This is not being neighbourly

Botswana was a royal hunting preserve for Ndebele combative kings like Mzilikazi and Lobengula and their Batswana counterparts.
The area in question is vast land of sun-baked sand, scrub and bush shrubbery that stretches from Plumtree to Kazungula and is today still teeming with herds of wildlife.
A multifarious array of projects which have gobbled billions of dollars have been put in place by both countries to protect the natural resources from spirited poaching, wild animals included.
Zimbabweans, Tswanas, Zambians, Mozambicans, South Africans and Namibians, even without the hodgepodge of boundaries imposed in Berlin, Germany, in 1884, have always been neighbours.
History, geography and geomorphology and social space make it obligatory for us to be neighbours.
The full import of this villager’s instalment is that on March 10, an incident occurred that strained the relations between Zimbabwe and Botswana over the protection of the same piece of land.
The silly incident has certainly taken all and sundry aback.
Just before dusk, Botswana wildlife rangers picked up a spoor of poachers towards the Zimbabwean side and informed their counterparts in Zimbabwe via SMS in good neighbourly collaboration against poaching.
As the sun rose the following morning four Zimbabwean rangers – George Mathe, Wailos Mungombe, Kudakwashe Goredema and Willas Mukonde – responded to the neighbourly call and tracking for the poachers.
Unbeknown to them, they strayed a few metres into Botswana and all hell broke loose when members of the Botswana Defence Forces arrested them, despite pleas from their Tswana counterparts, who even confirmed sending the SMS.
What followed was ugly. The four were disarmed, taken to police custody in Kazungula and when they expected to be discharged, they were actually charged with something close to banditry.
Chained in leg irons, they hobbled from one office to another and then transferred to Kasane Police Station at the border under heavy military guard.
Humiliated and with battered and bruised souls.
They appeared in court in leg irons and were remanded in custody, after being told that they had committed a serious crime that could end up with them being incarcerated for life or at least for five years. But what crime had they committed?
Shocked, puzzled and lost on the diplomatic jigsaw that the case presented, Zimbabwe through the National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority and Forestry Company, engaged Botswana without success.
For almost a month, the boys languished in remand prison where their diet, according to their narrative, was two slices of bread in the morning, a small portion of lunch and two slices at 4pm, after which they would be closed indoors for long cold nights. They were together with hordes of other criminals.
When trial was finally set for April 5, a diplomatic row had become certain.
Zimbabwe, through its embassy in Gaborone, engaged top Zimbabwean lawyer based in Francistown Miriro Furusa while the Botswana government brought in the land’s highest prosecutor and former national intelligence deputy chief Mr Leonard Sichele.
Meanwhile, Zimbabwe, through its embassy had granted surety to ensure that the boys, would be granted bail, after noticing some amazing unneighbourly behaviour.
That is how serious the case was taken but as professionalism would have it Mr Furusa managed to convince Mr Sichele in a pre-trial conference that there was no case.
This villager who had been doing some family business in Victoria Falls got wind of the trial and sneaked into the court.
Worried and looking sad were parks director general Vitalis Chadenga and Forestry Company chief executive Darlington Duwa and their support staff, who milled outside the courtyard.
There was jubilation when Zimbabwean-born Kasane magistrate Mr Sijabulisiwe Siziba acquitted the four with the consent of Mr Sichele, ending a month-long diplomatic offensive.
But at the end, the question remains, is this being neighbourly? Is Zimbabwe at war with Botswana? Have our relations come to this? What is going to happen tour our anti-poaching collaboration?
Back in the village, in the land of milk, honey and dust, the story is told about a man whose cow strayed into a neighbour’s maize field and helped itself to some cobs.
Angry, the aggrieved neighbour refused to take any apology from the man and demanded that he slaughter his cow immediately. Which he grudgingly did. A few months later, the neighbour’s only son broke into the man’s house and was caught red-handed in the house. Angry, the man called the neighbour and he indeed found his son trapped inside. He apologised but the man insisted: “Can you please kill your son!” That is a moral truism from the village, yonder in Dande.
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