Hide in plain sight

Judging by the muted response to the story about the capture of the Jozi FM presenter, Donald "Duck" Sebolai, who is a suspect in the brutal murder of his girlfriend, I'm going to go ahead and assume that I am the only one who is bothered by the details.

In the event you're one of those people who walk around with blinkers, here is a summary of the story. Sebolai's girlfriend, Rachel Tshabalala, was found murdered in her flat in Jabulani, Soweto, on June 29 after Sebolai called some of her acquaintances to alert them to her demise.

He then went on the run from the police who worked tirelessly to bring him into custody. They were so serious they even placed a R50000 bounty on his head. Allegedly. (Disclaimer: my lawyers said I must insert the word "allegedly" wherever I can in this column, to cover myself because the matter is sub judice. I think that's Latin for "I didn't mean what I just wrote". Allegedly.)

Anyway, the South African Police Service's brilliant detective work finally paid off when he was captured on July 8 in Dube, Soweto. Yes, it took our police a meagre nine days to catch this dangerous fugitive.

According to SAPS spokesperson Warrant Officer Kay Makhubela: "We received information last night that he had been hiding in a certain house in a particular street. Our police officers started [monitoring the house]. In the morning, he left the house unaware he was being followed by the police. This was until our officers approached him on Mncube Drive, and he was arrested." This Warrant Officer sounded really chuffed with the sterling work of the police. I mean, their intelligence paid off and a potentially dangerous criminal was captured. Allegedly. Right? Right.

OK, let's see how many of you know your geography. Go back to the story I just shared. This crime occurred in Jabulani, Soweto. Nine days went by and the suspect was captured in Dube, Soweto.

Now, I appreciate that people have been told how vast Soweto is. What would you guess is the distance between Jabulani and Dube? If you guessed it is 30km, you would be wrong. If you guessed 20km, you would still be wrong. Let me put you out of your misery. It is between 5.1km and 7.4km, depending on where you are.

This realisation immediately set off all manner of buzzers in my head. Two numbers kept ringing out loud; 5.1-kilometre radius. Nine days. Look, I'm not an unreasonable person. The fugitive might have gone to São Paulo and returned nine days later, only for our police intelligence to kick in and detect his return.

Don't give me that look. I've seen it happen in Hollywood movies about Colombian druglords and how they're always captured returning to their Queens, NY, apartments to collect the "lucky" crucifixes they left behind when they went on the run. But come on, we all know better.

This fugitive was potentially 5km from the crime scene the entire nine days our crack squad of detectives were looking for him.

I choose to ignore the obvious question: how do the police struggle for nine days to find a guy hiding in a back room next to the Cell C container where he is buying his gwinyas? What disturbs me is: What is wrong with our criminals? (Apologies, "alleged criminals"). I've yet to kill anyone and be on the run from the police but I've watched channel 170 on DStv, and when criminals are on the run from the police it usually requires a fake passport, fake beard and some form of border control officials to cross into Mexico.

The less resourceful ones may not cross a border but there will be a Greyhound ticket somewhere in this reckoning. This guy didn't even board a minibus taxi.

What's going on? And this is not the first time.

In 2004 Mrs N, my friend Sumo and I were driving to work around 7am when we heard on the radio that five prisoners had broken out of Westville Prison.

Among them were two bad guys on South Africa's Top 10 wanted list. Around 2pm I read on the internet that they had been captured.

Now, where do you think they were found? The Lesotho border? No. Jozini towards the Swaziland border? No. Harrismith? No. Try Peacevale, 33km northwest of Westville. Is Peacevale a mountainous forest with tricky terrain? No. It's nothing more than a clearing with a few, derelict buildings. Do you know what they were doing there when the law found them? They were in their birthday suits, steaming themselves with muthi called intelezi which apparently makes one invisible. I can imagine the surprise on their faces when the coppers took out their firearms and yelled: "Put your hands on your heads!" I bet the Einsteins had that perplexed, "You mean you can see us?" look on their faces.

And I bet our most notorious fugitive, the cash-heist kingpin, Collin Chauke, was just as surprised when he was captured in Nelspruit. With millions in a bag, this underwhelming moegoe went into hiding in Nelspruit.

The last time I toyi-toyied in the streets, Piet Botha was still the Minister of Sanctions-Busting. But I will happily join a march whose theme is "We demand better criminals!".

I bet they'll be standing there, wondering why we can see them. LS

• ngcobon@sundaytimes.co.za @NdumisoNgcobo