Why no requests for capital punishment?

AS SOUTH Africans go into their second historic elections, which will certainly not end on May 29 on account of several ballot papers and probably 100 independents, what surprises me is that there is no party or independent calling for the death penalty or life sentence without parole for heinous crimes.

The authors of our muchheralded Constitution were morally blind to the realities of crime and punishment in South Africa where superstition and savagery, in all forms, persist.

They assumed all South Africans were human and entitled to human rights. If one believes in this fiction, I would invite them to visit the C-max prison at the Johannesburg penal facility, dubbed Sun City.

In the mid-1990s, as an officer in the Gauteng Department of Education, I walked past that prison cell when I delivered the matric exam papers at the prison.

What I came across were not humans but a monstrous species of some life form that could have been created by Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein or that horrid surgeon in the movie Poor Things that is now on circuit.

The inmates of C-max can never be reintegrated into society.

What happened to the human rights of triathlete Mhlengi Gwala who, in 2018, was robbed of his bicycle and had his leg almost sawn off with a chainsaw?

He now races with a prosthetic leg.

What happened to the human rights of the 30-year-old man from Mpumalanga who was abducted just last week at gunpoint and then had both his hands chopped off? What is his future, if any?

In 2002, Unity Dow, a lawyer and MP in Botswana, published her novel The Screaming of the Innocent, whose theme is muti killings.

The book ends on a terrifying note, with the perpetrator at large and eyeing his next victim as she plays with other children.

I had sleepless nights after reading that book, which is based on African reality.

What about the rights of the children murdered by the purveyors to some, I repeat, some, practitioners of so-called indigenous medicine?

If we find it so unconscionable to send savages to where they rightfully belong – hell – we can at least tighten our parole laws so that a callous murderer, aged 30, today does not come back into society at age 45 or ever.

We might just become a favoured tourist destination once more. HARRY SEWLALL

Parkmore