Armed robberies occur daily in this country and yet they are not publicised by the media because of their insignificance. Anyone in this country will lock their doors at night and barricade every possible entrance in their house because they fear someone may come through at night.
For those using public transport especially in the early hours of the morning or late at night, their fears are based around the security of their cell phones and the moneys in their possession. And indeed these small robberies occur daily and that is what members of the public are mostly worried about.
After several spate of robberies that have taken place recently, we need to reflect on the history of this particular crime in Botswana. King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes has hastened to say there is absolutely nothing new under the sun.
Our history is littered with such incidents and we need to reflect back at how these occurred and what their causes were and further, how they were dealt with. Life has changed dramatically from what used to happen in the early 1980s to the current era.
One of the famous robberies in those days was conducted by a young man bearing the name of Marx Leepo, a private soldier at BDF who was daring in every way. Leepo was born in South Africa of a Motswana woman and had one sibling, a sister who worked for Air Botswana back in the day.
Private Leepo was a very reserved person and hardly engaged in conversations with other soldiers. It seems most of the time he was reflecting on the circumstances of life beholding his dear mother. Their mother was economically struggling and this dear son wanted to end this cycle of poverty.
As a Barclays Bank combi pulled off from Bank of Botswana with new notes amounting to about P90 000, Leepo was waylaying at the next stop before joining Khama Crescent. He pulled the gun and ordered the driver out of the driving seat and off he went to Mogoditshane.
This incident in 1981 resulted in the biggest manhunt of the year. In those days, the police and the military were seen all over Gaborone and the surrounding villages and traffic flow was interrupted by several roadblocks around. And that was all to recover P90 000.
Security was very low in the banks as they were lacking very basic things like close circuit cameras in banking halls. Imagine that a driver was sent to collect cash from the central bank without a security escort.
The money was ultimately recovered and Leepo went on to serve his 15 year sentence after conviction in a magistrate court. But it took so much effort and drama to get to that. However, the security agents of the time were committed to fighting that type of crime with all the resources they could lay their hands on.
Another one of the greatest manhunts was that of Sipho Sithole, also a South African citizen who saw a great opportunity in Botswana’s financial institutions. Sithole was almost a magician the way he committed crime. The young man was so slithery but still he could not escape the long arm of the law.
In December 1983 I was given an opportunity to join an evangelism team that was going to Maximum Prison at Gaborone Village and there we found Sipho Sithole incarcerated. After the service I shook hands with him and wondered how he managed to terrorise the country. He had a small body frame and he was my height and yet I was a seventeen year old who had just completed his JC examinations.
Sithole was later released from prison and went on to engage in crime again. He ultimately lost his leg after he was shot at a Francistown roadblock where he was wrestling with a soldier for his gun.
There are greater lessons to be learnt from the incidents I have mentioned and many others that followed. There was very little technology and the police depended so much on human intelligence to crack the cases.
The police are now equipped with much more sophisticated equipment and that includes helicopters armed with state of the art surveillance cameras. The streets of Gaborone are littered with security cameras and this should make life much easier to deal with such crimes. This significant investment by government must have returns.
In the mid-1990s it was realised most robberies were conducted by former soldiers. An active decision was taken by government to deal decisively with this problem. One of the measures taken was to re-enlist soldiers that had left BDF and were unemployed. A lot of them came back under what was known as the BDF 2 program.
Even now it is increasingly dangerous to have so many trained soldiers who have separated with the military roam around and idle. That is a recipe for disaster. Most soldiers that have either resigned or retired are living on the fringes of poverty. In this way they are vulnerable at being recruited into illegal acts such as robbery.
The solution here is to empower them through their retirement associations and employ them to provide armed escorts for cash in transit. They are trained in arms handling and have the discipline required to fill up that job.
They must be given the assignment with clear orders to shoot robbers on sight. The reason why there is a resurgence of armed robberies in the country is because the security agents in this country have scaled down their thrust against these acts of criminality. The state through its apparatus should be ruthless on criminals of all sorts.
The scaling down of the shooting of robbers came at a time when there was public outcry. But now it is us the public who go all out to blame the security agents and particularly the police for being ineffective. If there is no evident deterrence, crime will effectively grow especially in a country faced with great unemployment.
