Kunene divorce ‘not about lifestyle’

May 19 2012 at 12:35pm
By Sameer Naik

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Lucky Nxumalo

Kenny Kunene, centre, is also known as the Sushi King.

Kenny Kunene ‘devastated’ about divorce

May 15 2012 at 12:36pm
By Marvin Adams

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Lucky Nxumalo

Kenny Kunene, centre, is also known as the Sushi King.

Millionaire businessman Kenny Kunene and his wife Mathato are divorcing.

The ex-convict playboy, who’s known for eating sushi off half-naked models, told a local newspaper that they have decided to split after realising that “they have different visions in life”.

Kunene broke the news on his own reality show So What? on e.tv.

The ZAR nightclub owner has denied rumours that started last year that his alleged affair with a young radio presenter is to blame for their separation.

And Kenny expressed sadness that his 16-year marriage has come to an end.

“I was so devastated when Mathato first told me her reasons she wanted a divorce,” he explains.

“I went for two weeks without even shaving my head and beard. But I accepted it, mainly because I knew she wasn’t divorcing me because she doesn’t love me any more.

“We are just at different places in life.”

Meanwhile, Kenny denies rumours that he’s run out of money.

“Just because we closed down ZAR, it doesn’t mean that money has run out. Right now I’m wearing a R15 000 pair of jeans and an R8 000 Gucci shirt,” he insists.

“I still travel on a private jet, as people can see on my show. I still drive my cars and I stay at my penthouse in Sandton.

“I finance my reality show and I bet it’s the most expensive local production and I don’t even get paid for that or get any revenue from it.” - Daily Voice

Kenny Kunene divorce

South African controversial business man, Kenny Kunene, announced on his reality show that he is getting divorced. Ag shame!

South African ex-con playboy, business man, self made millionaire, owner of ZAR empire, Sushi King, DJ and ~~very well deserved and scripted and acted out~~ reality star of eTV’s SO WHAT, Kenny Kunene, announced last night on his show that he is going through a divorce with wife Mathato.

Honestly I have been wondering when will this day come. This guy is notorious for controversy.

Last year Sunday World ran a story on Kenny Kunene, stating that his philandering ways were leading to family drama and that his wife was divorcing him. He denied rumours that his alleged affair with a young radio presenter or the bed-sharing with three Swazi girls on his reality show is to blame for their separation.

The ZAR empire owner expressed his sadness at the end of his 16 year marriage. “I was so devastated when Mathato first told me her reasons she wanted a divorce, I went for two weeks without even shaving my head and beard. But I accepted it, mainly because I knew she wasn’t divorcing me because she doesn’t love me any more. “

He added that Mathato did not married him for money, as she declined a blank cheque he offered her. “She only wanted to keep the house that she lives in and wanted me to continue to pay for her car...I'm also going to continue supporting [his] children.”

The show follows Kenny Kunene as he lives the luxurious life (his unapologetic for his success and lavish lifestyle). In the show’s 2nd season its all about the business side of things, his personal life, the great parties that he hosts and attends, the ups and most definitely the downs ...because he is being divorced and that surely is a down.

Kenny Kunene-How much "Bling" is too much ?

My question is - how much “bling” is too much? Are African high rollers judged more harshly than, say, big-spending Russian oligarchs? Or is Vavi correct in saying that South Africa’s rich should be more circumspect with their wealth?

Posted by: CNN Correspondent, Robyn Curnow

KENNY KUNENE IN NEW YORK TIMES
Partying Amid Poverty Stirs South Africa DebateBy CELIA W. DUGGER
SANDTON, South Africa — Kenny Kunene, a former gangster turned businessman, gave what he called “the mother of all parties” for his 40th birthday. With his small paunch protruding from a white tuxedo and his eyes hidden behind Roberto Cavalli sunglasses, he ate sushi from the belly of a woman who was wearing nothing but black lingerie and high heels while hundreds of guests looked on.

