It has been revealed that the man who has offered to pay back what President Jacob Zuma owes to the public for his role in the Nkandla debacle is a struggling wannabe filmmaker who lives with his parents.

The 33-year-old was featured on radio shows and quoted by various newspapers on Thursday and Friday after he wrote to parliament saying the PMUT, which he purports to chair, “will pay that money back on behalf of the president”.

But it has now emerged that not only is the PMUT’s address – which is given as 250 Avoca Hills in Durban – fictitious, it is also an “unregistered … non-profit organisation”.

Mchunu on Friday admitted that his organisation was unregistered and told one of the daily papers in South Africa that he did not personally know Zuma.

He said he only had a chance meeting with the president in 2008 when he worked as a production assistant in a documentary about KwaMashu township, outside Durban.

The paper reported that, it tracked Mchunu down to KwaMashu where his neighbours laughed when told of his offer to pay the millions “owed” by Zuma while his contemporaries in film-making dismissed him as an “attention seeker”.

His father’s house on Nhlangakazi Road, in D-Section, is a modestly renovated township house – with a single garage still under construction – which showed no visible signs of a well-to-do family.
Said a neighbour: “He lives here. That’s his father’s house, but he also spends time in H-Section … He’s married now.”

When he registered his seemingly dormant company, VumVum Media, in 2011, Mchunu gave the Nhlangakazi Road address as his residential address.

Even Edmund Mhlongo, the founder of the KwaMashu Community Advancement Projects (K-Cap) – where Mchunu learnt video production in 2004 – had a good laugh when he heard about the story.

“He got married last year or thereabouts … I don’t know him as a businessman. I know him as a struggling young man who works for production companies and gets jobs here and there … maybe his wife is a millionaire,” said Mhlongo.

It all started with two letters which were sent to the parliamentary committee set up to consider the four reports on Nkandla – including that of public protector Thuli Madonsela, the government task team’s report, the Special Investigating Unit report and Zuma’s response to Madonsela.

The one letter was written by a group of Durban lawyers who asked for Madonsela to be removed from her position, alleging that her report had been “littered with flaws, inaccuracies, contradictions and inexcusable errors”. The second letter came from Mchunu, pledging to put an end to the president’s woes and “pay that money back on behalf of … Zuma”.

Zuma is under pressure from opposition parties to repay a portion of the R246-million in taxpayers money which was used to upgrade his Nkandla homestead.