A video has gone viral showing a group of people drinking bottle after bottle of alcohol straight from their mouths.
What makes this video special is that this is not a holiday party, but a "serving time" for the theft of whiskey, brandy, gin, cider, vodka and beer with an estimated value of 300,000 rand (approx. $16,000) a few days earlier.
That's right, the store owner decided to take an innovative approach to the thieves by making them drink the stolen liquor all the way to the bottom to discourage them from stealing.
According to local media, when they were apprehended, they still had the stolen items. They were then given a choice: either drink all the stolen alcohol immediately or face "umfakati," the local term for community justice, which can sometimes take violent forms.
Social media users were divided, while some made fun of the hilarious scene, others questioned whether it was an appropriate punishment for the shoplifters.
"I wanna get caught stealing alcohol," one user wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
"Imagine if they were caught stealing money. Would they force them to use it?" another netizen wondered.
"It’s very dangerous to force them to consume too much alcohol. They can end up dead," a user warned.
"Drinking a bottle of whiskey clean, no ice, straight from the bottle, with dash beatings from men with sjamboks. They either going home forever or their are lives about to change forever," another post read (sic).
"This was supposed to be a before-and-after thread. You can’t leave us hanging," a user concluded.
However, nothing is yet known about the condition of the thieves.
Another high-profile similar case in South Africa occurred in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when a daring group of thieves tunneled under a popular South African liquor store, breaking through the concrete floor to steal alcohol.