Youths of Sebina Village in the Central District 100 kilometers from Francistown are targeting Zimbabwean citizens and randomly beating them in the village.
One victim says that she was beaten by a group of young men whilst she was walking around the village looking for a job.
“These boys just came up to me and said ‘You are a Zimbabwean’ then they started beating me when I had not done a thing to them,” she said in a telephone interview.
She said that she knew of several other Zimbabweans who were beaten in the village for no reason at all.
At times, she said, the young men would ask if one has valid immigration papers and would then check them and when they see such papers are valid, they then throw them at the person before starting the assault.
The woman said that they reported these incidents to the kgotla but the assaults continue as the chief seems to be on the vigilantes’ side.
These incidents were also confirmed by another Sebina resident who said that she has seen the youths beating up Zimbabweans in the village on several occasions adding that she is surprised by the fact that the chief of the village is not taking any action against these youths.
”If such a thing happens, one would have expected that the Chief would act against the culprits, but unfortunately that has not happened and the concerned youths continue to roam in the streets of the village beating up innocent people,” she said.
Another witness to the incidents, a lady who works at the kgotla, said that she knows about such cases happening in the village and that she has seen some Zimbabweans coming to report them in the village but no action was taken against the youth.
The lady also said that she knows that the vigilantes were formed by the Chief to help control the cases of unlawfulness in the village. The village Chief was not available to comment as he was reported to be attending a meeting outside the village.
In the past, Member of Parliament for Tati East, Sampson Guma Moyo, has complained after he saw a Zimbabwean citizen being assaulted in Tshesebe in the north eastern part of the country in broad daylight.
Botswana currently hosts large numbers of Zimbabweans who have left their home country running away from violence, joblessness and galloping inflation in their country. Currently, Zimbabwe’s inflation is which is reported to be at 100,588 percent.
Some of these Zimbabweans are, however, here legally whilst others are not and they are blamed for the increasing crime rate in the country.
