Offending scrapyard operators will also face the wrath of the Department of Sanitation and Pollution Control. The police chief says beginning June 22, police will enter any scrapyard to check if owners or operators have regularised with the law and licensing requirements.
"We will close down unlicensed ones, arrest the owners and prosecute them. We are going to deal with them," he says. Police will also step up the monitoring of the transportation of scrap metal to ensure that the trucks used are licensed and keep a close eye on scrapyards that load or offload at night.
This comes after a meeting early last month between scrapyard owners and the police called against the backdrop of an escalation in the theft of vehicles and of cables belonging to the Botswana Power Corporation (BPC), the Botswana Telecommunications Corporation (BTC) and Botswana Railways, as well as the vandalising of the utilities' property.
At the meeting, police said their investigations pointed to a link between these crimes and scrapyards, particularly illegal ones.
The three public utilities are losing millions of Pula repairing vandalised infrastructure instead of improving on service delivery.
The marauding metal thieves also go into private homes to uproot taps and water meters.
The Director of Waste Management and Pollution Control at the Ministry of the Environment, Wildlife and Tourism, Enoch Naane has confirmed that his department will also step up inspections of scapyards:
"If we get there and someone fails to produce a licence, they will be in big trouble," he warns, adding that among conditions of the licence are that owners must keep an up-to-date record of the origin of metal sold to them for ease of trace, keep an up-to-date audit, sort the metals according to size and material type, cut the metal to fit the trucks used to transport it, provide workers with protective clothing, and have sanitation and ablution facilities on the premises. Naane's anti-pollution squad will act against any scrapyard owner or operator found polluting the environment. Mmegi is informed that since the meeting last month, 18 scrapyard owners have come forward for registration out of which three were rejected. More applicants are being processed.
