Moja Love TV presenter Bishop Israel Makamu allegedly offered to pay R1 million to the family of a woman who claims he s.e.xually harassed her when she was a teenager working at his church. The lady’s father is believed to have rejected his ‘dirty money’ and has asked him rather to issue an apology.
“He tried to bribe us with R1 million, but we don’t want his dirty money. I just want him to apologize to me as a father for what he did to my daughter. He tried to threaten me and said I must do my research on him. He thought I was scared of him,” the father said on Saturday.
The father of the young lady was speaking out after a two-minute voice recording went viral on social media this week, in which someone who sounds like Makamu is heard making suggestive comments to his daughter.
In the recording, the person is heard talking to the woman, whom he refers to as “ngwanaka” (my child). She was 17 at the time. The person says he has just dropped someone off and wants to pass by and see the woman who is heard calling him “daddy” throughout the conversation.
“O tlo mpha? [will you give me” he asks, to which the woman replies: “No, daddy.” Then he says: “Wa bora, wa bora, ngwanaka [you are boring, my child].”
After the audio clip went viral early this week, Makamu claimed that it was the family that demanded a payment from him to make the recording disappear.
“Bishop Makamu says the lady in the recording worked for him and their conversation was not s.e.xual in any manner and it was altered to extort money from him,” Moja Love said in a statement on Tuesd ay.
“He says he thought the matter had been resolved back then, but it suddenly emerged again three weeks ago. Bishop Makamu suspects his character is being assassinated,” Moja Love said.
Yesterday, the father said his daughter had been struggling to cope since the audio clip surfaced.
“She is not okay after all this. It has disturbed her a lot. She even quit going to church.”
On Friday, the 21-year-old woman, whose identity is being withheld, claimed in an interview with the Movement Against Abuse in Church founder Solomon Ashoms that the Rea Tsotella TV show host s.e.xually harassed her at his church in Eden Park, Alberton, four years ago.
In the YouTube interview, the woman, who was a receptionist, administrator and call centre agent at Makamu’s church in 2017, alleged that she received a call from the pastor asking her to collect the office keys from him at the robots between Eden Park and Thokoza.
“I went to the car and stood by the driver’s side and he said I must get inside the car; he will drop me off.
“He started saying he loves me … He drove with me to the church. I was nervous and asked myself what we were doing at the church,” the woman claimed.
She said that Makamu then made s.e.xual advances and she ran away.
The woman, who was sharing a rented room with a friend who also worked at Makamu’s church, said she was 17 at the time and had no boyfriend. She said she had regarded Makamu as a father.
“[When] I got to my room, my roommate asked me what happened and I told her. She said I must record him next time this happens,” she said.
“His personal assistant took long to call him because he knew why we were there. We waited for almost two hours,” she said.
She alleged that when Makamu finally showed up, he called into question the legitimacy of the audio recording. The pastor then allegedly offered her parents money. “He offered them R1 million. My dad said no, he will never sell his daughter. He then called Makamu and told him that if anything happens to me, it will be on him [Makamu],” she told Ashoms in the interview.
