Hours after announcing that she was taking special leave, National Assembly Speaker Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula launched an urgent bid to interdict law enforcement authorities from arresting her on corruption charges – and claims there is “no case”” against her.

“I am a senior person and the respondents rushing me into a police cell for reasons other than that I am a flight risk, is a threat to my health and life,” she stated in court papers, where she reiterates that she is “innocent of the charges sought to be levelled against me”.

In an application filed in the Gauteng High Court in Pretoria, Mapisa-Nqakula asks that the officials who are investigating her be interdicted and restrained from arresting her “whether under Section 40 or 43 of the Criminal Procedure Act, 51 of 1977”. Those sections deal with an accused person being taken into custody through the use of a warrant of arrest.

Mapisa-Nqakula also wants law enforcement officials to be ordered “to arrange a date” with her attorneys for her to be summonsed to appear in the magistrate’s court that has the appropriate jurisdiction to deal with her initial court appearance.

In addition, she is demanding that the State be forced to provide her lawyers with access to all the evidence against her.

Based on media reports, Mapisa-Nqakula says she has been accused of soliciting and taking 10 cash payments totalling more than R2.3 million from an unnamed whistleblower – through a “Sam Gulube” – between 2016 and 2019, when she was the defence minister. These payments reportedly related to a defence contract.

In 2021, these corruption claims came before Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Defence when United Democratic Movement leader Bantu Holomisa asked for an investigation. However, legislators dropped the probe in September that year due to non-cooperation from the whistleblower. 

Mapisa-Nqakula’s urgent legal action against the State follows a search and seizure raid that was carried out by the National Prosecuting Authority’s Investigating Directorate on her home on Tuesday, on the basis of a warrant that was issued eight days before.

She says she was advised by her lawyer that the warrant is “likely unlawful” and not to consent to any search until her legal representatives have access to the evidence that underpinned it.

According to Mapisa-Nqakula, she was not given access to the supporting affidavit used to justify the search and seizure warrant – on the basis that it listed the items that the police were looking for. She claims investigators subsequently entered her home without her consent.

“It became evident that the search party was looking for cash money, citing as example ‘R20 000 in cash’. We have never kept that sort of money in our home and, on their request to see our safe, opened an old standing strongroom in the lower part of our house, which we last used in about 2004 for them to inspect,” she says.

“They also asked whether we were in possession of any foreign currency, which we said we were, given our return at the weekend from being abroad and they counted out the grand total of US$23.00 in our possession.”

She says Sergeant Suneel Bellochun, who carried out the search, appeared to be looking for a bag and a “bear skin”, which he was unable to find, and that he seized “a certain wig of mine”.