As the revelers got tipsy on his liquor, he says he treated the most important among them — including Zizi Kodwa, President Jacob Zuma’s stylish spokesman, and Julius Malema, the rabble-rousing leader of the governing party’s youth wing — to $1,300 bottles of Dom Pérignon. Like the American rappers he emulates, Mr. Kunene himself swigged a bottle of Armand de Brignac Champagne that goes for more than $1,500 at his posh nightclub, ZAR, perched on the roof of a five-star hotel.

His October bash here in Sandton, a Johannesburg suburb often described as the wealthiest square mile in Africa, and another sushi-eating party that Mr. Kunene hosted recently in Cape Town, have turned him into a peculiarly South African sensation. His antics set off raucous bickering in the governing alliance about the conspicuous consumption of a politically networked black elite in a country where the majority of young blacks do not even have jobs.

Zwelinzima Vavi, leader of Cosatu, the powerful trade union federation allied with the governing African National Congress, accused Mr. Kunene of “spitting on the face of the poor” and declared that parties where people who have gotten rich in dubious ways flaunt their wealth “turn my stomach.”

Mr. Kunene, who says he supports the A.N.C.’s Youth League with his time and money, promptly retorted that his was “honest money spent on honest fun.” He describes his success as proof of the nation’s democracy, and he told Mr. Vavi, who is also black: “You remind me of what it felt like to live under apartheid. You are telling me, a black man, what I can and cannot do with my life.”

The Kunene story has crystallized a recurring question about life in post-apartheid South Africa: Is the accumulation and exhibition of such wealth a sign that blacks have finally arrived after an era when whites hogged the high life, or is it evidence of a moral decay undermining Nelson Mandela’s once great liberation movement?

“It raises in such wonderfully stark terms what freedom is and what one does with it,” said Jonny Steinberg, an author and one of the many newspaper columnists who commented on the events. “The idea that one uses it to get rich, and ostentatiously so, and that this is the most important dividend of freedom, is very powerful.”

In recent months, the spectacle of eating sushi from a woman’s body — perhaps familiar to Americans from Samantha’s escapades on “Sex and the City” — has been a source of both lurid fascination and ridicule here. A cartoon by the Mail & Guardian’s Zapiro, titled “The Last Sushi,” depicts a naked woman lying on a long table with well-known businessmen and politicians feasting on the fishy bits that decorate her curves.

That Mr. Kunene, a small-time player in South African politics, has vaulted onto the front pages underscores how salient the issue of economic inequality has become in South Africa, a country that by some estimates has the worst disparities of wealth in the world.

But the focus on Mr. Kunene, nicknamed the Sushi King by headline writers, is also a tribute to his obvious gifts for self-promotion and self-reinvention.

He was raised by his unemployed mother (an evangelical faith healer), his grandfather (a retired English teacher), and his grandmother (a midwife and the family’s only earner) in a black township outside of Odendaalsrus in what is now the Free State. The family could never afford to give him a birthday party, he said, and he always craved luxuries.

When he was a teenager during apartheid, he said he and his friends picked out the houses and cars in wealthy white areas they fantasized would one day be theirs. He dreamed of Porsches. “The objective was to overthrow the government and take everything that the white man had,” he said.

Like his grandfather, he became a high school English teacher. To earn extra money, he opened a small saloon, eavesdropped on gangsters and joined them, hijacking cars, robbing businesses and dreaming up ways to trick people out of their money, he said.

“My heart was not into armed robberies,” he said. “My heart was more into fraud because I’m a thinker.”

But he was caught and convicted in 1997 of helping run a Ponzi scheme. His case alone listed more than 1,900 victims, he said. He served six years in prison. After his release, he went into business with Gayton McKenzie, a bank robber he had befriended behind bars. They sold a book that Mr. McKenzie wrote about quitting a life of crime, and marketed Mr. McKenzie’s motivational speeches to schools and corporate groups.

They invested their earnings in a fish distribution business, Mr. Kunene said, and then started working as consultants to diamond and gold mining companies, helping manage testy relations with restive local communities and navigate the shoals of government regulation in a country governed by a black majority.

