STATEMENT BY HELEN ZILLE PREMIER OF THE WESTERN CAPE

20 April 2010

ANC must answer for hoax email

I have received the report of the independent investigators into the alleged racist email purportedly sent by the Acting Municipal Manager of Stellenbosch to the provincial Minister of Local Government.

Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC) was commissioned by the Department of the Premier to conduct a forensic investigation into the authenticity of the email which was released to the media by the ANC's Membathisi Mdladlana and Lynn Brown at a press conference on 7 April 2010. The full WC report is available on request.

The forensic investigators concluded that the email in question could not have been sent by the Acting Municipal Manager, Mr Du Plessis, to Minister Bredell on the grounds that.

·         The email in question contained factual inaccuracies relating to the alleged sender, Mr Du Plessis;

·         Mr Du Plessis did not have access to the email account from
which the message allegedly originated; and

·         There was no trace of the alleged email on any of the servers used to process the flow of emails from the Stellenbosch municipality to the Western Cape Provincial Government.

In other words, the email in question was a fake.

The independent investigation has confirmed our initial suspicion that this was a hoax designed to discredit the DA and the Western Cape Provincial Government. It bears all the hallmarks of the ANC's dirty tricks department.

There are only two possibilities:  Either the fake email originated in the ANC itself, or it was fabricated by a third party and given to the ANC, who abused it for political purposes without any attempt to verify its authenticity.

We have grown used to the ANC's attempts to discredit us and we expect this trend to escalate in the run-up to the municipal elections. The ANC has nothing left, except the race card and smear tactics. As the ANC grows more and more desperate, it will increasingly resort to this kind of measure in an attempt to falsely portray the DA as "racist".

When Membathisi Mdladlana and Lynn Brown released the fake email to the media they called on me to "put [my] money where my mouth is and act swiftly". Well, we have acted swiftly. It took us less than two weeks to expose this as an ANC smear. 

In exposing this hoax, we put money where our mouth is - literally. The investigation cost the taxpayer R72,000. But we do not see why the public should bear the cost of investigating a fake email which was abused by the ANC.

I have today written to Membathisi Mdladlana and Lynn Brown to request that the ANC in the Western Cape foot the bill for the investigation. I have also requested that she and Mr Mdladlana issue an unreserved public apology for disseminating a fabricated email which suggests that the individuals concerned harbour racist views.  The email is defamatory of Mr du Plessis and also potentially of Minister Bredell.

I have given the ANC leadership five working days to respond to my letter. If no satisfactory response is forthcoming, we will consult our lawyers to ascertain the legal options available to us. We can not allow the ANC to continue with its dirty tricks. Not only do they waste everybody's time, they waste taxpayer's money too.

Statement issued by the Western Cape Premier's Office, April 20 2010

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