zuma family was concerned.
Beginning in 2009, Zuma, in addition to fathering a daughter with Sonono Khoza, the daughter of soccer manager Irvin Khoza, married two more women in quick succession.
In 2010, it was Thobeka Madiba, with whom he has three children, followed in 2012 by Ngema, who at that time was also a girlfriend of many years with whom he had a son.
In 2011, it was reported that Zuma and another longtime Ingoduso, Nonkululeko Mhlongo, were preparing to get married.
Mhlongo often sits with other “presidential spouses” at ceremonies and is generally considered part of the family. The couple met in South Africa after Zuma’s return from exile in 1990 and their offspring arrived in 1998 and 2000.
However, despite reports of planned nuptials, there has never been a wedding.
In 2012, MaNtuli was still part of the family, having atoned for his indiscretion with the bodyguard with the payment of a goat.
In 2013, Eshowe businesswoman Nomthandazo Mathaba-Mthembu caused a stir when she arrived at the gates of Nklandla in a 15-car convoy under the guise of delivering gifts for an annual dance ceremony on New Year’s Day.
At the gates, it was reported, Mathaba-Mthembu’s entourage began to sing “traditional courtship songs.” Mathaba-Mthembu later said that Zuma had promised to marry her. She was sent to pack.
In his heyday as the nation’s number one citizen, Jacob Zuma’s many wives and some of his would-be lovers took turns sharing the spotlight, glory, and loot.
But, as the sun sets on what has been dubbed the wasted and wasteful nine years of Zuma’s presidency, some of those who came for the ride are thrown under the proverbial bus.
It couldn’t happen to a nicer group of people. DM168
