On your Twitter timeline, you may have spotted a top-trending hashtag that suggests that President Cyril Ramaphosa has tendered his resignation.
Fake news: Cyril Ramaphosa is not resigning
The #RamaphosaResigns trend rose up the topic ranks on Thursday morning. The origins of this wildly untrue claim are unknown at this stage.
So, in our digging, we spotted two red flaggers. One was a tweet from a parody account @Advovolicious, which claimed that the president has bowed out of his position as South Africa’s head of state and is supposedly going to “address the nation on public television.”
Of course, if this was even remotely true, official government channels would have issued a statement to the press. Moreover, getting Ramaphosa to resign would take a bit more effort than filing a letter to Parliament.
Petition to have the president removed fails epically
The bureaucratic procedure to remove a sitting president is far more complex than letters type on a note for somebody’s attention.
Moreover, the second flagger is an active petition published by a group known as the Black Centric Forum. The group launched the campaign on Change.org, calling on South Africans to participate in the urgent call for Ramaphosa to step down.
“This is an imminent call for the immediate removal of Cyril Ramaphosa as a President of this country. Besides countless rumours about Cyril being the project of the Oppenheimers, The Debeers, Broederbond and an agent of the entire Right Wing establishment, recently, the Public Protector has discovered some attestation to his questionable credibility,” the petition reads.
Suffice it to say, the campaign was botched since in the 5 000 signatures the group is looking for, none have been received.
So, if you thought for a second that this was true, you can rest assured that a sitting president would not, under normal circumstances, vacate his position without following the appropriate channels.
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