Yes, Someone Should Arrest the Police Indeed
- Category: The Comrade
- Date 20-12-2009
- 338 views
When a police officer commits an offence, his colleague is called to handle the matter. If you have a grievance against the police and want it resolved, the available option is to visit a police post and lodge your complaint against the same police and hope to get a fair healing and eventual justice. When you drive a ramshackle of a car to a police checkpoint, it is only logical that the police should punish you.
This is not always the case though; they may take bribe and consent to your risky adventure, irrespective of the evident danger to your life and others’. Yet such a police man should be arrested if you report the matter to the police; if you believe that his intention was to extort money from you and arrest himself thereafter.
The work of the police is to arrest offenders; you cannot be left to manage the affairs of your family, and will intervene if you quarrel and fight at your home. They will be at hand if you beat up a man who tries to mess up a drinking session! For all manner of real and made-up offences, the police are willing to arrest someone.
The strange case is where a police man must be taken to the police post for detention. It is very much like breaking God’s commandments and thereafter confessing to the same priest who taught you never to break them. Religion is the only foundation that is instituted for the benefit of wrongdoers.
Every criminal knows that when they have committed countless sins, they can run to the nearest temple and immediately get confirmed as righteous children of God. It is possibly such a mindset that informed the electoral decisions in Kenya and Zimbabwe where the apparent losers were urgently sworn-in as victors, regardless of the reasons for which voters had rejected them.
Commonsense reveals that a monkey can never vote for the burning of a forest which naturally is its habitat. Without a forest, it would surely have nowhere to hide from danger and obtain the basics of its survival. This is the mentality that shapes the behaviour of the police in countries like Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
Recently, The Comrade was amazed to learn that Tanzania’s national electoral commission chairman, Justice Lewis Makame, warned members of the uniformed forces to remain apolitical during the forthcoming general elections. (See: ‘NEC tells police to avoid political bias,’ The Guardian 15th December 2009). Justice Makame singled out TPDF, Police National Service and Prisons as institutions that should be chiefly impartial in the approaching electoral season.
The NEC chair was speaking in Dodoma at the opening of a roundtable forum for regional and unit commanders. His major concern was that any expression of partisanship by the forces would not merely scare the ordinary voters from the democratic process; it would also wipe out people’s sense of confidence to exercise freedom in casting their votes to express their will and chose their leaders. Mr. Makame reminded the forces of their professional and ethical mandate which, if not upheld, can deliver tragic outcomes.
Justice Makame should become chair of electoral commission in the entire East African region. In a country like Uganda, the police force has been turned into an organ of the ruling party, with a military man as their head. Apparently, they are not doing their work if they are not breaking up meetings of opposition parties and spraying teargas into the eyes, noses, and mouths of opposition politicians.
What Justice Lewis Makame calls professionalism and ethical conduct is in short supply here. Individuals who stick to their professional demeanour may not be deployed during election time for they might undermine the rigging machinery. In the 2006 elections, the police had to manufacture a case of rape against the leading opposition figure in order to ensure that he was kept in prison during the campaign period. Makame should have been there and he would possibly have been able to punish such obvious bias.
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: The Comrade, The Guardian on Sunday