When Margaret Macharia Nduta, 37, was arrested in Hoh Chi Minh in July 2023, two possibilities may have crossed her mind—either she would go to the gallows, or she would be free the next day.
The story began on July 3, 2023, when she arrived in Vietnam in transit to Laos, a neighbouring Asian country.
Her family says she was travelling for the first time out of Kenya, but a Nation investigation has uncovered that she had actually lived in Ghana and the United Arab Emirates before this. The purpose of visits to these two countries remains unclear.
Murang'a family distraught after kin sentenced to death in Vietnam for drug peddling
At the Hoh Chi Minh City Airport, as she waited for a transit flight, customs officials detected unusual cargo in her luggage.
It is the content of this luggage that authorities used to nail her in court. On March 6, the Vietnam People’s Court of First Instance (equivalent to a magistrate’s court in Kenya) found her guilty of “illegal transportation” of drugs.
In Vietnam, trafficking more than 100 grammes of narcotics has often attracted the death penalty, although authorities there had been slowing down on fast execution of foreigners.
This policy offered Nduta a window of opportunity. Her situation was also helped by a public uproar back in Kenya after Nduta’s photos were published by Vietnam’s English-speaking media.
In court, she argued that she was a transit passenger to Laos. However, the purpose of the trip to Laos was not made clear or was probably ignored in translation in court.
Macharia Margaret Nduta, 37, has been sentenced to death in Vietnam.
Photo credit: Courtersy | Vietnam customs authorities
When the first court sentenced her to death , Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign and Diaspora Affairs worked up the phones. Dr Korir Sing’oei, the Principal Secretary at the ministry, spoke to his diplomatic counterparts in Vietnam.
After a March 16 phone call with Vietnam’s Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs Nguyen Minh Hang to formally ask for a stay of execution, there was no forthcoming promise, other than for her to pursue appeal.
The Kenyan Embassy in Thailand, accredited to Vietnam, would then follow it up with more diplomatic back-channels. It still remained the Supreme Court to decide.
In Court yesterday, Nduta maintained the same arguments that she was a transit passenger. Normally, however, countries are duty bound to detect and stop trafficking of narcotics on their territory. The appellate court rejected this reasoning.
She also argued that she had no idea she had drugs in the luggage, suggesting that the narcotics were loaded without her knowledge.
She asked for a reduced sentence to a number of years, rather than an acquittal. The Supreme People’s Court, sitting in Hoh Chi Minh City, handed her a heavier, but reduced penalty of life in jail.
The verdict yesterday, a final judicial decision, means she can spend the rest of her life in jail. However, she will have a chance at clemency whose powers are vested in the Vietnamese President.
The decision, however, comes as a reprieve for a woman and her anguished family in Kenya who had appealed to the Kenyan government to intervene.
Her appeal benefited from Vietnam’s recent amendments to the Penal Code, exempting drug trafficking, among several other crimes, from automatic death penalty. These days, most traffickers get sentenced to 40 years in jail.
It is, however, possible that the court that was presided over by Judge Tran Van Dat, was informed by the amount of drugs she was found with when authorities arrested her on transit at Hoh Chi Minh Airport.
