Hell of SA drug mules in foreign jails

Vincent Ntsolo is four years into an eight-year sentence in a Hong Kong jail. He was just 18 years old when he was caught by customs officials trying to smuggle 1.9kg of cocaine through Hong Kong to China. He is one of many South Africans recruited as drug mules.

“By God’s grace he didn’t get to mainland China. It was fortunate that he was arrested in Hong Kong. They didn’t tell him that China has the death penalty,” says Father John Wotherspoon, an Australian Catholic priest, who has made it his mission to help people caught smuggling drugs.

On the streets of Dobsonville in Soweto, the woman accused of recruiting Ntsolo walks free. His family sees her all the time.

“She is living her life as if nothing happened,” says Lerato Ntsolo, Vincent’s sister. “I have always wanted to know what they said to him, to get him to go. Maybe it was money talk.”

In a hotel in Johannesburg, the families of drug mules who are serving sentences in Hong Kong jails gathered recently to meet Wotherspoon, founder of Voices for Prisoners, an organisation to support drug mules in prison.

The families have limited contact with their loved ones. They can’t afford the trip to Hong Kong. They get one phone call a month.

So anything that Wotherspoon and his team can tell them is welcome. Many of the inmates hold back on what is happening. They don’t want to worry their families back in South Africa. But they do open up to the priest.

When Jane Chow, the chief operations officer for Voices for Prisoners, tells Sam and Zanele Betha that their niece, Fezeka, has been given a nickname by her guards, their faces light up. Fezeka is awaiting trial, accused of trying to smuggle 980g of cocaine hidden in perfume bottles.

“The prison guards call her the black pearl,” says Chow. “She is doing well, she is a real sweetie, and bubbly.”

The couple, who raised Fezeka, spoke to her for the first time in December, two months after she was detained. She cried through the whole call, they said. Fezeka has a seven-year-old boy.

Wotherspoon keeps a small notebook with scribbled information given to him by prisoners. In the book are names that keep recurring – the names and nicknames of drug dealers and recruiters responsible for dispatching the mules.

The notebook also traces developing trends in the drug trade. Wotherspoon has noticed more recruits coming from Zimbabwe. He has also noticed that drugs are increasingly smuggled in condoms or plastic pellets, which the drug mules swallow. And the recruiters are increasingly targeting older mules.