Z.R.P = Zimbabwe’s Rotten Police
The front cover of the print edition of the Mail and Guardian (SA) carried this image last week with the accompanying headline - ‘Zimbabwe police in new wave of ‘looting”. This week’s edition has more pictures of the looting and Grieg Henning, the farmer whose equipment was illegally taken, describes his experience in the comment section. Please note that Grieg Henning has won every case he has taken to court and that the High Court ruled that the police should return every item they seized from his farm on that day. However, in his words, “the realities on the ground make me dance to an awful tune”.
ZRP Assistant Commissioner Loveness Ndanga, head of the “procurement committee”, introduces herself. She informs me she and her crew have come to collect all the equipment they had inventoried (illegally, by the way!) in May. Everyone has moved closer and I find myself surrounded by this hostile throng. I have to be calm, cautious. I politely ask whether she has the necessary documentation to remove the equipment and is she going to pay me for it first? “No documents”, she replies. She is following her “chain of command”, and the “nitty-gritties could be sorted out” at the police station “later”.
Ndanga asks whether I have any objections. I would prefer to see proper procedure and first get the documentation, I tell her. She insists she will instead be collecting the equipment immediately. Was I about to stop them loading, she asked threateningly.
I thought that the knowledge and sight of this self-same committee looting my neighbours during the previous two weeks would have conditioned me as to what to expect. Instead, I am sick to my stomach. That menacing, monster crane, as high as a howitzer, growls into action, their lorries ease into position. The disgraceful spectacle of government agents, bureaucrats and members of the armed forces plundering my equipment is almost too disgusting for me to behold. My mechanic, clerk, security guard, garden staff, have lined themselves along the fence, folding their arms tightly against their bodies. They are visibly stunned, embarrassed, helpless. One is silently weeping.
As I watch, I think to myself, what cynical solution is this to solving the country’s food shortages? In which nation on Earth is it part of the culture to behave in this manner? And then get away with it with no one to disapprove it? Am I observing state-sponsored theft? How deeply ingrained is it? If the civil service has sunk so low, how will Zimbabwe ever extricate herself from the morass?
I recommend you read the full account on the Mail and Guardian website: the article is titled ‘Daylight robbery in hippo valley’.
Grieg Henning’s words and images convey the appalling injustice that he and others like him are experiencing at the hands of our police. But there are many other smaller stories that the outside world is probably not aware of. If everyday experiences are anything to go by then corruption in the police is rife, and ‘law’ and ‘order’ and ‘justice’ have been reduced to empty meaningless words. The top priority for the police seems to be how to avoid being caught (although, as Grieg Henning ’s experience demonstrates, being caught in the act is irrelevant if the government condones lawlessness).
One friend described how, while stopped at a police roadblock, a policeman reached through the window of the car and stole his mobile phone off the dashboard when he was turned away for a split second. He noticed its absence almost immediately and he confronted the man and asked him directly if he had taken his mobile phone. Of course the guy denied it. My friend asked me, “What could I do? Who should I report him to? The police…?”
Another person told me that if I was ever robbed I shouldn’t worry - I should just call the police and offer them a massive ‘reward’ if they caught the thieves and recovered the property. “Just make sure that the amount you offer them is likely to be more than they would get when the crooks gave them a cut of the sales”, he said. He had done this himself, and had miraculously recovered nearly every single item stolen. “You have the advantage”, he told me, “because when you hand out the dosh the police only share it between themselves. But if they take a cut from the thieves they have to wait for the stuff to be sold and they have to share it out between a lot more people. There’s a very strong chance that your offer will always be more profitable for the cops because they don’t need to share with the thieves, they’ll just threaten them with jail instead!”.
One of the most disgusting stories I heard came via a colleague who knew an elderly couple who had been robbed twice over the Christmas period. In the first burglary a few items were taken before something disturbed the thieves and they ran away. But they came back a few nights later and literally cleaned the house out while the couple hid in their bedroom, completely alone and terrified. The police were called the next day. The elderly man was in the process of describing what had happened to a policeman when he noticed a policewomen standing near a window in the background absentmindedly picking up objects that the thieves, in their haste, had left on the windowsill. He was concerned that by handling the items she might be destroying fingerprint evidence. He noticed that one of the objects she handled was a tin can containing food. When the police left the house, the can of food was no longer on the windowsill. The policewomen, while in an elderly couple’s home investigating a burglary that had stripped them of everything they owned, had quietly pocketed something for herself too!
Grieg Henning’s words reflect the outrage that all of us feel:
Our guardians the police have failed us. They have abandoned their moral and lawful duty. When we see them on the beat, we do not see a friendly “Bobby” upholding our safety. We see a betrayal of what is right. They are systematically taking away our livelihood, dividing and distributing what already exists to those who cannot use it. In the end, there are only losers.
The Z.R.P - Zimbabwe’s Rotten Police - need to be aware though that we, the public, are watching, and noting and remembering. The gravy train is going to derail at some point, and justice has a way of eventually catching up.
