South Africa’s Ambassador Was A Drug Dealer…Spent 2Yrs In U.S Prison

South Africa’s former ambassador to Singapore, Hazel Francis Ngubeni, spent two years in a prison in the United States for peddling drugs.

Details of how Ngubeni was jailed in 1999 in New York is contained in a 2016 article published in South African newspaper, Sunday Times.

The report said Ngubeni who at the time was known as Francis MacDonald, was caught at the age of 55 with “a bad of cocaine” by American authorities.

She was consequently sacked as a cabin crew member with the South African Airways and jailed.

Ngubeni was said to have hidden her conviction from South Africa’s State Security Agency before her appointment in 2013.

The newspaper said she later admitted her conviction to its medium but claimed she had been wrongfully jailed after a “strange bag was found in my luggage”.

The former ambassador, according to the report, had also previously been arrested on September 20, 1995, at the OR Tambo International Airport and charged with smuggling 9kg of heroin into South Africa from Thailand.

“She was arrested, convicted and sent to jail, which made her unable to render any service to her employer,” spokesman for the national carrier at time, Tlali Tlali, told the newspaper.

Meanwhile, in her recent interview with eNCA on recent the xenophobic attacks on Nigerians in South Africa, the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Naledi Pandor, had said Nigerians in the country are the ones who mostly deal in drugs and harm its citizens.

“Help us address the belief and the reality that our people have that there are many persons from Nigeria, who are dealing in drugs in our country, who are harming our young people by making drugs easily available to them.

 Pandor had asked the Nigerian Government to help South Africa rid its country of drug dealers and human traffickers from Nigeria.

“The belief that Nigerian nationals are involved in human trafficking and other abusive practices. This kind of assistance in ensuring that such people don’t come to our country would be of great assistance to our nation,” said Pandor.

Nigeria’s Foreign Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama, had reacted fiercely to the interview, saying: “It is precisely this kind of outrageous stigmatization of a people from senior government officials that fuel xenophobia and embolden criminals.”