One of the six “suspended” members of the Ingonyama Trust Board (ITB) has resigned from the entity with immediate effect. Inkosi Mabhudu Israel Tembe, the traditional leader of the Tembe clan In UMhlabuyalingana, resigned from the board on Thursday. In a letter dated 9 January 2025 sent to Mzwanele Nyhontso, the Minister For Rural Development and Land Affairs and seen by African Times, Inkosi Tembe threw in the towel, citing personal reasons. “It is with a heavy heart that I…

King Misuzulu KaZwelithini has rejected Rural Development and Land Affairs Minister Mzwanele Nyhontsho’s assertion that he cannot suspend the Ingonyama Trust Board (ITB). In a letter dated 7 January 2025, the Zulu monarch said he does have those powers and that Nyhontso is mistaken for claiming anything to the contrary.  The ITB is a South African public entity that oversees land owned by the Ingonyama Trust, established in 1994 to administer land traditionally owned by the Zulu monarchy.  The Ingonyama…

The battle for control of Ingonyama Trust in KwaZulu-Natal is heating up after King Misuzulu KaZwelithini reasserted his authority and ordered the entity’s “suspended” board members not to enter the trust’s offices in Pietermaritzburg. In a January 3 letter sent through his lawyers, Van Rensburg Kruger Rakwena Attorneys, the Zulu king instructed Advocate Linda Zama, Inkosi Mabhudu Tembe, Inkosi Phallang Molefe, Inkosi Sibonelo Mkhize, Dandy Matamela and Nomusa Zulu not to bother setting foot in the trust’s offices.  The purported…

They say old folk tend to behave like children. In recent weeks, South Africa as a nation had a front seat in this theatrical and toxic tantrum of South Africa’s oldest serving parliamentarian and nonagenarian. This soap opera of politics, draped in bitter entitlement, better understood in a tantrum, spares no one. It invokes the dead monarch against the living; it pits a monarchy against a democracy, ‘decades of experience’ at the expense of the new. It deliberately conflates the…