How Lisa got into drugs

Zikalala finally lifted the lid on the circumstances leading to her arrest and eventual life in jail.

She did this yesterday when addressing a congregation during the annual Prison Fellowship Swaziland national prayer day, held at Mat-sapha Correctional Services.

She said some people, who were unknown to her at the time, must have used knowledge in their possession about her trying life circumstances as their Trojan horse, which they eventually used to lure her into taking up an overseas job that never was.

The bait see-med perfect because she began to bu-ild her cas-tles in the air, looking forward to a better life – somewhat of a gateway out of abject circumstances.

Everything, according to Zikalala, went well until the day of her arrest.

Upon her appre-hension in foreign lands, she said the people who had commissioned her to ferry the illegal consignment; like fog in the advent of sunshine, suddenly dissipated into thin air.

"Suddenly, I found myself acting courier for a drug consignment," she said. "The most painful part is that when I later got arrested at the airport in Thailand, there was no one by my side, and I was left alone to fend for myself."

She said things really got tough, and the fact that prison life in Thailand was no bed of roses added more emotional strain. "It all seemed like I had been immersed into a deep abyss where return seemed impossible," she recalled.

"You could have been tempted to lose all hope in despair."

She shared that it was not until she had made a thorough introspection into her life, which later led into her decision to reconcile with supernatural powers, that she finally found peace.

"Suddenly, there was hope," she said. She said it was through her suddenly found relationship with God that things soon eased up.

The heavy load that weighed upon her shoulders disappeared even though everything was still happening incrementally."I would pray and fast, at times having to go without food for a period of 21 days," she elucidated, much to wide approval from the congregants who seemed absorbed in her testimony.

Zikalala said her prayers were finally answered when she got wind that something was being done back home about her situation.

Government authorities had begun to take up the issue with their Thailand counterparts, which meant that the strain of having to sleep and wake up under crowded conditions could finally be put behind her.

Indeed, she finally bid her goodbyes to the Thai prison in April 2011, following successful bilateral negotiations between government and Thai authorities.

During the event, Zikalala was short of enough words to thank government for the role it played in securing her eventual release from prison in Thailand so that she could be able to serve her remaining sentence at home.

Drawing from her tortuous prison life experiences, which somehow had a murky beginning but a promising end, she said others serving long sentences at correctional facilities should not lose hope in despair. She encouraged inmates to trudge on, and draw strength from the power of the Almighty.

Her testimony took the better of Correctional Services authorities. Senior Correctional Services Chaplain, Nhlanhla Mbingo, said her story was testimony to the great things God can do for a person.

Free Evangelical Church Pastor Sibonisa Makhubu said God had his own way of performing miracles through other people inspite of their past.

He said people should desist from being judgemental when dealing with others because one is never certain of God’s plans with that particular individual.

Correctional Services Commissioner, through the word of his Assistant Eric Makhathini, urged society to be forgiving to people serving time at correctional institutions for varying crimes.

He said this would go a long way into reducing the crime rate in the kingdom, specifically because rejection by society had a cumulative effect on the rate of repeat-offenders.

"Released inmates begin streaming back into our institutions whenever they find it hard to reunite with the people they wronged in the past," he said. "Such a state of affairs has the potential of opening up cracks and fissures where criminals could plant back the seed of contempt, thereby condemning a corrected inmate back into the cycle of wrongdoing."

Zikalala was sentenced to life imprisonment in Thailand but only served 16 years of the sentence following negotiations for her repatriation back into the country.

She will serve the remainder of her sentence in Swaziland but it is not yet clear when she will be released. Indications, however, are that she will not be released earlier than June 2021, which is exactly nine years from now.

　

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