The Sunday News
Every Zimbabwean enjoys inherent freedoms as enshrined in the National Constitution.
Everyone has a right to life and security and the Government upholds its constitutional mandate of ensuring that all peace loving Zimbabweans are protected and their property rights guaranteed by law. Demonstrations are a constitutional right and any group of people has unhindered right to demonstrate.
Cause for concern arises when a demonstrating group of people becomes a threat to other citizens. When do other citizens forfeit their rights to demonstrators? When do demonstrators circumvent peace to kill, steal and loot private property? Are there superior and minor rights?
No one has qualms with demonstration to express displeasure over certain issues but the concern emerges when demonstrations become violent and misguided to innocent people. How does a poor vendor lose her airtime to demonstrations? How do demonstrators loot clothes at flea markets? How do demonstrators dissatisfied with fuel price increase justify looting from a privately owned Tuck-shop? What has a vendor who loses her wares to do with the fuel price increase?
Demonstrators must emerge smart. Genuine demonstrators must exonerate themselves and rid acts of thuggery, robbery and private property destruction. Organisers must expose these social miscreants of criminal disposition who mask and ride over a demonstration to execute their nefarious and criminal activities of stealing cash, food and destroying private property.
As we emerge from this orgy of violence, budding business people are accounting on sad loses inflicted upon their businesses where undeterred thugs violently broke into shops where they stole virtually everything they could lay their hands upon
They even had the audacity to steal some drugs and accessories from pharmacies.
With huge consignments of drugs stolen in the wake the public is exposed to drug abuse as some of these stolen drugs will find their way to the unsuspecting public. What does a looter knows about a doctor’s stethoscope, drugs, injections or thermometer that gets looted?
The aftermaths of this barbaric act are too ghastly to contemplate.
It is the people in the locality who will suffer. The people have no pharmacies and clinics to get treatment and medical help.
The looters are gone but it is the people who have nowhere to buy soap or matches. The looters have left leaving a trail of miseries.
Did the looters achieve their intended goal of liberating the people as they claimed? Who does looting drugs, food or killing innocent lives liberate the people? How do pseudo demonstrators become the liberators of the people?
As things appear the only thing left behind by looters is a legacy of poverty, joblessness, hunger and a trail of destruction upon innocent people.
In future organizers of such demonstrators must effectively weed their midst of criminals hijacking noble actions to perpetuate their criminal dispositions.
Masukume Nelson, Inyathi Centre Bubi
