A 34-year-old self-proclaimed car dealer of Nakonde has been sentenced to five years behind bars with hard labour after he pulled a fast one on fellow hustler and clearing agent .
Emmanuel Sinkolongo found himself at the wrong end of the law after he went from car dealer to car thief, swindling his fellow hustler Winter Simumba, of a Toyota Alphard worth K120,000.
Chete FM reports that it all started in January when Simumba, a Nakonde clearing agent, ordered the vehicle from Japan and was advertising it for resale to fellow road kings in the border town.
But on March 9, Sinkolongo showed up at Simumba’s house with all the charm of a man who knew ‘a serious buyer’ from Tanzania, proposed to take the vehicle to Kamyanga Car Wash, where the buyer allegedly waited, except no such buyer existed.
Trusting his colleague, Simumba handed him the keys around 08:00 hours but by nightfall, all he had were excuses, WhatsApp voice notes and a missing Alphard.
From ‘the buyer is near’ to ‘we will finalise tomorrow,’ Sinkolongo led Simumba on a goose chase that ended at Nakonde Police Post the following morning with a shocking revelation that the car had illegally crossed into Tanzania.
When the matter was brought into the courts of law, Sinkolongo claimed, the buyer who also ‘owed him money’, took the car and vanished in thin air.
But Nakonde magistrate Cynthia Musaba was having none of it.
She said it was an afterthought aimed at misleading the court, pointing out that the convict never introduced the buyer to the car’s real owner and deliberately violated cross-border vehicle regulations.
Musaba said Sinkolongo had enough experience in the car trade to know better and found him guilty of theft under Section 265(1) of the Penal Code.
By George Musonda
Kalemba June 29, 2025
