On Monday afternoon, there are always traffic police officers. Many of them. And of course there are passers-by, many of them on their way home from their places of work. What we were not prepared for, was the dangerous criminal behavior that we witnessed as we waited in the long slow queue.
Just past Mukwano industry entrance gate, there is a group of organized fuel thieves. They carry a folded blue paper bag of the size of a 100 kilogramme sack. You will not realize that that the gang standing a little distance from the traffic policemen and policewomen until a fuel tanker is in sight.
It is then that these thieves pull out their ‘blue containers’, move to the tankers, remove the cover and begin siphoning fuel into their paper containers.
Now, as soon as we were alerted by one of our colleagues in the vehicle, we wondered whether the the tank driver was aware and he told us they were but they were unable to stop them. As we wondered why they could not get one of their team members to get out of the vehicle and chase away the thieves since the vehicles are moving at a snail speed, we realized the traffic officers were watching all this risky crime going on and they were not doing anything to stop them.
As responsible citizens, we decided to call one traffic policeman and we asked him why a crime was going on their watch and they were simply looking on. The elderly officer, noticing how angry we were, decided to keep quiet with an expression of regret. At this time vehicles started moving and we had to move on. When we looked back we saw him moving to his group as the tanker in front of us also moved on towards the railway crossing nearing the Jinja road traffic lights.
The purpose of this SOS piece is to not only appreciate the IGP decision to remove his errant officers from our roads, we want him to go further and arrest officers who tarnish the name of the police. The other reason for this editorial is to open a people’s office where we can directly report officers who shouldn’t be wearing the white uniform. We see them every day, we know their names from their tags, but we want an officer we can hold responsible whenever we report and offence and no action is taken.
There are signs you really want to clean the force. We want to be your partners if you want us to.
