Golden Miles Bhudu may have disappeared behind bars this week for an eight-year stretch, but this prisoners’ rights activist will neither be gone nor forgotten.
Bhudu (47) was jailed this week for aiding an escapee and corruption.
Magistrate Syta Prinsloo slapped Bhudu and his co-accused with an eight-year sentence and refused them leave to appeal.
Bhudu maintains his innocence and there are still other legal options available to challenge Prinsloo’s finding.
But for now he is back behind bars with his ”constituency”, South Africa’s 165 000 prison inmates who he has been defending since his six-year sentence for housebreaking and theft in 1987.
Loved and loathed by prisoners and correctional services officials, Bhudu will be missed at public hearings, press conferences and seminars, where he always had the first, last and loudest words of the day.
Bhudu has been called many things: a one-man show with a fax machine; a convicted criminal whose only goal is to enrich himself with donor money; and a loose cannon with no respect for authority.
But he was the one person in the country who knew what is really going on inside the big walls and fences of South Africa’s prisons.
Bhudu was always first to send a SMS or fax when prisoners complained about corrupt and aggressive prison warders. During the Jali commission of inquiry into prison corruption, he played a key role in exposing the misdeeds of the guardians who are supposed to protect our criminals.
He helped find training and employment opportunities for former prisoners, who are often rejected by their own communities and struggle to find work.
But he often walked into brick walls. For the construction of the new Kimberley prison Bhudu successfully put together a programme whereby ex-convicts with building skills would be used on the project. But a protracted tendering process and an unwillingness by the department of correctional services to push the initiative through saw it being dumped.
At a correctional services departmental briefing on a massive catering tender two weeks ago, Bhudu was the first to ask questions. Why wasn’t previous experience in catering a prerequisite? And why do some prisoners still use telephone cards as cutlery?
No matter was too small for Bhudu to talk, scream or shout about. He became the voice and face of South Africa’s often forgotten prison population.
And, I know he will already be busy drafting his first press statement from inside his cell in Johannesburg Prison.