A certain Dr. Bacheke, who has been terrorising patients at Princess Marina Hospital, literally saw red when his victims fell upon him and beat him blue and black.
To be clear, there is no medical practitioner registered with the Botswana Health Professionals Council as Dr. Bacheke; rather, the name is a generic nom de guerre for thieves who ply their trade inside Marina wards.
A young woman recalls that on being admitted to the hospital late last year, she was advised by fellow patients to be on alert and keep her property safe from thieves who are in the habit of visiting the wards in the dead of night and claiming to be doctors. One woman who had nearly fallen victim to the thieves recounted to her, an encounter in which one of the thieves introduced himself as “Dr. Bacheke” as he entered her ward.
“O ba bone mma bo-Dr. Bacheke [Beware of Dr. Bacheke],” she cautioned.
The name is derived from coded street patois (“check them out”) that pickpockets use to direct their accomplices to marks.
It has emerged that very recently, two thieves went into the maternity ward, pretending to be doctors and went through a stack of patients’ cards as they surveyed the ward. The sight of male doctors in female wards is nothing eyebrow-raising. However, eyebrows did literally go up when one of the bogus doctors lustfully exclaimed, “wooow!” at the sight of a naked female patient.
“That’s when panic set in because real doctors don’t ever say that,” says an eyewitness.
A cleaner who happened to have been in the vicinity confronted the men.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Someone closed the door, security guards soon appeared and a tag team made up of the latter and patients is said to have taken on the thieves. The police were later called to the scene and the intruders carted off.
As with virtually all public hospitals, Marina has to maintain an open environment for patients and visitors but this literally creates an opening for Dr. Bacheke and fellow practitioners to go inside wards and perform surgical operations on handbags. On days when they mix business with pleasure, they would be found out and subjected to the full mob justice treatment. However, when they keep their cool amid all distractions, they would most likely succeed.
Princess Marina was also the endpoint of a dramatic helicopter chase on December 14 last year when a speeding suspect’s car swerved off a public road and screeched to a halt in the main parking lot. At a time that the suspects were scrambling out of the car and trying to melt into the late-morning crowd, the chopper was hovering hawk-like overhead, its occupants tracking their every movement and maintaining secure-radio contact with plainclothes officers on the ground who had already deployed.
