She considers herself lucky to be alive, says Patricia Mbiza, who was seriously wounded in last week’s boardroom shooting in Pretoria. The Pretoria News on Monday quoted her as saying: ”He wanted to kill us, and he killed my colleagues and friends.”
Speaking from her hospital bed, Mbiza recounted how a colleague at a Sunnyside engineering firm, Happy Nkosi, pulled out a firearm at a board meeting on Friday. He shot dead two other board members and wounded Mbiza before committing suicide by shooting himself.
Mbiza said Nkosi was not performing well in his duties.
”We are to start mining for coal at the Stofberg mines in Mpumalanga and we were running behind with the schedule because of Nkosi,” she said. ”As procedure, we had to call him to order and we told him that he should not come into the office for the next two months until the project got off the ground.”
The news that he had been suspended from his job for two months was apparently too much for Nkosi.
Mbiza said the details of the shooting are still a bit vague, but she remembers Nkosi pulling out a gun. He started shooting. Wonder Masombuka — a former top Pan Africanist Congress official — and Abraham Maredi were killed, and a bullet hit Mbiza in the shoulder.
”He stood up, drew out a gun and shot at Masombuka. He then shot Maredi,” a heavily sedated Mbiza said. Other people in the boardroom managed to escape.
”He shot me in the shoulder. I ran and exited the building. He came around the corner and shot me again,” Mbiza recalled. ”I fell to the ground and looked up and saw him put the gun in his mouth, and he fired the last shot.”
The thought of her children kept her alive. ”I was scared. I thought of my three children and knew I had to get out of the situation alive for them.”
She said she is sure Nkosi targeted her and the other two victims. ”The three of us are executives of the company and we had to make a business decision,” she said. ”He wanted to kill us and he killed my colleagues and friends. Our intention was not to upset him, but he had to understand that he was not fulfilling his duties.”
She is not sure what caused Nkosi to act so violently. ”I do not know what caused him to snap, as we had informed him that it was just a suspension and that he would come back to work in two months.”
Mbiza was moved from the intensive-care unit of the Pretoria Academic hospital on Sunday and is expected to undergo surgery during the week to remove a bullet lodged in her skull. — Sapa