Man returns wallet with huge amount of cash to owner
"In our religion, it does not make sense to steal. I must think of you and how you must be crying over your money while I am spending something which does not belong to me."
WHITE RIVER – Suppose you receive a phone call from a stranger, telling you that you had dropped your wallet, containing more than R3 000, and they want to give it back to you. That is what happened to Ms Sphiwe Ndlovu last Tuesday.
Mozambican-born Mr Macedo Wamba (35) lives in KaBokweni. Wamba was waiting for his brother-in-law at the Pick n Pay shopping centre in White River when he saw a wallet lying in the corridor.
He kept looking at it to see if anyone was going to turn around, frantically looking for their wallet but no one did. He then picked it up and walked around to see if anyone missed a wallet.
“When I saw no one was looking for it I knew I would have to look inside to find any form of identification,” Wamba said. “I saw it contained R3 020 and I knew someone would be looking for it soon. I mean, that is a lot of money!”
Wamba saw an ID and a bus card. The latter contained a telephone number of one Ms Sphiwe Ndlovu.
“I told her I had her wallet containing R3 000. I don’t think she was aware that she had lost it until I phoned her,” he said. “I told her to meet me at the shopping centre and that I was wearing a black and white shirt so she could identify me.”
Wamba lied about his clothes. “I wanted to see her before she saw me, so I could have a better idea of whether she would lie to me about owning the wallet or not.
I walked up to her and said, “Can I help you?’ She replied by saying she had lost her wallet and that she would meet someone here who could possibly give it back to her. Then I just gave her the wallet. She hugged me and cried and thanked me.”
When asked why he did not just take the money, he explained that he was a Jehovah’s Witness.
“In our religion, it does not make sense to steal. I must think of you and how you must be crying over your money while I am spending something which does not belong to me.”
Wamba said the money in Ndlovu’s wallet was to buy cement for her grandmother. “Her grandmother phoned me that night to thank me for my deed. After that, I never heard from her or Sphiwe again.”
Wamba does not have Ndlovu’s number anymore and after attempts to contact her on Facebook, Lowvelder failed to make contact with her.
