Miss South Africa competitor Chidimma Vanessa Onwe Adetshina has withdrawn from the competition, citing her decision to do so for the safety and well-being of her and her family.
According to the BBC, the 23-year-old law student pulled out a day after the Home Affairs Department’s preliminary probe found that her mother might have used “identity theft” to get South African citizenship.
Adetshina has previously revealed that she was raised in Cape Town after being born in Soweto, a township close to Johannesburg. In talks with the media, she also disclosed that her mother was a South African of Mozambican heritage, while her father was a native of Nigeria.
Nonetheless, a social media storm erupted around her background, with several South Africans doubting whether she was indeed a South African.
Some netizens left comments on her social media page, with one saying, “The point of a Miss SA title is to uplift South African women, she is beautiful we can’t take that away, but she’s not South African.”
Another said, “Chichi should be more open about her heritage and story, this will do a lot to disarm her detractors there’s no one way of being South African we love her, very much she must tell her story… I’m thinking of a Lebo Mashile poem my hubby from Malawi, I have nieces and nephews who are half Zim, Mozambican, Nigerian… It’s nothing new in South Africa. I just wished she owned it more … maybe the next episodes we’ll start seeing that.”
As the controversy grew, Miss South Africa pageant organizers requested that the home affairs department investigate before the main event on Saturday. The department claimed in a statement on Wednesday that it has discovered, thus far, that Adetshina’s mother “may have stolen” the identity of an “innocent” South African mother.
The agency did, however, state that the beauty competitor “could not have participated in the alleged unlawful actions of her mother, as she was an infant at the time.”
The statement went on to say that it was undertaking additional investigations to bring criminal charges while also seeking legal opinion “on the implications of the alleged fraudulent activity on Adetshina’s citizenship status.”
While Adetshina did not address the results in her Instagram post, she did state that she had made the “difficult decision” to withdraw from the tournament.
She wished the other competitors the best of luck and said that she was grateful “for all the love and support” that she had received.
“Whoever wears the crown represents us all,” Adetshina remarked.
