The launch of Jacques Pauw's book, "The President's Keepers", was disrupted by a strange power outage on Wednesday night. The outage was reportedly caused by routine maintenance conducted by Eskom, but many guests suspected the cause might have been sabotage.
The book has caused waves in government circles with threats of legal action by both the State Security Agency (SSA) and Sars. The SSA issued a cease and desist letter in which it demanded that the book be pulled from the shelves, but outlets and publishers have continued to sell the book. The SSA repeated its demands this week.
The book is now the fastest-selling South African book since 2004.
The book reveals how President Jacob Zuma allegedly avoided paying tax for years, and how he allegedly received a salary from a security company for four months after becoming president, as well as a host of allegations about connections between South Africa's intelligence services and the murky underworld of gangsters and criminals.
The book launch took place in Hyde Park, Johannesburg on Wednesday night and was attended by hundreds.
The power went off around 7pm.
Power goes off at #ThePresidentsKeepers launch. Apparently caused by Eskom working on line outside pic.twitter.com/MT0NYmYLjv
— Karyn Maughan (@karynmaughan) November 8, 2017
The cause of the outage was reportedly routine maintenance by Eskom, but many did not believe this. It was reported that the building adjacent to the Hype Park shopping centre experienced no black-out.
Many believed the outage was caused on purpose, to interfere with the book launch.
Wow! So just as #ThePresidentsKeepers author Jacques Pauw was to talk abt the Zuma and the Russian connection and how tax money get stolen, BOOM... the power mysteriously went out and never came back on again. #MafiaState
— ΜċGεε (@LaboGoon) November 8, 2017
Wow! So just as #ThePresidentsKeepers author Jacques Pauw was to talk abt the Zuma and the Russian connection and how tax money get stolen, BOOM... the power mysteriously went out and never came back on again. #MafiaState
— ΜċGεε (@LaboGoon) November 8, 2017