The man who was arrested at Kamuzu Central Hospital (KCH) for impersonating a doctor has been sentenced to seven years imprisonment by Lilongwe Senior Resident Magistrate Court on Monday.
Rasford Gogoda aged 26 from Simon village of T/ASimon in Neno district was nabbed by police at KCH when people who knows him had alerted Area 33 police unit (located at the hospital) of suspicious doctor wandering about in patients wards.
The man was charged and convicted of two counts of Impersonating a public officer (medical doctor) and theft. The second count was put against him because of complaints from doctors who reported theft of personal items including phones and laptops during the time when the fake doctor was accessing doctors offices.
On mitigation factors, the convict pleaded that he has a family which depend on him and that he has a child with a special condition which requires weekly routine and is responsible of taking the child to hospital.
State prosecutor Damian Kaputa prayed for stiffer sentence because Rasford Gogoda is not first time offender and further said the convict had endangered lives of people who got medical treatment from him.
Magistrate Senior Resident Paul Chiotcha agreed with the prosecutor saying he deserves a stiffer punishment to deter the would he offenders. Then slapped him with the sentence.
Snr. Resident Paul Chiotcha then sentenced the fake doctor to 6 years imprisonment for impersonation and 1 year jail sentence for theft. The two jail sentences will run consecutively.
In 2014, two men were separately arrested at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH) in Blantyre on similar charges and both of them were handed a 6-year jail term with hard labour.
On 27th October 2014, Wongani Akuzike Kandulu (whose name later changed to be Wongani Kumbukani Kandulu) was arrested after working for Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital for a while and lied to authorities that he was a college of Medicine student. He was sentenced to six years imprisonment by Blantyre Magistrate Court barely two weeks after another, illegally using the name Dr Zizwani Mwafulirwa’s but his real name is John Ben Kamanga, was also given similar custodial sentence by the same court.
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