Gangsters have claimed Phase IV

VICTOR MUYAKWABO
Staff Writer | Friday September 7, 2012 00:00

Gaborone's Phase IV neighbourhood has become the workplace for men who are decidedly against Section 292 of the Penal Code of Botswana for their living.

The neighbourhood has established a reputation for armed robberies, street robberies and invasive crimes, but the murder on Wednesday last week of Rejoice Kaketso, a nurse walking home after saving lives in the course of her duties earlier in the day, gave the notorious quarter in Gaborone West a whole new profile.

The standard tools of the thugs who prey on people at Phase IV include knives, slashers and the occasional firearm. Their modus operandi is to enter the neighbourhood from around 5pm when they begin to wreak havoc on defenceless men and especially women walking in dark labyrinthine footpaths across the dry stream that bisects the neighbourhood.

This they will do until the wee hours of the morning when they retire westwards to the low-income, high-density ghetto of Old Naledi where most of the mean young men live. Their aim is to rob their quarries of anything - from money and clothes to cellphones and life. Indeed, far too often the heartless hoodlums have snuffed the last breath of life out of a young life full of promise for the future.

But the target of their nocturnal shifty work, cellphones and clothes, makes them small-time thieves. Yet the result, such as with the nurse last week, is a brutal cessation of life. It happens casually, often without aforethought. It may or it may not happen.

When it does, such as on Wednesday last week, it is usually because death became a means of survival. It is resorted to by instinct. This makes the otherwise small-time thieves extremely dangerous mobsters. Such is their callous approach. 

The more daring of the hoodlums breaking into homes where they beat and slash people into submission for hi-tech items, laptops almost always included. The late Kaketso had just dropped off a public transport combi at around 8pm and was walking home when a nefarious gang pounced on her. In the aftermath of the murder of the nightingale, Emanuel Xolani Willy, Moagisi Mosepele and a third man were rounded up by police and subsequently formally arraigned before Village Magistrate's Court for the murder, allegedly by means of a knife.

It is alleged that they stabbed her on the leg and drove the knife into her chest before fleeing - as though haunted and hounded by an invisible spirit - the scene of their grisly wickedness as the nightingale struggled to hold on to the last bubbles of life. Their immediate reward was her handbag.

A day after Kaketso's death, a man was attacked and stabbed by a gang of thugs who made away with his money and mobile phone in the same area. On Monday this week, after Gaborone West police had arrested 16 men in connection with the murder of Kaketso, four other hoodlums used an unspecified object to shock a woman into silence as they took her handbag that had P4,000 in cash. A mobile phone and student's schoolbooks provided the icing on the cake.

According to Tsholofelo Mosase, the young woman who was attacked on Monday evening near Letlhabile Primary School, two men walked past her minutes before two others attacked her from behind. 'One of them told his partner to check me out and an object that paralysed me with electrical impulses was placed on my neck,' she says. 'They took my handbag with P4,000 in it, my mobile phone and my schoolbooks.'

The Commander of Gaborone West Police Station, Superintendents Bonnie Bareki, says on a theory that more than two groups of ruthless thugs are operating in his precinct, which includes Phase IV. 'These people are many and they are aware that not enough is being done to fight crime,' he told Mmegi this week.

A part of his anti-crime strategy is holding cluster-policing meetings every 14 days where tactics are reviewed and improved upon.Superintendent Bareki says he is working with Gaborone City Council to have streetlights installed and bush cleared in the notorious neighbourhood of Phase IV where police record an average of one armed robbery a day.