DA files charges against Duduzile Zuma for Donbas fighters

The DA has filed criminal charges against Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla, Member of Parliament for the uMkhonto weSizwe party and daughter of the former president, Jacob Zuma, accusing her of recruiting at least 22 young South African men and dispatching them to fight for Russia in Ukraine under false pretences.

The charges, laid on November 27th at Cape Town Central police station, invoke the Regulation of Foreign Military Assistance Act of 1998, which prohibits South African citizens from enlisting in foreign armed forces without authorisation, as well as provisions on human trafficking.

The DA cites as evidence some 100 WhatsApp messages from a group said to have been administered by Ms Zuma-Sambudla, in which prospective recruits were promised security training, personal development courses or rapid citizenship in Russia or Canada. Families of the men report a consistent pattern: once in Russia their passports and clothes were destroyed, telephones confiscated and contact with home abruptly severed. Of the original group, 19 remain in Russia, 17 of them South African nationals, now reportedly deployed in the contested northern Donetsk sector.

The affair first surfaced several days earlier when another of Jacob Zuma’s daughters publicly accused her twin sister of orchestrating the scheme. Subsequent accounts from returned recruits and relatives, carried in the Mail & Guardian and elsewhere, describe a process that bears the hallmarks of organised trafficking: inducements tailored to unemployed or restless young men, rapid travel arrangements, and immediate coercion upon arrival.

Three individuals were reportedly sent back early, apparently because of family ties that carried weight with the recruiters. The remainder are said to be under Russian military discipline in an active combat zone.Ms Zuma-Sambudla has made no public statement on the allegations. The uMkhonto weSizwe party has declared the matter personal rather than institutional and declined to accept responsibility, while suggesting the Democratic Alliance concern itself instead with unrelated expenses scandals involving its own leader.

Defence minister Angie Motshekga has confirmed that the State Security Agency is in contact with Russian authorities, but the Department of International Relations and Co-operation has offered no explanation for its prolonged silence, even as families appealed for assistance.

South Africa’s mercenary legislation is among the strictest in the world, a legacy of the post-apartheid determination to prevent the country again becoming an exporter of military labour, and to curtail the potential power of white ex-military mercenaries, many of whom had started or joined private military companies in the late- and post-apartheid period, participating in several wars in the rest of the continent.

That such an operation could apparently proceed with the involvement of a sitting MP, and with at least the passive awareness of elements inside the security apparatus, points to a serious lapse.

The episode further complicates the ANC’s balancing act between the BRICS framework, and the DA-led beachhead for the Anglo-American establishment. Pretoria has consistently refused to condemn Russia’s invasion, abstained on key United Nations resolutions and hosted Russian naval exercises jointly with China. The DA has been vocally, even theatrically, supportive of the Ukrainian cause in this war.

But the state has adopted a nominally neutral diplomatic stance, and the presence of South African citizens on the Donbas front lines, however few, risks entangling the country directly in a conflict it has sought to keep at arm’s length, whatever the partisan sympathies of its leadership. Western diplomats already view South Africa’s neutrality with scepticism; the spectacle of a Zuma scion allegedly funnelling manpower to the Kremlin will do nothing to dispel perceptions that sections of the political elite retain a sentimental, or even operational, attachment to Moscow.

Rumours of Zuma’s connection to the Black Axe Gang, a transnational Nigerian crime fraternity, and their alleged involvement in smallarms smuggling on the Lady R, a Russian ship seen docking in Simonstown in breach of international sanction, remain unconfirmed, but the Russian connection remains a dangerous entanglement for much of the former liberation movement.

For the moment the men remain in the red zone, their repatriation uncertain, while the police and possibly the Hawks decide whether the evidence assembled by the Democratic Alliance justifies prosecution of one of the republic’s more flamboyantly pro-Russian public figures.