Sowetan Live

After an eight-year wait for justice the family of a girl whose rapist was let off the hook for violating her on the premises of a Johannesburg north school is relieved that the perpetrator will spend time behind bars for the crime.

School cleaner Harold Ngwako Ndebele, who was accused of raping a 7-year-old girl at the school in 2012, started serving a life imprisonment sentence on Thursday after the South Gauteng High Court in Johannesburg overturned the acquittal.

Ndebele was acquitted of the crime in the Johannesburg regional court in June 2018 after the court found that the victim was a single witness and that she never reported that Ndebele had penetrated her.

The girl’s father, who cannot be named because the law prohibits identifying victims of rape, told Sowetan that the successful appeal by the National Prosecuting Authority brought them slight relief, but would not change the damage that was caused.

The high court found that the accused acted in flagrant disregard for the sanctity of the victim’s integrity.

“I won’t say I was happy. It brought some kind of relief, knowing that there will be closure and that my daughter will also see justice,” said the father whose daughter is now 14.

On the day of the incident in 2012, the girl’s grandmother could not find her at school when she went to pick her up. The grandmother panicked and searched for the girl on the school premises and found her inside a classroom with Ndebele.

She asked him what he was doing with the child and he could not provide her with an explanation. The woman then noticed that the child was moving with discomfort and when they arrived home, she discovered a white discharge from the girl’s vagina which prompted her to take her to hospital where it was confirmed that she was raped.

“My daughter is not coping and has turned into a hermit and spends most of her time in her room. She is emotionally unstable and often fights with her siblings a lot. She used to be a bright student, but her performances at school have drastically deteriorated,” the father said.

He said he considered taking matters into his own hands on a number of occasions but had to allow the law to take its course.

“After he was acquitted I had to complain to the senior officials at the NPA but they said everything was done by the book. I made them aware that there were things that were not looked at but they dismissed me and said the magistrate was correct in his findings,” he said.

“I escalated the matter to the national level and they were able to look at it from a different angle and found that they could lodge a successful appeal. The prosecutor who was appointed was good. He managed our expectations and helped us understand the process and how everything was going to unfold, and this helped us to follow proceedings,” he said.