A theft from South Africa’s president. A silence from South Africa

Namibian investigators were hot on the trail of the suspected burglars. After receiving a tip about a sensational he — the theft of cash from a farm belonging to President Cyril Ramaphosa of neighbouring South Africa — they had traced large money transfers that the suspects made from South African to Namibian bank accounts.
All that was left to make a case against the suspects was to link the money to the burglary.
But when Justice Minry officials in Namibia reached out to their counterparts in South Africa for confirmation, they say they got an unusual response that killed their case: silence.
Now, two years later, that silence is raising new questions about whether Ramaphosa was trying to hide the theft from public view and mobilizing the government apparatus to help him do so.
The burglary of the president’s farm in South Africa, 650 miles from the border with Namibia, occurred in February 2020 but only became widely known this month. A political foe of the president levelled bombshell allegations that Ramaphosa had between $4 million and $8 million in U.S. currency stolen from his property, and then covered up the theft to avoid scrutiny over having large sums of cash tucked away.
The money had been hidden in furniture in a house at the president’s Phala Phala game farm, according to the political foe, Arthur Fraser, the former head of state security in South Africa, who made his allegations in a criminal complaint against Ramaphosa. The president never reported the crime to police, Fraser said, but relied on his personal protection unit to conduct an illegal, off-the-books investigation.
The president has since admitted that his farm was burgled, but has denied any wrongdoing. The money stolen was far less than was claimed, he has said, adding that the cash came from the legal sale of rare game bred on the farm. A spokesperson for Ramaphosa declined to comment for this article.
A police vehicle on the road Phala Phala, a game farm owned President Cyril Ramaphosa, outside Bela-Bela, South Africa, June 18, 2022. (Joao Silva/The New York Times)
As the president attempts to forge ahead with his regular agenda — his farm hosted a game auction Saturday — he faces a difficult road ahead. The Hawks, one of the nation’s elite investigative units, are investigating him. Even his allies worry about potential criminal charges associated with allegations that he hid large sums of foreign currency — from money laundering to breaking tax or foreign exchange laws.
Ramaphosa, in the thick of a battle this year to be reelected as the leader of his party, the African National Congress, has remained largely silent.
Even the manager of Phala Phala, Hendrik von Wielligh, conceded in a brief telephone interview that it was unusual to stash money from game sales at the house. Asked what usually happened with the proceeds, he said curtly, “Normally to the bank.” Von Wielligh declined to discuss the robbery, saying “the people that investigated” had warned him not to talk to the press because it would complicate the investigation, and possibly scare off witnesses.
Fraser, who himself is facing allegations of corruption during his tenure as head of state security, is a close ally of the former president Ramaphosa pushed out, Jacob Zuma. Zuma’s allies have been seeking to discredit Ramaphosa in any way they can as they fight his reelection bid.
The complaint filed Fraser resurrected what otherwise was a seemingly forgotten case. But it was one that Namibian authorities took great interest in two years ago.
In interviews conducted in 2020, a few months after the burglary, two Namibian police officers and two senior government officials said informants had alerted police that the men who burgled Ramaphosa’s farm had fled to Namibia. The officers and officials requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case.
A confidential investigative report was written a Namibian police official in June 2020 details allegations that U.S. dollars hidden inside a sofa at Ramaphosa’s farm were stolen a man in Namibian custody on unrelated charges. That report, which recently leaked online, also said that officials from South Africa and Namibia had discussed the burglary, although it seems South African authorities eventually stopped cooperating when Namibian law enforcement requested official assance. There also were discussions “allegedly ongoing between the countries’ two presidents,” the report said.
Hage Geingob, Namibia’s president, has denied doing any favours for Ramaphosa regarding the burglary. And Namibian law enforcement officials ins they did everything the book.“It is not in my culture to hide a crime,” Martha Imalwa, Namibia’s prosecutor general, who tried to get information on the burglary suspects from South African authorities, said in an interview. “We can’t force another jurisdiction to ass.”Around April 2020, weeks after the burglars were said to have made off with the cash, Namibian police stopped a Ford Ranger pickup truck in the Namibian capital, Windhoek. Criminal informants in Namibia had told police that the occupants of the vehicle had been involved in a theft at Ramaphosa’s farm, according to the two police officers and one of the senior government officials.
