Fight violent armed robberies

A spate of violent armed robberies in Maseru in the last three months has set the nation on edge. The sense of fear is palpable on the streets of Maseru.

The serenity which we had always enjoyed in Lesotho is now gone. In place of peace, there is now fear. We are living in fear and sleeping in fear.

With the police on the back-foot, Basotho are beginning to conclude that they are now virtually on their own.

These are indeed desperate times.

The government will need to explore much more robust policing methods and step up security across the capital if it is to restore the calm and tranquility that we have always known among our people.

What the recent armed robberies have also done is to expose the embarrassingly shambolic state of policing in Lesotho.

What the robberies have demonstrated is that the Lesotho Mounted Police Service (LMPS), which has been starved of financial and material resources for years, is clearly in no position to fight crime and win.

This is an institution that has a single vehicle for the whole of Maseru.

With a population of close to 400 000 people in Maseru, the dire lack of vehicles seems to have emboldened criminals who seem to know full well that the police’s reaction time will always be awful.

The government is surely aware of this dire lack of resources for the police. Sadly, nothing appears to have been done, for years, to address this pressing need.

Instead of ploughing resources in the LMPS so that we empower our police to fight crime, the government has often chosen to allocate such resources elsewhere.

Why on earth, for instance, does a government minister need three vehicles?

Such shocking profligacy is certainly unwarranted in a country like Lesotho where resources are often scarce.

The lack of financial and material resources has only compounded what is already an extremely dire situation in the LMPS.

This is a police service with a cocktail of its own problems that range from a demoralised staff that often fights for better pay to a police that appears still stuck in its old way of doing things when it comes to training and fighting crime.

A lot will therefore need to be done if the government is to jerk the LMPS and ensure it is fit for purpose. That task is urgent given the events of the last few months. The police must be prepared to fight fire with fire.

They must take the battle to the criminals. Gone are the days when Basotho would let their guard down thinking this is a peaceful society. We are living in extremely violent times when criminals have become more daring.

What this also shows is that we are in the throes of a major economic depression. Violent crime is likely to continue rising.

With no prospect of earning a living through legitimate means, desperate youths are likely to resort to deadly violence with absolutely no regard for the consequences.

The new government to be elected into power in October must convene an urgent national jobs summit to look at how to arrest these social ills. If we fail to come up with creative ways to generate new jobs, we are doomed. The anger amongst our young people will manifest itself in violent bursts of crime such as we have seen in the last three months.

The consequences are just too ghastly to contemplate.