RUNDU - The Kavango East region has a shortage of 2 373 police officers on the regional structure.
They are supposed to have 3 038 police officers, but now there are a mere 665 officers, which is way below the gazetted structure, forcing extra work on remaining staff.
A week ago, the Namibian Police’s regional leadership brought their grievances and challenges to the fore during a visit from the parliamentary standing committee on foreign affairs, defence and security. They said they needed their intervention.
Among the plethora of challenges are infrastructure, transport and personnel.
“As the population grows, crime is also rising, and the workforce that we have is of a limited number. The standard requirement per investigator is 50 cases, that is the total case docket which they are supposed to have per investigator. But currently, there’s no investigator who has less than 250 dockets. As a result, giving all those dockets attention is a challenge,” said Kavango East crime investigations’ coordinator, Bonifatius Kanyetu.
He added that since 2012, the training of investigators has come to a standstill, which means there is a huge reduction in investigations.
“Yes, we have got very few investigators, compared to the number of people we are policing. We have a high backlog of cases, as our investigations are now slow,’’ observed Kavango East acting commander, Eino Nambahu.
He said a lack of proper infrastructure in the region include the ageing police regional headquarters.
“I think we need new regional headquarters. The structure we are sitting at now is a very old pre-independence structure. You can try renovating, but putting more money into renovating can be a waste of resources. We tried painting, but it is just old,” he stressed.
Last year, there were two police stations opened at Rundu, namely Ndama (A class) and Kehemu (B class), which now use personnel from the Rundu police station as their vacancies are yet to be filled. These stations were built with prefabricated containers.
The Rundu police station also has its problems. “We are supposed to have 386 police personnel at this station. Currently, we have two other stations which are also being served from this station, so we had to cut the number and deployed members to those stations. I am also the station commander of those stations, Ndama and Kehemu,” stated Rundu police station commander, Hermine Muranda.
She then complained of having one car for all the three stations at the town.
“Rundu is a very big area. The challenge is the landscape; the sand is very thick. So, in order to move from one point to another, you need a 4X4, and what is happening is that the majority of the cars do not have the capacity to navigate the area they are operating in. They are thus all broken with clutch problems. We only have one police van which is attending to the entire Rundu district, which stretches over 50km east and more than 100km to the south’,’ added Muranda.
“This car is operating 24 hours, and it breaks down every week. Yes, we requested vehicles from head office, and we are still waiting for a fleet”, she noted.