Husband murder accused Bulelwa Ndudula, 46, took the witness stand yesterday and said there were never any “serious problems” in their marriage.
Despite these comments, Ndudula also pointed a finger at her late husband, senior ANC official Sakhekile Ndudula, 52, for making threats of violence.
She said he once told her that one day he would “blow my brains away”.
Ndudula told judge Igna Stretch the couple experienced “just minor problems, like in any other marriage”.
This prompted state advocate Sakhumzi Mtsila to pull out a thread of text message exchanges sent a few months before Sakhekile was shot four times in September 2016.
In text messages, Ndudula told Sakhekile’s cousin Viwe Dinga that were her husband to die, she would “spit in his coffin”. In another SMS she told of having given up on their marriage and that she would never ever set foot again in her husband’s parental home “unless one of our children could die”.Mtsila put it to her that such messages show that her marriage had, in fact, broken down and had been in this state for some time and this was the reason she had finally decided to kill him.
Ndudula denied being involved in her husband’s killing, saying she was merely angry when she sent the SMSes.
Asked by Mtsila what had made her angry, she said she could not recall why she was so angry at this time, which was in August 2016, a month before her husband was killed.
Asked why she vowed never to set foot again in the home of her in-laws in Tsomo, she told the court that she wanted her husband’s family to notice that there was something wrong in their marriage.Ndudula told the court that she was also angry because her husband was not assisting her when she was renovating their Cambridge West home.
Mtsila told her that such messages showed that problems in their marriage were “extreme” and that it did not need “a rocket scientist” to see that the marriage had been on the rocks for some time.
Ndudula was the first defence witness to take the stand yesterday. Her advocate Mike Maseti told the court that he would be calling two more defence witnesses.
When Ndudula was asked by Mtsila why she would refer to a coffin when she was angry with her husband, she refused to answer that, saying: “I don't have an answer for that”.
Mtsila charged: “I put it to you that you were not angry at all but you were expressing how you felt at the time about the deceased after you also wrote that you have given up on your marriage.”Ndudula said that was not the case and that she was merely unhappy and angry that her husband had not returned from Komani and that he was spotted wearing the same clothes he was wearing the previous day.
She also denied having a brief fling with a 34-year-old man who had previously told court that she once pulled out a gun on him after he had ended the week-long affair.
She confirmed that on the day the man visited her house with a friend, her husband’s gun was lying next to a TV, but denied pointing it towards him.
Her cross-examination continues today...