Reports last week that police had arrested 21 traffic cops for soliciting bribes ignited excitement among Zimbabweans, many of whom called newsrooms inquiring where and when the arrests had taken place.
Most believed a police operation had netted the 21 in one fell swoop, in Harare alone. They laughed when it dawned to them the arrests were a product of eight months’ effort covering all four corners of the country.
Without downplaying the efforts by Commissioner-General Augustine Chihuri’s charges, those that laughed are justified to do so.
To be frank, 21 bribe-taking cops can easily be found and arrested in a single day in Harare alone.
The scale of graft that has pervaded the Zimbabwe Republic Police’s traffic section is forbidding.
If such kind of sleaze is regarded strange in countries surrounding our borders, why should Zimbabwe accept such immoral criminality as part of life? But then, that the ball has started rolling, let us not take credit away from Chihuri’s men.
Everybody who was an adult a decade ago knows our police force used to be clean, honourable and respectable.
It is not entirely their fault that they were ravaged by a decade of a ruthless economic, political and social whirlwind that left them hopelessly rotten.
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But again they are not incurable. What the force needs is a cleansing that starts from the head (of the fish, so to speak).
It is important to understand that the moral decadence that shows itself among our law enforcers in the form of shameless bribe-taking has not affected the uniformed forces alone. Our country and its people were damaged by the horrible experiences of the past decade.
Cheating is now commonplace . . . cheating by high school and college students, piracy of music and movies, workplace theft, massive healthcare scams and match-fixing that Zimbabwean sport never used to know.
Add up all the various forms of ethical and legal misconduct and you have a moral crisis of serious dimensions.
The land reform programme which took Zimbabwe by storm in 2000 produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in the country’s modern history.
The blatant fraud, the audacity of the schemes, and the scale of the waste, it is just breathtaking.
Selfish, blatant immorality has contributed even to the tremendous increase in the rate of child abuse and domestic violence.
The Zimbabwean society lost, during that forgettable decade, its cultural moorings.
Not only the police, but society at large has lost a sense of right and wrong, has gone morally sick and in need of cure.
Evidence of this sickness abounds at our courts where cases of child rape, murder and sickening domestic violence litter court registers. Little more than a generation ago, such actions would have caused moral outrage.
Moral decadence may also be blamed on the emergence and blind acceptance in society of such vocabulary as “values”, coming to replace “virtues”.
The definition of virtue used to be clear-cut. Either a person was honest, loyal, chaste, and honourable or they were not.
Yet, values, according to one of the many definitions flying around, could mean beliefs, opinions, attitudes, feelings, habits, preferences, prejudices and even idiosyncrasies, whatever any individual, group or society happens to value, at any time, for any reason.
It appears that today, people feel justified in choosing their own values, just as they would choose groceries in a supermarket. But when this is the case, what happens to true virtue and morality?
Zimbabwe’s economic decay of the past decade sobered many by plunging them into abject poverty.
The horrid circumstances of that nightmarish period eroded moral restraints and survivors of those economic ravages lost their moral compass.
The result is what we now see in the police force, in government offices, at local authorities which now seek to have city dwellers accept non-availability of water as a way of life and the general moral decadence now accepted by Zimbabweans as an incurable corruption bug.
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