Award-winning gospel singer Lusanda Mcinga is unrepentant about allegedly abducting and beating up a hawker who sold pirate CDs of her music, saying she “doesn’t mind being arrested”.
“I will be arrested until this entire madness ends. I’m doing this for our children and future generations,” the 47-year-old declared a week after being arrested and charged with kidnapping, robbery and common assault.
Telling her story, Mcinga said she travelled with several local musicians, including five members of the Lusanda Spiritual Group, to Butterworth in the Eastern Cape for an anti-piracy campaign on November 11.
There they confiscated 5 000 pirated CDs at a local market, including from the hawker, who she said had 1 000 pirated copies.
The hawker told her he would direct the musicians to a lab in Umtata where the CDs were made.
“We were travelling in a Land Rover and had no space in the car. (The hawker) agreed to sit in the open boot. We shared our lunch with him and spoke to him at great length.”
But he later claimed the lab was in fact in Monti. “We decided he was fooling around, and we stopped the car and asked him to get out. I gave him R30 to return home,” Mcinga said.
She was surprised to get a call last Sunday from the Butterworth police.
She was put in a police cell for 24 hours before she appeared in court.
An angry Mcinga said she worked hard to build her career, only to have the “real perpetrators” of crime walk free.
“When I checked the sales of my new album recently I was told that I had made a lousy R15 000 because of the piracy.”
Mcinga is out on bail until her court hearing next month.
Anti-piracy enforcement supervisor Angus Rheeder
, of Recording Industry of South Africa (Risa), said the music industry lost R3 million from counterfeit CDs this year alone. Risa was seeking the prosecution of 416 hawkers for selling fake goods.