Legal loopholes foster bomb threats

Mmegi Editor | Wednesday May 7, 2014 10:24

Scores of workers abandoning production and pouring out onto the streets, passers-by diverted from their course to witness the incident, dozens of security officers redeployed presumably from other duties! It would be an understatement to describe bomb threats as an inconvenience. Rather they are a calculated if not reckless attack on both the economy, security and citizens’ right to feel safe in their country. Millions of Pula are lost directly and indirectly in production, opportunity costs and in the resources required to search through and clear premises, while the culprits snigger in contempt at the lenient penalty they will face in the unlikely event that they are caught.

Yesterday, BITC workers and those from nearby buildings spent up to four hours out of their stations, in fear and panic, while police conducted a floor-by-floor, office-by-office inspection. At some point, workers had to be physically escorted to retrieve their belongings from what was ostensibly a ticking bomb area, further instilling fear and dread within them. Meanwhile, the BITC – Botswana’s spearhead for inward investment and local export promotion – was at a standstill for all those hours, its critical statutory mandate at the mercy of a madman using his telecommunications device as a weapon. Last year, local prosecutors revealed that the man arrested in connection with the Finance House bomb scare would be charged with violating telecommunications laws and thus walk away with a slap on the wrist and perhaps a disapproving glare from the magistrate. While our criminals have gleefully leapt onto the Information Superhighway to initiate increasingly sophisticated crimes such as bomb threats, our legal system has lagged a decade or more behind, with a snail’s pace of evolution and modernisation. Only recently is Parliament considering amendments and bills to recognise electronic or digital evidence in criminal court as well as to give electronic transactions the same evidentiary weight as paper-based transactions. Our laws are even further away from fully recognising bomb threats for what they, which is terroristic attacks on state and national security, as opposed to acts emerging from the exuberances of the digital youth.

The punishment must fit the crime.

It is clear that the bomb threats have exposed a statutory loophole, through which offenders are happy to fall. Under the current laws, these culprits do not qualify to be charged with the existing terrorism laws, and thus receive the alternative telecommunications penalties. The occurrence of another bomb threat so soon after last year indicates that offenders have wised up to this legislative loophole and are fully committed to exploiting it.  The absence of a deterrent law has clearly emboldened the rogues and Batswana can expect a mushrooming of this menace.

                                                       Today’s thought

“Let us never forget that terrorism at its heart, at its evil heart, is a psychological war. It endeavours to break the spirit and the resolve of those it attacks by creating a lose-lose situation.”

 

                                                      - Norm Coleman