President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa’s game farm, Phala Phala, outside Bela-Bela, South Africa, June 18, 2022.  (Joao Silva/The New York Times)
One of those suspects, Erkki Shikongo, said in an interview that police held him and his cousin at the police station while they turned the vehicle inside out. They used tools to disassemble parts of the truck to search it, he said.“They just said, ‘We are searching for something,’ ” Shikongo recalled. When he asked what they were searching for, they would not tell him, he said.
Police found nothing and released Shikongo without charges.
Shikongo and his cousin, Petrus Muhekeni, were among the five suspects named in Fraser’s complaint. But both men denied any involvement in the burglary. They said in separate interviews they only learned about it after news reports surfaced and they were inundated with calls from journals.
While authorities have flagged his cash transfers, Shikongo said his money did not come from stealing from the president, but from buying and selling gold throughout southern Africa. Shikongo said he would have no problem going to court to prove his innocence.“I’m not afraid of anything,” he said. “I want to make sure my name must be cleared.”
The first public whiff of the burglary at Ramaphosa’s farm started with a mundane crime: Imanuwela David, a Namibian-born man who holds a South African passport, sneaked into Namibia in June 2020 taking a canoe across the Orange River.
David’s arrest for illegally entering the country quickly became a sensational media story. Details emerged that he was aided a police officer and the CEO of Namibia’s state-owned fishing company, which was embroiled in a corruption scandal known as “Fishrot.” Speculation swirled that David may have been involved in Fishrot.
Police said he had brought 11 notes of U.S. currency each worth $100 into Namibia. He had a TAG Heuer and a Rolex watch, a gold chain and four cellphones. Police also said at the time that David was a fugitive in South Africa, linked to a burglary there. They gave few details about the case, but one report in The Namibian Sun valued the amount stolen at 65 million Namibian dollars (about $4 million) — the same amount Fraser mentioned in his complaint against Ramaphosa this month.
Although Namibian police released few details publicly at the time, the confidential investigative report suggests that they may have known more than they shared.
Produced on June 21, 2020, eight days after David’s arrest, the report said there was information indicating that he was involved in “a housebreaking and theft” at a farm belonging to Ramaphosa. (The report, however, names a different farm owned the president, not the one that was robbed.)The memo gave other details that would also surface in Fraser’s complaint two years later — that a woman at the property discovered the money and told others about it; that the money was hidden in furniture; that David was a central player in the burglary.
The confidential report was created Nelius Becker, the head of criminal investigations for Namibia’s national police at the time. Becker said in a recent interview that he had shared it with two other senior officers and that it was supposed to remain confidential. He also said that, to his knowledge, Namibian police never attempted to quash or cover up any investigation.
But his report does describe a meeting between high-level authorities from Namibia and South Africa in which it appears that the South Africans attempted to pressure their neighbours. During the meeting, which took place at a border area known as “no man’s land,” a South African official confirmed that something had happened on the farm but that no case was filed, according to the memo. The official said David was the mastermind behind the burglary.“Due to the sensitivity of the matter and the envisaged fallout it will create in South Africa, they requested that the matter is handled with discretion,” Becker wrote in the report.
In a recent news release, Lt. Gen. Sebastian Ndeitunga, head of Namibian police, sought to temper any suggestion of impropriety. The meeting, on June 19, 2020, was simply to “share operational information” about David and other people suspected of stealing money in South Africa and fleeing to Namibia, Ndeitunga said.
Still, what unfolded in the subsequent weeks seems to suggest that Namibia was much more zealous in its pursuit of David and the other suspects than South African authorities.
Namibian investigators tracked the banking activity of David, Shikongo and a third man, Petrus Afrikaner, over several months. They recorded 6.7 million Namibian dollars’ worth of transactions, according to one of the senior government officials.
Namibian prosecutors were attempting to build a money-laundering case against the men. So they drafted a request for help establishing the sources of the suspects’ funds and whether they were derived from unlawful activities, said Yvonne Dausab, the Namibian justice miner, in a text message. On Aug. 14, 2020, the Namibia High Commission in South Africa delivered the request to the South African Department of International Relations and Cooperation, to be forwarded to the Justice Department, Dausab said. South African officials never responded, she said.
Chrispin Phiri, a spokesperson for South Africa’s Justice Minry, said in a statement Tuesday that the agency had no official record of a request from Namibian authorities regarding the suspects in the farm robbery.
Without that information, Namibian authorities could no longer freeze the assets of the suspects or pursue a case against them.