An expos\u00e9 in the Sunday Times has raised questions about government’s vetting process of senior officials.<\/p>\n
The paper reported that South Africa’s high commissioner to Singapore, Hazel Francis Ngubeni, was sacked by SAA after being jailed in New York for smuggling a bag of cocaine.<\/p>\n
Ngubeni spent two years in a US prison between 1999 and 2001, but did not disclose her conviction when she was nominated for the diplomatic post in 2013.<\/p>\n
She passed her security vetting process by the State Security Agency after being nominated by unnamed \u2019senior political leadership\u2019.<\/p>\n
The Sunday Times reported that Ngubeni claimed to not have a criminal record.<\/p>\n
Ngubeni admitted the conviction to the Sunday Times – but claimed she had been wrongfully imprisoned after a “strange bag was found in my luggage”.<\/p>\n
However, the former SAA employee was previously arrested in 1995 at OR Tambo International Airport and charged with smuggling 9kg of heroin from Thailand.<\/p>\n
A fellow cabin crew member claimed that Ngubeni had asked him to carry one of her bags into South Africa, where drugs were found stashed in a false compartment.<\/p>\n
The pair were acquitted in January 1997 after a key witness, reported to be a Mozambican diplomat, refused to testify against Ngubeni.<\/p>\n
Department of International Relations spokesman Nelson Kgwete said the department would “look into all the matters … and will work with all relevant state agencies to establish facts.”<\/p>\n
“The security vetting process for all our diplomats is a process that the relevant agencies are constantly reviewing with the intention of improving to avoid gaps and discrepancies.”<\/p>\n
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