OPINION: These are real people – not fictional characters out of some script prepared for Hollywood. Moliehi Maria Sithole and the father of her children Teboho Tsotesti are real people, writes Sizwe Dlamini.
Cape Town – Melica Jacobs, the Eastern Cape woman known as “Freezer Mom”, is now a free woman.
A Daily Dispatch report says charges of four counts of murder and one of concealment of birth against her were withdrawn after the infant bodies found in her freezers went missing from the custody of the Health Department’s Mthatha forensic pathology unit.
“Without the bodies, the NPA had no choice but to withdraw all charges before the Eastern Cape High Court (Mthatha).” – Published by Medical Brief on August 25, 2021.
I was drawn to this article after reading the drivel by Daily Maverick’s Rebecca Davis, dismissing the potential existence of a baby trafficking syndicate operating from within the country’s health system as a conspiracy theory.
“That’s because there is already a well-trodden path covering the same lowest common denominator narrative, and that is via the global conspiracy theory known as QAnon. Powerful people stealing babies is literally what QAnon is all about.” Hhay’ bo!
Arriving at the conclusion that the privileged Davis has never experienced what the underprivileged citizenry – especially black women – of South Africa go through at public health institutions is, therefore, a no-brainer.
We have infant bodies that went missing from the custody of the Health Department’s Mthatha forensic pathology unit. How is this possible if the seedy existence of corruption within the government’s health system is nothing but a conspiracy theory?
Then there was the other stuff and nonsense from another privileged Richard Poplak who opted to poke fun at everything, dismissing the fact that a black mother who had been through a harrowing ordeal at the hands of negligent health care workers and corrupt government officials, as something out of Hollywood.
“He/she was said to be working in concert with corrupt officials and the South African government, in order to facilitate a human and organ trafficking network that reaches – cue Hollywood trailer voice– all the way to the top.”
These are real people – not fictional characters out of some script prepared for Hollywood. Moliehi Maria Sithole and the father of her children Teboho Tsotesti are real people. The father of Sithole’s triplets, who are also missing, Sipho Mzolo is a real person.
Clearly Poplak and Davis’s disdain for the “defender of the Little Guy, a committed anti-racist” has resulted in them developing psychological scotoma.
The word “scotoma” is generally associated with vision, and it refers to a blind spot in the eye. “Psychological scotoma” is another type of blind spot that occurs in the way one views reality. It means there is information in one’s experience that is inconvenient for one’s ego, and it responds by turning a “blind eye” to it.
According to Hope Rehab, psychological scotoma usually arises as a response to cognitive dissonance. This refers to a situation where there is some type of conflict between one’s beliefs, opinions, and one’s behaviour.
Clearly, Branko Brkic’s emissaries’ egos don’t like there to be any obvious inconsistency in their thinking, hence the resultant psychological scotoma.
On September 26, 2021, Brkic ran a piece by psychological scotoma-free Robyn Wolfson Vorster: “Stories of children who go missing, seemingly without a trace, are emotive and fear-provoking. But in a country notoriously poor at child protection, trying to understand a problem often weaponised for political ends seems almost impossible. So just how big is the country’s missing children problem, and how do we unravel the myths and misconceptions that prevent us from understanding it better?”
Just weeks later we get this drivel from Brkic’s emissaries on the same platform simply because they are out of touch with the daily reality faced by South Africa’s underprivileged women. Or is it because of their disdain for the “defender of the Little Guy, a committed anti-racist”?
Robyn Wolfson Vorster says, “… the lack of clarity about how big the problem is, a challenge that makes it even more difficult to solve. It also mirrors a larger debate around the link between missing children and trafficking, and if South Africa has a problem with child trafficking.”
But Brkic and his emissaries are having none of this debate if it involves the “defender of the Little Guy”.
However, all this comes as no surprise as it is in the public domain that Brkic’s handlers, the Oppenheimer family that benefited directly from apartheid, exploited black people. Millions of workers were exploited by the Oppenheimers through Anglo-American and De Beers were forced to work in the mines by the 1913 Land Act, and died of silicosis and other diseases and lived in inhumane conditions in the hostels.
So it should come as no surprise that exploring the truth about the plight of a poor black woman exploited by unscrupulous officials of the system is of no interest to them in their mission to defend their truth.
* Sizwe Dlamini is the Editor of Independent Media’s Investigations Unit.