Cash-starved and on the ropes:

Eighteen months after securing 58 seats in Parliament to become South Africa's official opposition, Jacob

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MK party members show their enthusiastic support for the leadership during a gathering.

(Photo: X/@MkhontoweSizweX)

In the same week that member of Parliament Duduzile Zuma-Sambudla faced charges of terrorism and incitement to commit violence in the high court, the continuing factional battles in Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto Wesizwe (MK) party spilled over as a potential international incident with Russia could be brewing.

President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office said on 6 November that it had received “distress” calls from 17 South African citizens who had been lured into fighting in the Russia-Ukraine war “under the pretext of lucrative employment contracts”.

“President Cyril Ramaphosa has ordered an investigation into the circumstances that led to the recruitment of these young men into these seemingly mercenary activities,” the statement said.

It referred to the country’s Foreign Military Assistance Act of 1998, which prohibits South African citizens and entities from offering or providing “military assistance to foreign governments or participate in armies of foreign governments unless authorised by the South African government”.

The statement said the men were aged between 20 and 39. Sixteen were from KwaZulu-Natal and one from the Eastern Cape. It “strongly condemned the exploitation of young, vulnerable people by individuals working with foreign military entities”.

Senzo Mchunu, the police minister who's been placed on special leave in the wake of serious allegations of corruption and political interference in the criminal justice system, briefly touched on intelligence he had received about a paramilitary structure in KwaZulu-Natal while testifying on 22 October before Parliament’s ad hoc committee.

ANC MP Mdumiseni Ntuli quizzed Mchunu about the “recruitment of intelligence to strengthen a certain structure” in the province, as Mchunu mentioned in his affidavit to the committee.