It's His Child!

Zukiswa “Zookey Zarling” Vutela opens up about her three-year struggle to get actor Kay Sibiya to accept their daughter.

- Hopewell Mpapu

THE birth of a baby should be a special time of celebration and tenderness when a family comes together to welcome a new life and share dreams for the baby’s future.

But one little girl’s entrance into the world has been anything but warm and fuzzy. Her mother and the man her mom says is her father have been at each other’s throats for nearly three years now, embroiled in a bitter war of words about the toddler’s paternity – and it seems there’s no end to the saga in sight.

The drama has been playing out in the public arena since 2014 when radio personality Zukiswa “Zookey Zarling” Vutela (40) claimed that hunky actor Khumbulani “Kay” Sibiya (29) had made her pregnant.

Kay, who played the role of Ayanda Zulu in the hit SABC1 soapie Uzalo, denied fathering the child and asked for a paternity test to prove he wasn’t the dad. She refused, Kay said in an article DRUM published towards the end of last year (Hunk with a heart, 3 November 2016).

“Yes, there was something between us but it was a fling. I wanted to have a DNA test done but was not afforded the opportunity to do so,” he said. Now Zookey has come forward to tell her side of the story – and it is decidedly different to Kay’s. 

According to Kay, he and Zookey only had sex twice in the space of one week “and she then told me she was pregnant,” he told us. “I had no problem with that, but I requested the DNA test [after the baby was born] as I thought it was only fair – I didn’t know who Zookey had slept with before and after me.”