The nation’s eyes are focused yet again on another heinous case of a husband allegedly masterminding a plan to get rid of his wife.
According to the prosecution, Christopher Panayioutou did not particularly dislike his lovely wife, Jayde, his problem was that he liked too many women. Deeply indebt, the state alleges that he found the demands of his wife and mistress too stressful, so he needed to get rid of the one, in order to indulge the other. He hired killers who practiced various dry-runs, and discussed various schemes to avoid it looking like a hit, ahead of the actual murder.
Panayioutou, no doubt will find top-notch lawyers to represent him. The case will be long and drawn out. In the meantime Jayde is dead and the lives of the other accused, Thando Siyoli, Sizwezakhe Vumazonke, have been destroyed.
This murder now joins the recent and highly publicized cases of the Modimolle Monster Johan Kotze and Shrien Dewani where wealthy men were alleged to have hired killers to do their dirty work for them. Headlines and pictures of Ina Bonetter and Anni Dewani were emblazoned relentlessly across our newspapers for days on end.
The underlying rationale with many wealthy men in this country who contract killers is that “if I am too chicken to kill my victim, I can always depend on some poor desperate black man to do my dirty work for me.” It epitomises the relationship of power, underpinned by violence, between the powerful and the powerless. Driven by the assumption that poverty-stricken black men are eminently ‘bribable’ and ‘amoral’ these men have gone to great lengths to enlist black men to help them carry out their master plan.
The execution of these gruesome deaths is the worst forms of transgression perpetrated against women at the nexus of race, class, and gender. “If I can’t have her, no one will” is the stuff of family murders, which have plagued South Africa since before 1994, and continues until today, across the barriers ofrace and class.
Those who feed off the wide-scale criminality in South Africa for their own nefarious ends should experience the full force of the law to deter people from literally getting away with murder. Not only is it right to punish criminals for murder, regardless of who perpetrates them, but those so-called respectable men whohire the poor as contract killers, should be punished doubly harshly for destroying the lives of the poor in more ways than one.
One of the accused in the Anni Dewani case could barely defend himself. His command of English was so poor that the more he tried to defend himself, the more he found himself trapped in a web of lies.
Unlike the guys who are alleged to have contracted them, the poor black accused can’t afford good lawyers to fight their case for them.
The criminal justice system should use the Modimolle Monster and Panayioutou cases to communicate to poor black men that they should desist from being used by the “rich” to do their dirty work”; that it is never good to kill anyone regardless; and that if they do it for money, they will most likely be caught and not have the luxury of enjoying their ill-gotten gains. More importantly they should be made to realise that they not only destroy their lives, but also those of their families.
It is not too far-fetched to alert South Africans that the relationship between the “hit contractor” and the willing “contractee” is representative of the relationship between master and slave, as reminded by slave expert, Nell Irvin Painter. “The slave masters used Machiavellian systems to mentally break the enslaved Africans. While validating themselves as superior, they used every propaganda tool within their power to teach black people to hate themselves. The results still have major impact on the psyche of black people today.”
Justas slavery has had devastating effects on black Americans, so apartheid has had similar effects of racial domination on SA’s oppressed. Painter elucidates further, that “[a] weakened black family emerged from slavery. The destruction of the family unit through the slave master’s intrusive sexual exploitation of women and other evil designs, evolved into a volatile moral code for black people. As a consequence, today over 70 percent of African-American children are born to unmarried women in America. That number is an astonishing residual effect of slavery. Such large numbers children born to single mothers is clearly the wrong model for a stable, secure future for black people, as there is a direct link between an absent father and an increased chance that a child will drop out of high school and have a criminal record.”
Sound familiar? The analogy with SA is more than apt. These well-planned crimes between the powerful and the powerless perpetuate the pernicious master-servant relationship and the destruction of the moral fabric of society in ways notimmediately fathomable. The consequences for families are dire. Hence the law should be doubly harsh against those who use their positions of power to extract nefarious activities from the poor for their wicked ends.
