When Drum met her for the first time, she was distraught. With tears in her red eyes, she braced herself for proceedings at the Soshanguve magistrate’s court on 4 May.
While she watched the suspected murderers of her lover stroll into a full court, community members were chanting for justice outside the gate with placards and threats hurling through the steel bars.
“Okae (where is) Thabo Bester?”, “Lerato, wena o satan weitsi (you are satan)!” and “Re lebelle (look at us)!” were just some of the remarks she listened to as she sadly sat through the proceedings.
A few of the supportive community members had made it into the court room and were fuming with rage, likening the accused Sibusiso Mahlangu to Thabo Bester for having lived as Sibusiso Sithebe - ‘the dead Tshwane man’, for over a year.
His wife and co-accused, Lerato Mahlangu stood beside him as Judge Swart read out their charges in the murder case of her baby daddy, Sithebe.
Now, the day before their third court appearance when DNA results of Sithebe’s alleged exhumed body are expected to be revealed, the mother of Sithebe’s second daughter, Lerato Mphefo has gathered enough strength to speak out.
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Starting off by telling Drum that she won’t be able to attend court the following morning because it’s her first week of working at a new job, she says life without her lover has been tough.
“I’ve been using my daughter’s social grant money to buy Pampers. I can’t buy her clothes because the money is R500 and Pampers is expensive, she even goes to creche now so I realised that I can’t cover all her costs alone.”
When Sithebe was still around, he would use the R350 grant money he would get and the R50 he would save every day from taxi check-in to cover their needs. Sithebe was a taxi driver who loved his family, especially his girlfriend Lerato who he had been in love with since high school.
Although they had broken up because of distance issues in 2011, Sithebe made it clear to Lerato that he wants to spend the rest of his life with her in 2018 when they started dating again.
In fact, after his mother died in 2021, “we made a promise that only death will do us apart because I’m the last woman that Mama knew to be in his life,” she says.
During the breakup, Sithebe got into a relationship with Lerato Mahlangu with whom he had his first born with.
With this being an eternal bond between the two, Lerato Mphefo was worried that Lerato Mahlangu would be a thorn in her relationship. Sithebe assured her that it wouldn’t be the case because she was now married and hadn’t given him access to their daughter for years, but time proved otherwise.
In October 2021, Lerato says the problem started when the married ex-girlfriend contacted Sithebe at night and claimed that their seven-year-old daughter was sick.
After a back and forth over the phone, they went to meet Lerato a few houses away in the dark where she suspiciously asked for privacy with Sithebe only to tell him that she suspects that their child could be sick because she did not attend her grandmother’s funeral. She then suggested that a ceremony be done for the child to cleanse her.
“Sibusiso was angry. We met her in the street because he did not want her to know exactly where we stay. I don’t know what he thought she would do. When we got there, she was alone in the street with the car she claimed to have come with, nowhere in sight,” she explains.
Even after agreeing that they’d work everything out the following day, Lerato Mahlangu and her aunt kept on panic-calling throughout the night. Surprisingly, Sithebe found his daughter in a saddening state; “matlho a wetse (eyes were hollowed) and she looked like a child who had been crying a lot”, Lerato recalls the description from Sithebe.
For some reason, Sithebe’s efforts and attempts to see his child again after this day were in vain but Lerato continued to use her as an excuse to “meet up” with Sithebe.
On 29 December 2021, Lerato and her husband Sibusiso Mahlangu showed up at their door. This time, with another reason.
“She came at night [again] at Sibusiso’s home [in Soshanguve block W] and found me, Sibusiso and our daughter. Mahlangu was driving, their car stopped at the gate and Lerato got out and asked for Sibusiso.”
“When he went to her, she said that she was there to get Sibusiso’s number because she had lost her phone and bought a new sim card and so was using a new number. She then said she would bring their daughter the following day – which didn’t happen.”
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When Sithebe made his way back into the house, Lerato recalls him crying, saying that something was not feeling right with how Lerato has recently been putting pressure on him and on his tail all of a sudden. His spirit was feeling heavy, and he kept on asking what Lerato wanted from him so badly.
Two days later when Mphefo was supposed to be with her family, Sithebe sincerely asked that she spends the New Years Eve with him and his family instead. That night, their daughter could not stop crying.
“Rethabile started crying [non-stop] that night and that shocked me because it was the first time my child cried like that, Sibusiso even left because her piercing cry was touching him. He went to his friends and came back around midnight. When we kneeled down and were supposed to pray, he cried again and said ‘thapelo ya gana (I can’t pray)’.”
Mphefo asked him how that is even possible, and he responded by saying his chest feels painful and asked for water.
The following morning, he decided to spend the day with his family and not go to work. He had requested his brother Xolani Sithebe to buy cake because they hadn’t celebrated Lerato and their child’s birthday which were on 28 and 27 of December, respectively.
“He told me to take out a shirt that I would like him to wear that day. Whatever I did for him made him happy, but he would never ask, I would always just do but that day, he asked me to put together an outfit for him,” says Mphefo.
They went to Lerato’s family home in Soshanguve block L where they were briefly celebrated until Sithebe started receiving phone calls that claimed to have a better taxi driving job for him. Because Sithebe was always trying to make ends meet for his family, he could not ignore the offer.
Even though Mphefo’s mother warned him to not go to the people who had been calling, Sithebe insisted on meeting up with them “to finalise the deal”.
“He took Rethabile and sat on a bench. Suddenly, they were both crying. When I asked why he was crying, he said he missed his [deceased] father and that his heart breaks when he sees his daughter grow.”
After she consoled him though and it was time to take pictures, he bluntly said, “I do not want to appear in the photos, we are not the kind to take photos anymore” and asked Lerato’s niece to play Joyous Celebration’s Ndenzel’Uncedo.
They repeated the song ten times as Sithebe kept on telling Mphefo that it is the song she should remember him by with a spirit that was not so high anymore.
In hindsight, that day was even stranger because “Rethabile put his phone in the drain but it was luckily blocked by a closed lid from reaching the drain water. I think the child was protecting him [from receiving any more phone calls that would lead him to leaving]."
Eventually, he left. The next time Mphefo spoke to her lover was when he was telling her that he was in Hammanskraal with the owner of the new taxi he was offered to drive and would be home by 10pm.
After a few tries, his phone was not going through anymore and a search team was hard at work for over a year until Sibusiso Mahlangu confessed to killing him in April 2023 after he was found in possession of Sibusiso Sithebe’s identification card when he was arrested for driving a stolen car.
