It’s time we take strong measures against crime

By Stephen Mpofu
BUILDINGS suddenly appear ahead and loom larger as they draw closer.
The driver, a cross-border transporter or umalayitsha pulls off the road and stops the vehicle along the kerb, all the while stealing glances of his interlocutor in the passenger seat and admonishing himself and the other man for allowing their minds to run away with small matters instead of concentrating on an urgent issue at hand.
Then, both men get out of the vehicle and examine the luggage under a canopy in the back of the truck.
The driver flips the lids of a long empty cardboard box while the other man carefully watches the steady flow of traffic in both directions.
A gap in the traffic and the other man rushes over to the passenger seat, tenderly brings out a life-size “doll”, and gingerly lays it on a large towel in the box.
He flourishes a lollipop from the pocket of his jacket and shoves it into the mouth of the “doll”. Then he wags a finger and says, “Shhh! No noise . . . the police will arrest you”.
The two jump back into their seats and proceed to the first port of call where they breeze through immigration and customs, flashing smiles that infected officers watching vehicles moving to and from across Beitbridge.
Over the bridge and on the Zimbabwean side the two men park their vehicle and rush over to complete immigration and customs formalities their pounding hearts in their mouths.
Once out of danger and away from the border post, umalayitsha and his passenger stop the vehicle, both men get out and go over to the cardboard box with huge sighs of relief.
A genuine smile on his face, the driver flips open the cardboard box and the man carefully raises the object from the box with profuse sweat on its face and arms and its mouth drooling the sweet completely done with.
To you (yes, you) reader, this account may sound stranger than fiction and totally implausible.
But take away the element of drama deliberately meant to capture attention and you see reality standing on its feet.
“My father put me in a cardboard box with holes in it and brought me here from South Africa”, a small boy tells playmates at a village somewhere in Mberengwa district.
“I crossed the border from South Africa to Zimbabwe lying in a cardboard box and breathing through holes in the box”, another small boy recounts his experience to peers as they play hide-and-seek on a certain property in Bulawayo.
The unrelated events took place in the different settings several years apart.
The story they tell is that motorists have been smuggling children from South Africa to Zimbabwe over the Beitbridge Border Post stashed in perforated cardboard boxes among other methods employed by human traffickers.
In the two narrated accounts, the South African mothers of the boys died and their husbands decided to bring the children back home to Zimbabwe.
Just recently a woman on a visit to Bulawayo from a village in Kezi district, Matabeleland South Province laughingly told this writer that her young daughter working in South Africa gave birth five months ago and sent the baby, just over 150 days old, to Bulawayo “by car” for relatives to nurture.
The phrase “by car” would appear to suggest that the baby was taken across the border into Zimbabwe by a smuggler probably for a fee he could not turn down. Zimbabwean police sources in Beitbridge expressed shock when contacted for comment by this writer, this week.
They indicated that “teams” of law enforcement agents would have to meet to discuss ways to stop the racketeering.
Apparently, it is common knowledge among Zimbabweans that cross-border transporters including buses have long been ferrying young children without travel documents on them and unaccompanied by adults across the same border into South Africa and vice-versa.
And it is improbable that those involved in those criminal acts run the risk of arrest for no payment at all.
It is also known that truckers moving goods across international borders from southern Africa to the Congo to east Africa also do smuggle passengers’ children in secret places on their haulage trucks, according to a report attributed to a certain driver from Filabusi.
The Limpopo River border between Zimbabwe and South Africa has long been known to be porous, like the land boundary between Botswana and this country, with many jumping the Limpopo River border sometimes being violently robbed and women raped, or drowning while attempting to make their way to South Africa to look for work.
With checks on vehicles, Zimbabwe not appearing to be exhaustive enough, a possibility may not be ruled out that dangerous contraband such as guns and drugs may already have been entering Zimbabwe under the noses of the country’s gatekeepers.
Rashers of western movie style robberies that have been taking place across Zimbabwe of late would seem to confirm an increase in the number of illegal weapons being used and foreign imported expertise by Zimbabweans involved in the heists.
Large numbers of Zimbabweans work in South Africa with Johannesburg especially infamous for being the most violent city in the world after America’s Chicago, with many rape cases being reported there on a daily basis.
It is known that after the end of liberation wars in southern Africa, guns were smuggled across borders from Angola through Namibia to South Africa where gun-toting robbers are an almost daily menace.
Some of the people who have staged dramatic robberies in this country are suspected to have secretly brought guns that they used particularly in urban areas, from South Africa.
It is not easy for anyone to acquire guns in Zimbabwe without special clearance from the police.
This strict control of gun ownership is undoubtedly credited with little, if any, violent crime for a long time, until recently, in a land where a brutal war of liberation was fought with guns like the AK rifle in the hands of blacks as an international symbol of liberation and freedom from oppressive rule.
What obviously needs to be done now to curb the spates of robberies that have rocked businesses and homes in the country is for combined police and army personnel to carry out clean up operations in suburbs from which robbers maybe suspected to be carrying out their strikes.
a strategy carried out with considerable success in Zambia in the past and which might remove dangerous weapons from civilians in other countries in the region where violence is a major problem.
If Zimbabweans refrain from taking ruthless measures against violent crime, the country might be flooded with guns, and who knows, also become a transit point for illicit drugs, both occurrences of which are always accompanied with violence which disturb normal, social and economic activity in a country.
While the Bible says, “money answers everything”, it also warns strongly that the love for money, which amounts to worshipping it, is the source of all evil.
Therefore, those who seek not God’s wisdom about the use of money but instead idolise that commodity will do terrible things, such as human trafficking and armed robberies that turn some people into heartless beasts.
Zimbabweans will ignore God’s warning concerning money at their own peril – morally, spiritually or even physically.
Yet if they consistently tap into God’s word, his benevolence will richly reward them even materially while they are still on this earth.
The writer is a former editor of The Chronicle.