From crime to politics: The notorious David July story
Sharon Mathala | Monday January 29, 2024 10:27
The 48-year-old July was once a feared serial robber in the country, but perhaps it was his 1999 armed robbery incident where together with four of his friends robbed a police station P900, 000, abducted an on-duty police officer and got away with police guns.
July grew up as an ordinary child in Mmadinare who loved playing football, especially in the middle of the field where he earned his nickname ‘Mdavana’.
He is the fourth child of the 11 born to his parents.
He attended school all the way to Form 5 where he dropped out after he and his friends were suspended from school after they were suspected of a motor vehicle theft. From then on, his life would speedily move into crime whereupon police chase was almost a normal for him.
“We abducted a police officer and stole around P900, 000 from a police station in Shakawe. I went into hiding at my sister’s place in Maun. By the second day word had gone around and I was a wanted man. I had hid the money at my sister’s place, so I went to dig it out and ran away.
At this point my other friends had been arrested already,” July recalls. According to July, he left Maun and headed to South Africa. He came back to Botswana a few months later to assist one of his friends with bail, but with the police on his trail, he was arrested. “The case dragged on for long because I didn’t want to admit I was guilty. I came up with plans to escape from custody a couple of times and I would be re-arrested, dramatically, you all know about it. I knew what I had done was massive and I didn’t want to go to jail for a good part of my youth.
I will tell you another time how we planned those escapes but I can tell you, it was wild,” he says. However, with all the ‘thrill and rush’ that comes with the fast life of crime, July says there came a point in his life when he had enough. “Look, at one point, I had P1 million of stolen cash with me but I couldn’t even enjoy spending it because I had to pay off people and live on the run. Would you call that life? What is the point of having so much money, but you can’t even enjoy it?” July jokes. Following his prison sentence of 15 years which he served until June 2009, July found a way to survive whilst incarcerated.
He was the go-to-guy who compiled court papers and applications for his fellow prisoners. “I spent most of time reading law books in prison. I know the law like the back of my hand and so when hanging around with other prisoners, I could pick holes in their cases and so I helped some of them draft their papers and even got some released and I made lots of money,” he said. How he made money and how much, July shares that at one point during his incarceration at the Gaborone Maximum prison, he served with a ‘Mosarwa’ man whose sentence was supposed to run concurrently but an error was made that he served consecutively.
He had been in prison since 1994. “He had served an extra three years in prison which he shouldn’t have. I managed to pick this and helped him file a civil suit and he was released and awarded P400,000 and he paid me P88,000 as my reward. I was practically a lawyer in prison,” he recalls. July would ride on this and still does today. July says since he is unable to find a ‘proper’ job because of his past crime life, he is now using some loopholes he picked and assists prisoners who cannot afford representation. He, however, wants to broaden his voice and speak out for his fellow ex-convicts.
“You see the reason why most prisoners return to a world of crime, it is because they have nothing to do after being released. They are not employable simply because of their past. But we have been sent to prison to rehabilitate but the society and the system doesn’t seem to trust in their systems that prisoners have been rehabilitated,” July argued.
This has urged him to consider politics. “I have been living a crime free life for more than 10 years now. But most of my friends because of life circumstances, are still in that life. After prison when I failed to find work, I tried to sell marijuana just so I could live but that wasn’t for me, I do not want to go back to prison,” July says.
July says he has since written to President Mokgweetsi Masisi for a presidential pardon so he could contest for elections under the Botswana Movement for Democracy (BMD) ticket for Lotsane council ward in Palapye. Asked if voters will ever detach him from his past life, he acknowledges he was once a feared man. “It pains me to hear and read of stories about young children who say they look up to me and want to emulate my past life. That is not a life I would want for anyone. If I could, I would erase that part of history in my life. I hope to do so on a larger scale at the council,” he says. “I am lucky to be alive.
I have flashbacks of seeing my friends being shot dead by the police during raids. At times the bullet was meant for me. I remember one of my friends was shot by the police thinking he was me. We had just exchanged caps and hours later they shot him, they thought it was me,” he says.
July says after spending a lot of years in prison without the benefit of conjugal rights, he is now a father of two twins and wants to keep it that way. He has turned a new leaf. July asks Mmegi to not publish some of his dramatic crime stories and escapes from prison he had earlier shared with Mmegi, saying he is in the process of writing his tell all book.
"I have done all crimes under the sun except murder and I accept that now and I want to use my life learnings to change other people who may fall in the same misfortune as I have been doing in Palapye on a smaller scale but now I want to use politics to increase my voice," he says.