Police national spokesperson Senior Assistant Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena is quoted elsewhere in this paper claiming the police are short staffed and therefore are not able to guard government ministers’ homes around the clock.
This is quite surprising — and disturbing. Government ministers are subjects of national security and any excuse for not providing them with adequate security should itself be viewed as a breach of national security.
The mere fact that there is a standing arrangement requiring that ministers of government need to be guarded makes it imperative that it be done.
The police have just told the nation how exposed and vulnerable our ministers are. A bomb exploded at the house of Finance minister Tendai Biti soon after midnight Saturday and, upon being asked what had happened on Sunday evening, the police said they had not received such a report and therefore were not aware anything like that had happened.
Senior Assistant Commissioner Bvudzijena told NewsDay the police finally got the report at 5:45 pm Sunday. He said police did not have enough manpower to provide the security required for cabinet ministers. We find this quite strange.
Zimbabweans are aware of many residences where long retired ministers are still guarded 247. People move around and see police in uniform and armed, guarding properties such as farms belonging to individuals that are not even government officials — farms belonging to members of the former ruling party’s politburo for example.
It is difficult then to understand a situation where a minister of government — a Finance minister and a top leader of the former opposition party — who is bound to have many people with motives to eliminate him, is not provided with State security.
How would our police have explained this if the minister had been home at the time of the attack and had been harmed?
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A shortage of manpower would not have been easily accepted by the ordinary Zimbabwean.
Such an eventuality could have caused political disturbances of unpredictable magnitude.
The country could have easily been plunged into chaos.
That is the reason why such key figures in society have to be protected always.
What happened at minister Biti’s official residents brings to mind events of two years ago when the same minister said he had received an envelope — at his home — containing a 9mm bullet and a death threat telling him to prepare his Will.
One of the minister’s employees was hospitalised after he was allegedly beaten and kicked by a soldier outside Biti’s front gate.
Biti then said he could be the target of assassination by forces determined to block political reforms. The minister then bemoaned the lax security systems around him and the Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai whom he said was also in danger of assassination.
“Yes, we are at risk (of assassination) and I think we are being irresponsible by having the lax security arrangements we have, certainly myself,” Biti told journalists . . . “But killing somebody is not easy and also the world has moved. The information highway has helped: Zimbabwe is not an island. There will be harsh consequences to any act of insanity.”
We hope the blast at the minister’s house and the bullet-bearing envelops are all not part of some “act of insanity”.
We also hope our police force, the internationally acclaimed force with the record that Commissioner General Augustine Chihuri and President Robert Mugabe himself always boast about, will tell us more serious excuses than a shortage of manpower when it comes to the security of our ministers.
