A man who admitted that he stole and slaughtered a pig at Oshakati three years ago now has to serve a prison term of 18 months.
This is after a fully suspended sentence of two years’ imprisonment, to which Jona Ndakalako was sentenced in April last year, was set aside by two judges of the Oshakati High Court and replaced with a two-year prison term, of which six months are suspended for a period of five years.
The two High Court judges also ordered that Ndakalako had to report himself at Oluno Correctional Facility near Ondangwa by Friday last week to start serving his sentence.
Ndakalako’s sentence was changed after the state appealed against the fully suspended prison term that he received in the Oshakati Magistrate’s Court on 4 April last year.
Ndakalako was initially sentenced after he pleaded guilty to a charge of theft.
He admitted that he stole a pig, valued at about N$450, in the Okandjengedi area of Oshakati on 19 July 2022.
Ndakalako also told the magistrate who presided over his case that he slaughtered the pig after stealing it.
“I took it with the intention to sell it,” he said when the magistrate asked him why he took the pig.
“I wanted to go sell the pig in order to pay for my sibling who was writing Grade 10 exams,” Ndakalako said as well.
He could get N$450 by selling the pig, he told the magistrate.
He knew it was unlawful and wrong to take someone’s property without their consent and that a court could punish him for it, but he realised only after the theft that he had made a mistake, Ndakalako said.
He told the court he was 32 years old, unemployed, unmarried and the father of two children who were living with his mother.
The magistrate was also informed that Ndakalako was a first-time offender.
In the High Court’s judgement on the state’s appeal against the sentence handed to Ndakalako, judge David Munsu says the magistrate correctly found that there were no “compelling and substantial circumstances” present in the case to justify a deviation from the sentence prescribed by the Stock Theft Act.
The act states that a first-time offender convicted of stealing livestock valued at less than N$500 should be sentenced to not less than two years’ imprisonment without the option of paying a fine if compelling and substantial circumstances warranting a lighter sentence are not present.
Munsu agreed with the state that the magistrate had to impose a sentence of not less than two years’ imprisonment without the option of a fine, and in terms of the Criminal Procedure Act was entitled to suspend only a part of the sentence and not the entire sentence.
“Accordingly, the court [below] committed a misdirection when it suspended the whole sentence of two years,” Munsu stated.
Judge Johanna Salionga agreed with Munsu’s judgement.
State advocate Victoria Shigwedha represented the state in the appeal.
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