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Mapuri has grossly embarrassed CCM,government and Mkapa
2005-09-18 07:47:18
By Wilson Kaigarula
As young boys, my playmates and I were scared stiff of the police. Older boys and adults invoked the men and women in khakhi uniforms as enforcers of discipline whose duty it was to arrest and punish naughty children as well as tame adult wrong-doers.
Whenever I saw a policeman at a distance, I would shiver and begin crying, because I was dead sure that he was heading to our home or some spot where I was playing with other kids, to punish me for something wrong I had done up to one week previously.
The fear of the police gradually became so intense that we became nervous upon seeing them, even though we had not done anything that would ”qualify” us for punishment.
Strangely, even adults, who would have presumably been more enlightened and thus been expected to know who the police were mandated to target for arrest, questioning, and so forth, were, by and large, also unduly scared of the law enforcers.
It was common to see a law-abiding citizen develop a spur-of-the-moment geographical change of plan, by making a U-turn and head back to where he had been coming from, or cross the road where he hadn’t planned to, in order to avoid criss-crossing with a policeman.
This is because of the ever-prevalent fear that a policeman would somehow take the citizen to task, one way or another.
The net effect of all this was that fear of police officers virtually translated into hatred, so much so that considerable tension that threatened to tear relationships apart, gripped a family into which a young policeman sought to marry .
Resistance was rife, because parents felt that a policeman was not the right species as a husband to their daughter and as their son-in-law. The few family members who argued that law enforcement was as normal a career as, say, teaching, were perceived to be ill-wishers, thereby triggering misunderstandings.
As I grew older and wisened up, I realised that policemen and policewomen were, after all, normal human beings with a livelihood to lead, with feelings manifested by loving and being loved, marrying, becoming angry when provoked, forgiving when they deem this to be the best option, mourning dead relatives, cheering up when they are happy, becoming gloomy when things aren’t going too well, recreating, and so forth.
The only distinguishing element is that as law enforcers, they have to deal with lawless elements like rioters and robbers, who compel them to use force to tame or arrest them; or to act in self-defence.
It dawned on me, much later, that as more and more academically educated people joined the police force, it became more and more modernized and sophisticated.
Basic and upgrading courses at police colleges have fashioned many of the trainees and veterans on brush-up stints into admirable practitioners who realise that police duties entail more of the use of brains than punches, judo acrobatics and karate kicks and chops.
That the physical options are resorted to only when it is absolutey necessary.
That university graduates should enthusiastically join the police force as a career base speaks volumes of the attitudinal revolutionary that has taken place in regard to law enforcement.
It dawned on me, furthermore, that the citizenry has over the years become conscious of their rights, including the right to seek legal redress when wronged, by way of, for instance, reporting assaults, robberies and being conned, to the police.
They don’t even spare unethical police officers, when they manipulate their position as tools for intimidating innocent civilians, or facilitating intimidation of people with whom particular individuals or groups of people have scores to settle.
The motto of the police force is short, powerful and, one may even justifiably, say, beautiful:Usalama wa Raia (the safety of civilians).
By this fact alone, the police should be endeared to the people, whose safety and security they are obliged and mandated to safeguard and guarantee.
Exceptions are, of course, law breakers who have no cause to like or love operatives who block offences and crimes they plan to commit, arrest and book them after their commission and, when circumstances demand, hurt or kill them.
Not infrequently, top police brass decry unethical conduct perpetrated by some unscrupulous elements within the force and sensitize civilians about their rights.
And some police officers, whatever their ranks, are also dismayed by unethical conduct by some of their colleagues, because of the general perception that one rotten egg spoils the rest in a basket.
The reader may recall some incidents of unethical conduct, one of the sensational ones being theft, from a major police station in Dar es Salaam, a couple of months ago, of a salary package for officers stationed there. The head of the station was one of the suspects!
The police is one of the wings of what is collectively known as the Disciplined Forces; others being the army and prisons department. The soldiers and men (to use military lingo) who constite the Tanzania People’s Defence Forces are the nation’s defenders.
Which is why it is morally revolting when some soldiers beat up civilians and destroy their property in the wake of quarrels or misunderstandings, some of which are sparked by such petty reasons as a soldier and a civilian quarrelling over a woman in a bar!
As an entity subscribing to the rule of law the anti-thesis of jungle law soldiers who are covered by the law are enjoined like everyone else, to seek legal redress whenever they feel wronged. Otherwise the scenario of a group of people’s defenders pouncing on defenceless civilians, is alarmingly paradoxical!
For if ’’defendees’’ are assaulted and cast into a state of panic by their defenders, to whom can they turn for defence against defenders who have abdicated their defence role?
Prison officers and warders are custodians of convicts whom they are tasked to rehabilitate in the course of their prison terms, so as to re-integrate conveniently and beneficially into society thereafter.
It boggles the mind, therefore, that warders, conspiratorially with some convicts they have co-opted, should evict tenants from a housing estate in which the department has a stake, but which is at the centre of a dispute over which a court of law has yet to pronounce a definitive verdict.
This is what happened at Ukonga in Dar es Salaam. But the most shocking thing, as other commentators have pointed out, is that Minister Ramadhani Omar Mapuri, the person in charge of prisons (in addition to the police) defended the barbaric act.
Thank God a probe team has been formed to get to the heart of the matter. In the interim, though, it is almost unbelievable that a minister in charge of a ministry (home affairs) that is supposed to oversee law enforcement, should condone lawlessness by brutal operatives of a department that is charged with penalising and rehabilitating law breakers, some of whom were used in the law-breaking mission at Ukonga!
Sadly, Mapuri’s sickening utterances came close on the heels of remarks by President Benjamin Mkapa in the US, that the loss of lives in Pemba during election-related violence in the year 2000, was the one thing that upset him most during his presidency.
What a pity, then, that upon his appointment, Minister Mapuri swore, before the President, to uphold the Constitution, one of whose highlights is the rule of law, to which he has so nakedly demonstrated scant regard for !
But besides being Home Affairs Minister, Mapuri is also Publicity and Ideology ’’icon’’ of the ruling CCM, which is determined to retain power vide elections slated for only ten weeks from now.
Consolidation and enhancement of good governance is one of the campaign pillars of CCM; which puts Mapuri (plus the party and its government at large) in a tricky situation, because condoning violation of the law is nimical to the tenets of good governance.
The minister has therefore done a disservice to CCM and the government. Resignation can thus be hugely beneficial to him, the party and the government, and more-so President Mkapa, who, certainly, wishes to retire as a happy man, his conscience being spared of the pricks of the Ukonga scandal.
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