Death penalty not the solution to our problems
Despite drug scourge, reasons for banning capital punishment in SA remain valid
A few days ago, social media was abuzz with discussions about the death penalty sentence imposed on Lesedi Molapisi, a 30-year-old Botswana woman arrested for smuggling drugs into Bangladesh earlier this year.
Molapisi, who was arrested at the Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport, had arrived on a Qatar Airways flight from OR Tambo International Airport, which had arrived in Dhaka via Doha. Airport customs officials and an intelligence agency intercepted Molapisi while she was crossing the green channel – the passage for arriving passengers with no goods to declare. Upon searching her luggage, 3kg of heroin was found.
When the story about the imminent execution of Molapisi was reported, many South Africans welcomed the news and suggested SA must also reinstate the death penalty. The argument is that because those who use drugs are often sent to early graves by dependency on the substance, the punishment of death for drug exporters and cultivators fits the crime. It’s certainly true that drugs have brought untold misery to our communities. Townships, in particular, have become infested with drugs, particularly nyaope, with devastating consequences.
My peers I grew up with in Meadowlands and Dobsonville, Soweto, today are caught up in a tight grip of drug addiction. It’s devastating to witness and even more painful knowing the trauma it is putting their families through. In the throes of addiction, many go to the extent of stealing furniture at home to sell for a fix.
They are prone to violent outbursts and emotionally abusive. The story of Ellen Pakkies, a mother from Lavender Hill on the Cape Flats, who murdered her drug-addict son is well known. After he threatened to rape her Pakkies could no longer bear the torture he was subjecting the family to. Society rallied around Pakkies, and her three-year jail sentence was reflective of how even the courts understood she wasn’t a coldblooded murderer, but a victim of an epidemic that SA is losing the battle to.
Despite the horrors addicts put families through, I don t the solution. For one thing,’ believe the death penalty is those who sell drugs, particularly in townships, are young people or working-class families trying to make a living.
They are not the ones cultivating or importing the substances. Those running drug cartels are living in multimillion-rand mansions in some of the most protected suburbs. They have the added protection of being nationals of China and Eastern Europe. Contrary to popular belief, the biggest drug cartels in SA are not run by Nigerians, but by Chinese triads. Studies such as those of Dr HF Snyman and BJM
Wagener have provided extensive detail on it. The death penalty would target lowly traders, many of them black, while the real criminals remain untouched.
Furthermore, there’s evidence law enforcement is complicit in getting drugs into our communities. The cases of police officers arrested for stealing drugs confiscated in busts are countless. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, 16 police officers appeared at the Kempton Park magistrate’s court after being arrested by the Hawks for allegedly stealing narcotics confiscated at OR Tambo International Airport. Five police officers were recently arrested after they tried to steal drugs seized in a drug bust in Aeroton, south of Johannesburg.
Many such incidents have been reported and, no doubt, more have gone untold.
While I appreciate that everyone is fed up with crime levels, we must be careful of romanticising the death penalty. It was outlawed for the right reasons. Reinstating it when we have such high levels of racialised inequalities that are forcing many into a life of crime, when we have a broken criminal justice system, and when the rich alone access better legal resources, will be setting parameters for genocide.