A Businessman, Buffaloes and a Sofa Full of Cash: A President’s Alibi

The scandal known as Farmgate erupted in June, after Arthur Fraser, South Africa’s former spy chief and a political opponent of Mr. Ramaphosa, filed a criminal complaint accusing him of failing to report to the police the theft of at least $4 million from the president’s farm.

Mr. Fraser accused the president of instructing his head of security to conduct a covert investigation instead, which resulted in the kidnapping and torturing of the burglary suspects, some of whom fled across the border to Namibia.

One of those suspects, Floriana Joseph, a housekeeper at the president’s game farm, Phala Phala Wildlife, was accused in Mr. Fraser’s complaint of helping to plot the burglary and then being paid off by the president to keep quiet about it.

Ms. Joseph lives in a tiny settlement, Vingerkraal, a spread of boxy tin shacks on dirt lots housing many Namibian exiles, about a 45-minute drive from Phala Phala. On a recent visit with Times reporters, she kept up her guard as she spoke, eyebrows arched, as she cradled her son.

Ms. Joseph, 28, said she never saw money in the president’s couch, let alone coordinated a robbery. The first time she had ever even heard of the break-in, she said, was in a report on a local radio station in June. No investigators had questioned her before that, she said, contradicting an affidavit by the president’s head of security, who said he interviewed her in March 2020, about a month after the burglary.

Now, she suspects that murky figures are out to set her up. Over the past several months, she said, random people have shown up looking for her. Some say they are with the police, while others have refused to identify themselves. She now photographs every car that drives up.