Last year, Mr. Kunene and Mr. McKenzie helped Gold Fields, a major gold producer, retain its mining rights to the South Deep mine southwest of Johannesburg, which the company describes as “one of the greatest undeveloped ore bodies in the world.”

“It’s a lot of political lobbying work,” explained Sven Lunsche, a Gold Fields spokesman.

At Mr. Kunene’s swanky apartment in Sandton, a snapshot of him with President Zuma is displayed in the living room. On his iPad, he flicked through photographs taken at his birthday party, showing pictures of him with the men he called “Zizi and Julius” — Mr. Zuma’s spokesman and the Youth League leader, Mr. Malema.

At the Cape Town party on Jan. 29, Mr. Malema was quoted as saying that Mr. Kunene’s club belonged to the A.N.C., but he later issued a statement insisting that he had said only that black people have a right to own a club in “predominantly white territory.”

Mr. Malema’s comments prompted Gwede Mantashe, the party’s secretary general, to starchily insist that the A.N.C. “is not into nightclubs or partying, but it is a revolutionary movement. We furthermore reiterate our condemnation to the act of serving sushi on a woman’s body.”

Kenny Kunene, Lil Kim and Fistaz Mixwell

Mr. Kunene this month bowed to his party’s wishes and foreswore sushi parties, but he could not resist noting that in South Africa, the rainbow nation, “I ate sushi off a black girl in Johannesburg. In Cape Town, I ate it off a white girl. I was intending to eat it off an Indian girl in Durban.”

Mr. Kunene has leapt into a life of fame and money, but often on Mondays he gets into one of his Porsches and makes the short drive to the poor and working-class township of Alexandra. “I don’t forget where I come from,” he said.

Uproar over Times journo’s sexual frolics with ‘Sushi King’

THERE KENNY: Kenny Kunene the ‘Sushi King’ and Times of Swaziland Entertainment Editor, Ntombi Mhlongo Social network site Facebook is abuzz with comments over a picture of Kenny Kunene the ‘Sushi King’ and Times of Swaziland Entertainment Editor, Ntombi Mhlongo. The picture was taken last August during the Bikers Party at the Mavuso Sports Café which had been attended by former Minister of Tourism and Environmental Affairs, Macford Sibandze. Over 60 comments were received after the picture was posted on Facebook’s gossip forum ‘Umgosi Eswatini’ from last Thursday. Most of the comments are derogatory against the entertainment editor. Facebook users have attacked Mhlongo but she hasn’t responded to any of these comments. In the picture, Mhlongo is dressed in a denim mini-skirt with a matching jacket, and reacts somewhat happily as Kunene frolics with her in full view of the public. Kunene appears to have his hand inside her skirt. The ‘Sushi King’ seems unmoved as Mhlongo smiles from ear to ear. Users have insinuated that the picture was photo-shopped whereas others dismiss that notion. Swazi girls were labelled as ‘cheap’ on Facebook, following their antics on Kunene’s reality show ‘So What?’ that is currently airing on e-TV. The episode, which featured Kunene’s trip to the country, shows snippets of him in his bedroom with some Swazi girls posing near his bed. The 30-minute reality series showed all ‘Sushi King’s movements while he was in the country -from his arrival at the plush Happy Valley Resorts to the Biker’s Party at the Mavuso Sports Bar. Facebook comments n A member of the welcoming committee in good standing n Ewu ds s d Ntombi Sushi Queen... n Awu???? n hhawu n A whole editor. n This is a DISGRACE..honestly.. I am disappointed!! n Damaged goods...walking wounded...factory faults....Nx. n Uze losisi utsi haleluya,,,,,yini kona lolokushuthe nalosisi webanftu? n You have let us down as women in the whole wide world,specially in Africa, who in her sane mind gets(f*****) in everyone's view, you are a disgrace woman..why didn't you at least book a room or something ngoba that sushi guy is loaded? n This pic has been photoshopped with Adobe Photoshop 7.0, I checked with my computer...