You would be certainly forgiven for erroneously running away with the notion that the famously-known KFC Wedding couple – Hector Mkansi and Nonhlanhla Soldaat – were rich and living a life of opulence after their historic wedding in December 2019.
Of course, one would carry that particular belief because of the financial windfall in support the couple received after their lowkey proposal at a KFC store, which despite being mocked by some people on social media, earned them empathy from the broader society and the South African private sector, that ultimately donated quite a substantial amount of money and gifts.
At the time, some financial experts estimated the total gifts and donations in millions, all-inclusive of what was spent on their wedding day.
Virtually every company that makes anything in the country offered to donate their products, from bricks to cement, from built-in cupboards to lounges, you can name them.
However, two years since that life-changing event, the couple is back to the life of poverty and deprivation, according to the husband, Hector. Like many South Africans who are jobless and struggling to make ends meet, the Vaal-based couple is similarly facing the same reality.
He indicated that the couple still lives in a government-provided RDP house, and albeit everybody in the community thinks they have money, it’s actually the opposite, and this has made their lives extremely difficult and at times unbearable.
“I remain unemployed. We are still living our normal life though it’s difficult because people know us as the ‘KFC couple’ and they think we have money and have big houses and stuff. We are still living in poverty. We live in an RDP house that is normal. It also becomes difficult to walk in the community, because when everyone looks at us, they think we have money,” Mkansi told Timeslive.
Despite the challenges, Mkansi maintained that the relationship has not been affected, as they still love each other the same way they did when they met a decade ago.
But how did people who receive so much money run broke in a space of 2 years?
This is quite a difficult question to answer, the couple has not complained about failures by any companies to honor their pledges, therefore, they supposedly received all that was promised to them.
It is, therefore, one’s opinion that considering that there is a desperate lack of financial literacy in the country, one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that the couple might have overspent the money.
We have had quite a myriad of examples of people who got the opportunity to be lifted out of poverty, however, by a curse or by recklessness, they returned to poverty, hence, there is a TV show called I blew It. Quite sad indeed!
