South Africa’s Zulu King Misuzulu kaZwelithini has moved to reassure his people and dismissed stories that he had been poisoned.
“I am not poisoned, I am well,” he said on a video released on Monday evening.
At the weekend, the king’s traditional prime minister said he had gone to neighbouring Eswatini for treatment.
Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi added that it followed the sudden death of one of the king’s senior advisers, also of suspected poisoning.
But in response, the king’s spokesperson, Prince Africa Zulu alleged there was “an orchestrated agenda and a desperate narrative to communicate defamatory and baseless claims of His Majesty’s ill-health”.