FACT CHECK: Is SA’s new Home Affairs minister Zimbabwean?

By The Daily Maverick

SOUTH AFRICA: After President Cyril Ramaphosa announced his Cabinet for the Government of National Unity (GNU), it didn’t take long for commentary to start flying about the six DA ministers he appointed.

Among the claims that went viral on social media was that the new Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber was from Zimbabwe.

Is this true?

One of the X accounts to tweet this allegation belongs to Mehmet Vefa Dag, a wannabe politician who stood unsuccessfully for election for the Land Party.

Dag tweeted: “BREAKING NEWS: The Republic of South Africa demands answers as the DA Minister of Home Affairs Leon Schreiber who is alleged to [be] a Zimbabwean foreigner is given a key position in [the] country. On Wikipedia Leon’s place of birth was changed 5 hours ago from Zimbabwe to South Africa, this is happening while South Africa is watching.”

He accompanied his tweet with a screenshot of Wikipedia showing the site’s edit panel, which Dag presented as evidence of the claim that Schreiber’s birthplace was hastily changed to South Africa after his appointment as minister.

When we checked Schreiber’s Wikipedia page a few hours later, all reference to his place of birth had been removed.

However, it was evident from the recent history of Schreiber’s entry that an edit war had been happening on his page since just after Ramaphosa’s Cabinet announcement.

A Wikipedia edit war is when two or more people repeatedly override each other’s edits.

In the case of the Leon Schreiber entry, the bone of contention appeared to be the minister’s place of birth.

But as other social media users pointed out to Dag, the edit screenshot that he shared showed the opposite of what he claimed. It showed that Schreiber’s place of birth had been edited to say he was born in the Harare suburb of Borrowdale in Zimbabwe, away from the original statement that he was born in the Northern Cape.

Schreiber, who is Afrikaans, has since confirmed that he was born in Piketberg in the Northern Cape and raised in Kleinzee, Namaqualand.

As is often the case, one of the giveaways that the claim about Schreiber was fake news was that the word ‘Zimbabwean’, on the screenshot shared by Dag, was misspelt.

Read more in Daily Maverick: Fact Check Hub

This particular piece of misinformation is likely part of a xenophobic campaign which has been waged on social media in recent years.

It is possibly also linked to the disappointment of Patriotic Alliance voters that their leader, Gayton McKenzie, was not named Home Affairs minister as the party had hoped.

McKenzie and the Patriotic Alliance ran an openly xenophobic election campaign under the slogan “Abahambe”, meaning “They must go”; a reference to foreigners.

Falsely claiming that Schreiber is Zimbabwean looks likely to be part of a misinformation war being waged against the newly formed GNU.

Ironically, Dag himself is originally Turkish.