The Sunday News
Mhlupheki Dube
WHEN I was travelling recently along the Harare-Plumtree highway I could not help but notice that there are vast stretches of areas that had been fenced along the road whose fence is now missing.
I am talking of the area around Ntabazinduna near Bulawayo and the area after Mbokodo going towards Figtree. The barbed wire strands had been put during the upgrading of the highway. This was primarily to stop livestock from straying onto the highway and cause accidents. I want to furiously protest this uncouth behaviour of either vandalising common property or completely stealing it and converting it to personal use. This disturbing behaviour among our people is not only limited to livestock infrastructure but to a wide range of infrastructure that is meant to benefit members of the community.
What is most disturbing being that these criminal activities always go uninvestigated and hence no one is punished. One can argue that members of the public now know that you can vandalise Government property and nothing will befall you. This has to stop.
People must be arrested and convicted so as to send the right message to offenders. While this happens to almost all communal infrastructure, my interest naturally is in protecting livestock infrastructure as stealing or vandalising such infrastructure always makes people’s lives unbearable.
I am aware for example of cases of solar panels being stolen in areas where solar panels have been put on communal boreholes to make it easy for community to access water for domestic use as well as use for livestock. Lupane District has suffered thefts of such solar panels and this has even extended to theft of solar panels powering rural clinics. Clinic operations become crippled because of criminal elements within the community. What is disheartening is not the theft only but that these cases usually die a natural death with no arrests of offenders.
This should not be allowed, I would rather have the whole village arrested and fined and even made to pay to replace the stolen panels than to just let it go unpunished. This may sound extreme but it is my long-held opinion that rural people are the most vigilant and observant people and hence there is no way there can be theft of big items such as solar panels or metres of barbed wire along the highway and they fail to know who did it.
If they can tell you from a shoe print who the owner of the shoe is, a cow’s spoor, whose cows are they, surely they are vigilant enough to provide critical leads into arrests for vandalism and theft of public infrastructure. How can a person unroll several metres of four strands of barbed wire along a public highway with villages running parallel along the same highway, and everyone claim to know nothing?
I am convinced that if the law enforcement arms of Government descend on these communities and apply minimum pressure, they will be on the trail of these thieves in no time. It is the inaction of the law enforcement which allows this cancerous behavior to proliferate with obvious devastating effects.
Imagine the amount of money that was invested in procuring and installing the highway fence and in less than five years only wooden poles are left standing.
A whole non-governmental organisation goes out of its way to source funds to buy solar panels for community water sources including clinics and sometimes schools and these get stolen to the disadvantage of the whole community.
I have seen hordes of livestock standing around a borehole during a scorching heat of the sun waiting for any passerby to pump water into the troughs for them to drink. In most cases no one bothers to pump water for these thirsty animals unless if it’s the owner because the borehole itself is usually heavy and the number of animals waiting, overwhelming.
This is a very common sight in some areas of Bulilima, Nkayi, Hwange and Lupane districts and I guess many others in the drier areas of the country. So the whole point of installing solar power on these units is to make sure animals and people have easy access to water.
The system pumps water into the drinking troughs on its own and animals just drink anytime time. Then someone comes and steals the panels to either go and sell or to charge his phone and play music! The community needs to be encouraged to provided adequate protection of such investment and there is no better encouragement that ensuring that thieves are caught and punished.
Uyabonga umntakaMaKhumalo.
Feedback [email protected]
cell 0772851275
