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MR.Thomas Mihayo
MR.Thomas Mihayo, the Retired High Court Judge has brushed speculations from amongst the people in the country that a top government stalwart exerted pressure on judges to impose harsh life imprisonment on Nguza Viking 'Babu Seya' the accredited musical practinioner and his sons.
He said: “It’s not true at all…I went through the proceedings of the case and came to realise that what was being said in the streets about this case was purely gossip, with no elements of truth.”
He said surprisingly, the media were reporting these gossips,in full gear.
Judge Mihayo, the incumbent Media Council of Tanzania (MCT) Ethics Committee, said he had thoroughly read court proceedings of the sodomy case against Babu Seya and his sons, as prepared by the Kisutu Resident Magistrate, before making a final verdict.
Since it has no jurisdiction to determine on the matter, the Kisutu Resident Magistrate Court received initial facts on the case, and forwarded it to the High Court for its ruling.
“In fact, as a high court judge who presided over this case, and made final verdict by sentencing Babu Seya and his sons to life imprisonment,” he confessed.
He added that in the course of reading these documents and proceedings of the case from the lower Court (Kisutu Magistrate's Court), I realised that what people had been saying on the streets was not true.
“It was not true that there was a certain top official in the government who put pressures on the judges in arriving at such a verdict,” he said.
According to him, he spent time to talk to the children alleged to have been molested by Babu Seya and his sons and noticed that these children had infact been sodomised, the acts which had been going on for some months before.
Judge Mihayo said he heard the story of the children and got the real picture of what transpired in the acts.
"Therefore I came to realise that parents of these children were not aware of the behaviour of their children," he said.
Babu Seya and his son are still in jail, serving a life sentence after being convicted of molesting the school children.
On February 12, last year Nguza Viking (55) alias Babu Seya (R) and his son, Johnson Nguza (27) alias Papii Kocha- lost their appeals against the life imprisonment.
But the Court of Appeal, sitting in Dar es Salaam, acquitted and set free two other Babu Seya sons - Nguza Mbangu and Francis Nguza – of the defilement charges for which they had been similarly convicted and jailed. It cited lack of evidence with which to uphold the earlier ruling.
Judge Mihayo said some media were giving wrong reports on Babu Seya and sons’ case, noting: “Had journalists conducted extensive investigative journalism, they would have uncovered the truth.”
“The bad thing is that journalists did not do thorough investigations on this case, otherwise they would have known the truth,” said Mihayo.
Investigative journalism is lacking in Tanzania, he noted, urging members of the media fraternity in the country to read the newly launched MCT print monitoring report with a view to identifying their weaknesses and correcting them