eNCA | ANC MP supporting #SecretBallot’s life threatened
JOHANNESBURG – African National Congress (ANC) Member of Parliament (MP), Makhosi Khoza has received death threats telling her she has 21 days to live.
Using an app called TrueCaller, the number from which the death threats were sent is identified as belonging to someone called “Blf.”
According to TrueCaller, the data that identifies a person’s name on the app “is crowd-sourced from the millions of users who have downloaded the TrueCaller app on their smart phones. As part of the end user agreement, the TrueCaller app asks the user to allow access to the user’s address book/contacts on the smart phone.” This means either the person using the number in question identified themselves as “Blf”, or someone saved them as a contact under that name. As TrueCaller explains, “everyone who has installed the app has surrendered his phone book.”
The number in question was off on Saturday afternoon when eNCA called it – it does not have a voice message function, although one can send SMS notifications asking the person to return the call. Black First Land First (BLF) president Andile Mngxitama has reportedly denied that a BLF member was behind the threats‚ saying “there must be a white person trying to cause s**t for BLF”.
Khoza has been in the firing line for saying ANC MPs should in fact vote according to their conscience when the debate on the vote of no confidence in President Jacob Zuma takes places in Parliament on 8 August. She was speaking on the side-lines of the ANC National Policy Conference (NPC), even thought Police Minister Fikile Mbalula said MPs who support the no confidence vote will be disciplined.
READ – Makhosi Khoza says she will not be ANC’s ‘sacrificial lamb’
In an interview with eNCA, Khoza said: “If upholding the Constitution is synonymous with being a suicide bomber, that statement to me is actually frightening.” Following her statements, ANC Chief Whip Jackson Mthembu accused her of extreme ill-discipline and said the organisation should act against her.
eNCA