Approximately, five thousand Tutsi refugees were massacred by Machetes, first in church and then in Sainte-Marthe Maternity Hospital, in Nyamata, Rwanda between 14 and 15 April, 2004. One cannot afford not to shed a tear or two as one goes through Jean Herzfeld’s book, The Machete Season, the killers in Rwanda speak. That was Rwanda going through its darkest period in history then but like a phoniex, Rwanda has risen and now occupies a high place in the global economy, market and good governance.
What started as ethnic clashes between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda ended up being a regional conflict involving Rwanda, Burundi and the then Zaire, now The Democrativ Republic of Congo (DRC). When the world interneved, it was too late, the damage had already been done. The initially machete armed militias had been transformed into fully fledged armies.
Zimbabwe is currently under siege. There are dangerous criminals operating under the banner of artisinal miners. These are not miners – these are armed and dangerous, machete armed criminals. It is an open secret that Zimbabwe is economically on the brink of collapse and the unemployment rate is said to be as high as 90%. With a youthful population whose only hope is either to skip the country or join the others in the informal sector, the youths end up trying any enterprise, legal or illegal, which guarantees them survival.
At the beginning of 2018, the government laid off quite a number of graduates of the National Youth Service from the civil service payroll. At the same time indigenisation laws were amended to suit the dictates of the new political regime. With their source of income cut off, the majority of the laid off youth officers turned to artisinal gold panning for survival. Universities and Colleges have been producing graduates who end up in the streets, as more companies close dowm , then more unemployed people join the masses of the those already in the streets. All these people end up following the glitter of gold and a state of anarchy is bound to happen. Incidents of clashes increased and some of us took note of the deteriorating situation as early as last year (https://zimcriminology.wordpress.com/2019/02/14/makorokoza-machetes-and-knobkerries/)
The knee-jerk reaction as a formal reaction to crime must not be allowed to continue. These thugs operating as artisinal miners have been known to the criminal justice system. These criminals have been known by many euphemisms; Makorokoza, MaShurugwi, etc. Only when embarassinlgy the media exposed an unholy alliance between the police , where high ranking senior females officers where alleged to have been in love relationships with the illegal gold panners, police officers having also joined the illegal gold rush, the killing of a police officer and the storming of a police base by the gangsters, the intevention of the country’s Chief Justice to denounce the machete menace that the police launched “Operation chikorokoza ngachipere.”
All what is playing out is like a scene from Frank Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, the machete-gangsters seem to be a man-made crime problem. Now that arrests have been made, it is yet to be seen, if due process of the law will be followed and if those convicted of such crimes will go through the criminal justice system. If left unchecked,these gangsters will morph into fire-arm bearing militias and transform from being gold-mine based criminals to a national security threat level criminals. Now that the wheels of the criminal justice are turning, then the madness and anarchy caused by these machete gangsters must be definately dealt with conclusively.
The Truth! 