A resident has been seeking justice after he was allegedly wrongfully kept behind bars for years.

According to Mr Msokoli Samson Ngabi (44) he was working as a DJ and manager at a tavern in Kokosi when his whole life turned around in 2004. On one fateful night, a fight broke out at the tavern. “I turned off the music and chased them out,” he told the Herald. Ngabi says that he only heard later that a man was killed when the fighting continued afterwards. One day later, a detective turned up at his door, insisting that he was the one who had killed the man, who apparently passed away near a graveyard. Although Ngabi continued to protest his innocence, he was eventually sentenced to 15 years imprisonment over this murder, which he still says he never committed. He eventually served five years of this sentence. He was at first incarcerated at Potchefstroom but moved to the Klerksdorp prison after a year. “While I was in prison I was pray
ing to God that someone may help me,” Ngabi told the Herald. He also tried to write to various institutions about his plight, letters to this day he is not sure ever made it out of prison. It was, however, still a huge shock when, after he was released in 2010, he obtained a copy of a High Court judgment, delivered by Judge Motata Mavundla on 9 October 2006, basically just a year after he was imprisoned, that an appeal against both his conviction and sentence succeeded and that it is ordered that both the conviction and the sentence be dismissed. “No-one ever told me about this in prison. It means that I was supposed to have been released immediately and was never supposed to have been there in the first place. Before I was sent to prison I was a successful artist and DJ,” Ngabi laments. He also showed the Herald several trophies that he won in martial arts competitions. As his career has been ruined, Ngabi tries to make a living by growing and selling vegetables in his back yard and doing loose jobs.
In a search to get some sort of compensation from government over the trauma he has suffered, Nhabi has tried various means, including getting the assistance from a local attorney. The Herald contacted the Wits Law Clinic to find out more about what can be done to assist Ngabi. This facility, which offers free legal help for cases it sees fit, has assisted in other local cases before. According to Professor Peter Jordi of the Wits Law Clinic, a person who has been wrongfully kept in prison in such circumstances can try to seek either compensation from the Department of Justice, if it can be proved that this department failed to send the information of the appeal through to the Department of Correctional Services, or from the latter department if they did receive the documents, but failed to implement the court ruling. Unfortunately, all such claims have to be handed in before five years of the affected person being released from prison. This means that, unfortunately, Ngabi stands no chance of a claim being successful.