OF GUN BUTTING AND STOLEN ROAD RAILS

A few days ago a few individuals decided to help themselves to the road rails on the recently done Mukono-Katosi-Nyenga road.

In the dead of the night these people parked their by the road side and helped themselves to 42 pieces of the guard rails. They would have got away with were it not for some vigilant residents who hid in the nearby bushes to witness the deed, in the process taking down the number plate and identifying the perpetrators of the crime.

Sometime during the process they got in touch with the nearby OC station to alert her to what was happening. But as it turned out she gave them the run around, didn’t turn up and failed to catch the culprits in the act.

It took the intervention from the OC’s superior the following day to get to the bottom of the crime rounding up the culprits and arresting the OC and another policeman as an accomplice.

You might have missed this story because we were all still reeling from the brutal arrest of Yusuf Kawooya last Friday.

"Kawooya was pounced upon by gun wielding men in broad daylight on a Kampala street. It is assumed that in his attempt to defend himself he may have put up a fight. Most of us wouldn’t know because the footage we saw started with Kawooya writhing on the ground as the gun toting (its on the tip of my tongue to say thugs) men half dragged him on the tarmac road, while gun butting his sides, which seemed like an attempt to inflict damage on his kidneys...

Within minutes of the afternoon incident the footage had torn up social media and given much fodder to the critics of the government.

On Saturday the security agents, as it turned out, were hauled before a disciplinary committee to answer for their sins before being carted off to jail. We await the conclusion of that case.

The two incidents are related in more ways than one.

In both incidents there was active involvement of security agents. These law enforcers were actively involved in breaking the very law they were sworn to uphold.

In both incidents it is hard to argue that these security agents had not done this before.

In Mukono it was suggested that the road-rail thieves were warned off by the same police who the crime was reported too. If that had not happened they may have stolen more road rails. So the police officers’ roll in the caper was to look the other way and ensure no interference from themselves as the resident law enforcement agents.

In the Kawooya arrest, except for the clumsiness with which they went about it --  the waiting vehicles, the arms and the numbers marshalled to arrest poor Kawooya all suggest they had done this before.

And in both instances they would have got away with had they not been “caught”.

In the road rail theft we would have dismissed it as old granny tales had the residents tried to insist that the police were in cohorts with the thieves. Or maybe not. But we would have thought the story had gone too far, to suggest the police knew about the incident and pointedly ignored calls to come and arrest the situation.

Had we not seen the footage in the second incident, we might have thought it was just a routine arrest of a suspect. Attempts to provide the detail of the arrest would have been dismissed as being melodramatic.

For starters we have to commend those who brought the incidents to light. It is obvious that without them both incidents would have been swept under the rag and far out of sight of the public conscience.

But more importantly it should be a signal to the security agencies that it cannot be business as usual.
Incidents in our immediate past with – the killing of senior police officers , the terror attack on Kyadondo in 2011 and other incidents offer enough proof that there people out there with designs to cause terror or at least public disturbance. So there is a need for security agencies in their various permutations...

We neither downplay nor dismiss these threats.

But is it too much to ask that our security agents stay out of criminality?

And secondly that in the pursuit of their business that they adhere to the laid out procedures and stick to the law? Onlookers would have been hard pressed to see how arresting the rotund Kawooya necessitated the show of armed force that we saw displayed in the minute long operation.