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.
