It is a shame when a law enforcement institute identifies a problem and instead of devising ways of solving it, it just issues warnings to the people concerned.
I was stunned when I heard the police on radio warning parents to watch against sham organizations who running around making announcements that they were offering bursaries to students.
What shocked me here was not the sham bursary offerings but the fact that the warning came as a result of police receiving thousands of complaints from parents who had been defrauded of their hard earned money through similar scam since January last year.
It is unbelievable that it is a year now and the police is just waking up to warn parents of these scam bursary offerings. I wonder for the last one year, what the police has been doing? Isn’t it perturbing that our police had to wait for the whole year since receiving these complaints to come out now and issue warnings.
As a law enforcement, I would expected the police within that period of complaints to have made investigations on this matter and come up with the right solutions to tackle this problem.
However, I find it annoying that the best it could do after one year period of receiving complaints is to simply warn parents – the very parents who issued these complaints in the first place.
I know the first step of problem solving is to first identify the problem, acknowledge and warn the people concerned of its existence. But after one year, I would have expected the police with the answers to this problem or better yet an arrest or two of these civic organizations that have made it a profession to steal from parents.
Well, I won’t deny that issuing a warning to parents is a good step towards fighting these bursary scams but I hope the police takes a further step towards curbing the existence of these organizations. What we need is action. We need to see the people responsible for these scams arrested and judged. We need to see the parents who have been conned for their money compensated. In other words, we need justice.
