When it’s a crime to be poor...
‘Man of God’ is finding it difficult to forgive ‘the government which I work hard to try and support’ after being arrested while on the hunt for food early in lockdown and thrown in jail for three months.
‘I didn’t steal a cellphone – we were just starving and looking for food.’
Mjoliso “George” Mphotye cuts a slight figure surrounded by piles of discarded cardboard and empty plastic bottles. Three months in prison have taken a toll on the father-ofthree’s already slender frame.
Mphotye and his friend, Justice Shabangu, were arrested for breaking the lockdown rules in April.
Desperate for something to eat, they had ventured out from their homes in “Mushroomville” – the informal and ramshackle compound on the banks of the Hennops River, where they live with a community of waste collectors – in search of food.
The offence should have seen them fined R1 000 and released but, instead, the men were thrown first into the back of a police van and then into prison.
For the first week, Mphotye survived off tea and porridge – trading his daily rations of bread for a bed and a blanket.
“If you don’t have a bed and a blanket you sleep on the floor,” he told The Citizen yesterday.
Mphotye and Shabangu were finally liberated on Tuesday, after Lawyers for Human Rights took their case to the High Court in Pretoria.
Judge Brenda Neukircher ordered the men’s immediate release and tore into the authorities, describing what had happened to them as “absolutely unacceptable” and saying she was “extremely perturbed”.
Mphotye said yesterday he and Shabangu were, in fact, not even working when they were arrested but had gone to collect food from a former employer who offered to help them during the lockdown.
“We all owe each other here and I had used my last money to pay the people I owed,” he said. “On our way home, we ran into the police. They greeted us and we greeted back. We didn’t think there was anything wrong.”
But then the police began questioning the men. “They said we were being disrespectful and they were going to take us to the police station and, from there, to Kgosi Mampuru Prison because we had broken the law,” Mphotye said, “My heart started pounding.”
It was not until they were placed in a cell, though, that reality set in.
Mphotye had never been to prison before. “I’m not a criminal, I’m a man of God. This was the first time,” he said, “I was in shock. The beds had no mattresses and we slept on the steel frames. My entire body hurt. I slept awfully. There were people fighting and I was scared”.
Asked how he felt about the ordeal, Mphotye paused: “I am a human being. What am I supposed to say when the government which I work hard to try and support, arrests me? I can’t forgive them yet. It would be one thing if I was arrested for stealing a cellphone but I didn’t do anything.”
He said he was just trying to pick up the pieces of his life now.
“I have nothing, I don’t even have shoes. I am starving.”
The department of justice and correctional services did not comment, but police spokesman Brigadier Vish Naidoo said: “I can say Covid-19 has been an uncharted territory for us all and so to was the implementation of the Disaster Management Act. We are constantly educating and making the joint security forces aware of the forever-changing regulations so as to ensure that the rights and dignity of South Africans are not infringed upon – but we also calling on citizens to comply with the regulations now more that ever.”
Advocate Paul Hoffman, a constitutional law expert, said what had happened was “a complete miscarriage of justice” and Mphotye and Shabangu could sue the state. “Had they had the benefit of legal advice from the outset, they could have pleaded necessity because they would have starved. And they ought to have been acquitted.”