‘WOMAN SUED OVER ‘LELO MULUNGU ANILANGIZA’ HULE REMARK
Written by Millennium on September 25, 2019
MUTINTA MULAYE writes
@SunZambian
THE Boma Local Court in Lusaka has ordered a woman of Lusaka’s Ng’ombe Township to compensate her sister in law with K2, 000 for defaming her character when she called her a prostitute and openly declared ‘Lelo mulungu anilangiza’. This was heard in a case in which Esther Zulu, 34, of Ng’ombe sued Vivian Kachikoti, of the same area for defamation. Zulu told senior local court magistrate Gaston Kalala that she wanted the court to teach her sister in law Kachikoti a lesson for tarnishing her name.
She said that one evening when she was going to see an in law in hospital, her cousin who is Kachikoti’s husband called her name.
“He asked me where I was going and I told him I was going to UTH to see our relative. He asked if we could go together and we started walking,
“ I just heard from nowhere ‘hule!’ I asked my sister in law if it was me she was referring to and she said yes. She shouted again ‘hule! Lelo mulungu ani langiza!’,” she said.
She said Kachikoti moved closer to them and started beating her husband and telling people that she (Zulu) was a prostitute of her husband.
“People gathered and were asking what was happening and who the prostitute was and she kept saying it was me. I left the place and told the patient in hospital what happened and she also didn’t believe that my sister in law called me a prostitute,” she said. In defence Kachikoti told the court that she was not sure whether her husband and Zulu were actually cousins as she had never been to her home.
“Last month at uncle’s funeral, Esther came to me and told me that my husband will never grow up and he doesn’t listen. She told me he dates a certain woman and impregnated another woman who works at a club,” she said. She said days later she phoned her husband around 19:00hrs to ask if he knocked off from work.
“He said he was kuma plot and he would come home after an hour. I heard a baby crying in the background and when I asked him who that baby was he cut the call, that’s how I sensed he was with another woman,” she said.
She said she followed him as she had an idea of where to find him and stood at a nearby shop for about an hour when she saw her husband with Zulu.
“I was watching them from a distance and my husband saw me first. Zulu ran away and I went to beat my husband and I asked him to take me to the prostitute’s place that he was with. He took me to Zulu’s place where he beat me until I fainted,” she said. She said since that scandal, her husband had not returned home.
The court found that there was not enough evidence that Zulu and Kachikoti’s husband had a romantic relationship. Kachikoti therefore defamed Zulu and court ordered her to compensate her with K2, 000.
