Sometimes impersonating someone you’re not can be hilarious.

Take, for example, Alec Baldwin’s spot-on imitation of Donald Trump, or this geezer who pretended to be the Moroccan PM to score a table at a fancy restaurant.

Other times, it can leave you confused, shaking your head, or both.

In this case, it’s a little of all of the above.

According to The Citizen, there’s a guy out there who’s being mistaken for Jacob Zuma’s son, Nhlakanipho Vusi Zuma, who passed away from lupus on Sunday, 1 July 2018.

People are thinking that a man named Lerati Mphafi [pictured above] is the ex-president’s late son.

However, that there’s a Twitter account under the name “Nhlakanipho V Zuma” using Mphafi’s image in the profile pic doesn’t help much.

Nor do some of the tweets and pics, which wax lyrical about his “dad”:

It sounds awfully dodgy – and awkward, since the real Vusi Zuma passed away.

This is what Vusi actually looks like:

That’s a big difference.

This was uploaded to Twitter by former public protector Thuli Madonsela, who had originally mixed the two men up by posting Mphafi’s photo instead, reports TimesLIVE, but then fixed her mistake.

Zuma will be buried in Johannesburg this weekend. What of the imposter account, though?

The Citizen report has come up with three theories behind this Lerato Mphafi/Vusi Zuma mystery:

Maybe Vusi Zuma really did start this account but decided to use the face of someone else in an effort to remain anonymous in the eyes of the media and South African society at large. When you consider that Vusi managed to stay out of the limelight for all the years leading up to and during his father’s reign, it’s quite possible he did do this …

The most likely explanation was that it was just started by some anonymous fool with too much time on his hands who wanted to get up to mischief of some sort by pretending to be a Zuma child. However, nothing mischievous was ever tweeted from the account …

Part of me would love to imagine that the guy in the picture actually started the account and simply pretended to be Vusi Zuma for a while. Why? I don’t know. Maybe he did it to impress a girl … or in the misbegotten hope it might help to land a business deal.

My vote goes for theory #2. However, Mphafi’s colleagues are coming out on Twitter to defend him, saying he has no idea why his photo is being pasted on the net:

His Facebook account is quite active, and judging from his photos, this is indeed the same dude who everyone thinks is Zuma:

It’s a huge headache, probably for those who knew Zuma’s son quite well and – if he had nothing to do with the Twitter account – for Mphafi himself.

[sources:citizen&timeslive]