By Julius Phiri –
THE paralysed sister of the Katete teacher reported to have cut off his wife’s head on suspicion that she was cheating on him has narrated how he gave the terrified woman two minutes to pay back the K30,000 he spent on her nursing course before killing her.
Tikhozenji Mwale said when her sister-in-law, Mumba Kalaba, 26, failed to produce the money, the enraged man, school teacher Tobias Mwale, attacked her with a machete.
Ms Mwale told local radio station Mphangwe FM that the husband and wife were arguing in their bedroom and she was following the conversation from an adjoining room.
Ms Mwale said being paralysed, she was unable to do much more than call out to her brother to calm down and restrain himself from using violence as the argument escalated.
She said her brother’s fury had been ignited by pictures and messages related to a strange man that he had discovered on his wife’s phone.
She said Mwale had gone as far as calling the man, who lived in Kasama where Kalaba was training as a midwife nurse to tell him he was about to kill her.
Ms Mwale said from the conversation she was overhearing, the man at the other end was telling her brother that he had no idea Kalaba was married.
When that conversation ended, Ms Mwale said she heard her brother tell his wife she must pay him back the K30,000 that he claimed he had spent on her nursing course there and then.
Ms Mwale said her sister-in-law told her husband, a teacher at Omelo Mumba Primary School, she could not produce the money but offered to sign an undertaking to pay him in future.
She said it was at this point that he gave her two minutes to produce the money, failure to which he was going to kill her.
A moment later, she heard the sound of hacking, like a machete chopping into something.
Ms Mwale said she had been left distraught by the tragic event of Sunday afternoon.
Police say they found a machete at the scene of the murder with Kalaba’s head almost severed from the body and bearing other wounds to the shoulder, arms and left wrist.
News of the brutal murder and Mwale’s arrest attracted scores of Katete residents to the local police post to try and catch a glimpse of the suspected murderer.
The Basic Education Teachers Union of Zambia (BETUZ) in Eastern
Province said yesterday it condemned the nurse’s murder as inhuman and an example of gross gender-based violence.
BETUZ provincial secretary Simon Bota said it was regrettable that a teacher could be at the centre of such a gruesome murder.
“We as a union we condemn gender-based violence (GBV). As teachers, we should be instruments of positive change in our communities. The incident that happened in Katete is disheartening and inhuman, to say the least,” Mr Bota said in a Press statement in Chipata yesterday.
